Towards a Market Entry Framework for Digital Payment Platforms

This study presents a framework to understand and explain the design and configuration of digital payment platforms and how these platforms create conditions for market entries. By embracing the theoretical lens of platform envelopment, we employed a multiple and comparative-case study in a European setting by using our framework as an analytical lens to assess market-entry conditions. We found that digital payment platforms have acquired market entry capabilities, which is achieved through strategic platform design (i.e., platform development and service distribution) and technology design (i.e., issuing evolutionary and revolutionary payment instruments). The studied cases reveal that digital platforms leverage payment services as a mean to bridge and converge core and adjacent platform markets. In so doing, platform envelopment strengthens firms’ market position in their respective core markets. This study contributes to the extant literature on digital platforms, market entries, and payment

FIDE Congress 2020 - EU Competition Law and the Digital Economy: United Kingdom Report

This report was prepared for the 29th biennial Congress of the International Federation of European Law (FIDE) to be held in The Hague in May 2020. It is the national report for the United Kingdom in response to Topic 3 of the 2020 FIDE Congress, titled ‘EU Competition Law and the Digital Economy’. This report offers an overview of UK competition enforcement in digital economy markets by answering twelve questions organised into four sections. Part A summarises key UK antitrust and merger decisions, agency publications, priorities and goals of enforcement in digital economy markets. Part B focuses upon the definition of markets and conceptualisation of market power by UK authorities in digital economy cases in light of their challenges and particularities. Part C offers a detailed overview of the issues underpinning UK antitrust and merger scrutiny in this field: the types of conduct investigated, relevant factors and concepts, theories of harm, efficiency justifications and remedies in digital economy cases. Finally, Part D identifies the potential for incoherent enforcement in this field from two different sources: the overlap between UK competition law and ex ante regulatory regimes (e.g. consumer protection, data protection); and the overlap between the powers of various UK competition decision-makers (e.g. sectoral regulators, the Competition Appeal Tribunal, and the courts)

Pattern Recognition: Industry seeking regulation – the case of crowdfunding. Bruges Political Research Papers 79/2020

At first it seems counterintuitive that an industry would seek regulation over itself, but from the point of view of crowdfunding, it was a logical step. Crowdfunding, as part of FinTech, is changing and challenging traditional financial institutions. The fragmentation of the EU market by national legislation on crowdfunding hindered its growth, and although FinTech is a diffuse interest, crowdfunding, as a pragmatic diffuse interest, formed legitimacy coalitions with the regulators. Utilizing Trumbull’s framework on pragmatic diffuse interest, my aim is to demonstrate through this case study that the industry lobby had influenced the agenda-setting and the policy-shaping, but only to the extent that there wasn’t conflicting interest from consumer groups. This is in line with previous finding on financial industry lobbying and some preliminary findings emerge, although as the proposal is still in first reading stage, the end results and conclusions remains to be see

Multilateral Transparency for Security Markets Through DLT

For decades, changing technology and policy choices have worked to fragment securities markets, rendering them so dark that neither ownership nor real-time price of securities are generally visible to all parties multilaterally. The policies in the U.S. National Market System and the EU Market in Financial Instruments Directive— together with universal adoption of the indirect holding system— have pushed Western securities markets into a corner from which escape to full transparency has seemed either impossible or prohibitively expensive. Although the reader has a right to skepticism given the exaggerated promises surrounding blockchain in recent years, we demonstrate in this paper that distributed ledger technology (DLT) contains the potential to convert fragmented securities markets back to multilateral transparency. Leading markets generally lack transparency in two ways that derive from their basic structure: (1) multiple platforms on which trades in the same security are matched have separate bid/ask queues and are not consolidated in real time (fragmented pricing), and (2) highspeed transfers of securities are enabled by placing ownership of the securities in financial institutions, thus preventing transparent ownership (depository or street name ownership). The distributed nature of DLT allows multiple copies of the same pricing queue to be held simultaneously by a large number of order-matching platforms, curing the problem of fragmented pricing. This same distributed nature of DLT would allow the issuers of securities to be nodes in a DLT network, returning control over securities ownership and transfer to those issuers and thus, restoring transparent ownership through direct holding with the issuer. A serious objection to DLT is that its latency is very high—with each Bitcoin blockchain transaction taking up to ten minutes. To remedy this, we first propose a private network without cumbersome proof-of-work cryptography. Second, we introduce into our model the quickly evolving technology of “lightning networks,” which are advanced two-layer off-chain networks conducting high-speed transacting with only periodic memorialization in the permanent DLT network. Against the background of existing securities trading and settlement, this Article demonstrates that a DLT network could bring multilateral transparency and thus represent the next step in evolution for markets in their current configuration

Research on the Application of E-commerce to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): the Case of India

SMEs account for a large proportion and play an important role in the development of each country in the world, including India. The globalization will bring many advantages for enterprises however SMEs will face fierce competition at the local, national and International level. In order to maintain and promote the important role of SMEs in the context of increased competition, SMEs have to change and adopt new technologies. E-commerce and digital technologies are bringing opportunities to help SMEs improve their competitiveness, narrow the gap with big enterprises thanks to their fairness and flexibility of the digital business environment.       According to UNIDO (2017), India is one of the countries successfully applying e-commerce to SMEs. Contributing to this success is the important role of the Indian government. Therefore, this paper focuses on researching the application of e-commerce to SMEs in terms of the role of government in promoting and creating an ecosystem for SMEs and e-commerce development

Tying in Two-Sided Markets with Multi-Homing

This paper analyzes the effects of tying arrangements on market competition and social welfare in two-sided markets when economic agents can engage in multi-homing; that is, they can participate in multiple platforms in order to reap maximal network benefits. The model shows that tying induces more consumers to multi-home and makes platform-specific exclusive contents available to more consumers, which is also beneficial to content providers. As a result, tying can be welfare-enhancing if multi-homing is allowed, even in cases where its welfare impacts are negative in the absence of multi-homing. The analysis thus can have important implications for recent antitrust cases in industries where multi-homing is prevalent.tying, two-sided markets, (indirect) network effects, multi-homing

Employment and Working Conditions of Selected Types of Platform Work

Platform work is a form of employment that uses an online platform to match the supply of and demand for paid labour. In Europe, platform work is still small in scale but is rapidly developing. The types of work offered through platforms are ever-increasing, as are the challenges for existing regulatory frameworks. This report explores the working and employment conditions of three of the most common types of platform work in Europe. For each of these types, Eurofound assesses the physical and social environment, autonomy, employment status and access to social protection, and earnings and taxation based on interviews with platform workers. A comparative analysis of the regulatory frameworks applying to platform work in 18 EU Member States accompanies this review. This looks into workers’ employment status, the formal relationships between clients, workers and platforms, and the organisation and representation of workers and platforms

Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032