Research On The Measurement Of Market Share And Market Power Of Platforms

Determining the market share and market power of manufacturers is a basic problem in the anti-monopoly field.In two-sided markets.there are users on both sides of the platform,some platforms also have transaction volume.so there are many ways to measure the market share of the platform.Importantly,the platform has the characteristics of cross-network externalities and multi-user ownership,the traditional volume of transactions or users on both sides may not reasonably reflect the market power of the platform,so the problem of reasonable measurement of the market share of the platform is challenged.This paper constructed a theoretical model to investigate the correlation between the platform's transaction volume and the scale of the two sides with the profitability of the platform.On this basis,it deeply combs the possible effect of the cross-group network externality and user homing to the platform's profitability.The study found that the cross-group network externality makes the platform's transaction volume unable to accurately reflect the platform's profitability.while the user size of larger cross-group network externality is more convincing when measuring the platform's market share.Apart from,cross-group network externality and user multi-homing weakened the importance of market share of two-sided markets,the relationship between market share and market power has been analyzed rigorously on the basis of market share of platforms have been measured reasonably.The analysis discovered the positive role of platform's market share in promoting market power.Although it maybe is effected by cross-group network externality and user multi-homing,platforms with high market share still have high market power.This paper attempts to enrich the relevant theories of two-sided markets and hope to provide valuable information for anti-monopoly of two-sided markets.Finally,this paper empirically tested the above theoretical conclusions.On the one hand,On the one hand,this paper takes the bank card and search engine market in the United States as the research object,makes statistics on the market share distribution of the main platforms,and makes trend analysis on the data of Visa,Google's transaction volume,user size and profit on both sides,trying to find out the difference between each index and profit from the changing trend.Then paper constructed empirical analysis with FGLS methods by using panel data of the US search engine platform of 2009-2018,mainly observes the influence direction and degree of the market share of the platform on the market power.It is found that the conclusion is a robust test.The paper found that in two-sided markets,when measuring platform's market share by the user scale of larger cross-group network externality,it can reflect market power of platforms reasonably and the market share has a positive effect on the market power.The relevant research on market share and market power of platforms provided a useful idea and basis for the anti-monopoly of the two-sided market.If the measurement of platforms' market share is not clear,it may have an impact on the evaluation of platforms' market power,which is not conducive to effective competition in two-sided markets.