ABSTRACT
Network effects and multisided platforms are critical to their business models, to the set of activities that they perform to build resources and use them to generate, deliver, and monetize benefits to their customers. This chapter explores how the more users that there are in a network (platform), the more valuable that it is likely to become to each user. To increase its chances of capturing the value created in its platform, a platform owner may want to insure that targeted users perceive its platform as meeting their needs distinctively better than competitors’ platforms. This distinctiveness can be because of the size of the platform’s network, but can also be because of the other attributes of the platform, or some combination of both. Each side of a multisided platform has a short head and a long tail (niches) of members or member activities.
