APPLIED MECHANISM DESIGN AND ECONOMICS OF PLATFORMS

Abstract

My first chapter investigates optimal price mechanism for a monopolistic ride-hailing platform in a two-sided market setting. Our main result shows that when consumers' valuation distribution is concave, fully-discriminatory price mechanism is optimal; while when consumers' valuation distribution is convex, optimal uniform price mechanism is optimal. My second chapter provides a general framework to analyze competition between two-sided platforms, where buyers and sellers can multihome. We show that increased platform competition shifts the fee structure in favor of buyers if buyers are singlehoming, but shifts the fee structure in favor of sellers if buyers are multihoming. My third chapter derives the optimal procurement contract for a buyer who must obtain a divisible object from two potential sellers. We find that the optimal allocation is efficient in that it is driven by production cost minimization.