Navigating Trade-offs: Platform Strategies in Two-Sided Markets with Negative Externalities
By Sumanta Singha, Rajib Saha, Abhijeet Ghoshal
Citation
Singha, Sumanta., Saha, Rajib., Ghoshal, Abhijeet. (2025). Navigating Trade-offs: Platform Strategies in Two-Sided Markets with Negative Externalities .
Copyright
2025
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Abstract
A two-sided marketplace with network effects, such as an online food delivery platform, faces challenges when buyers impose disutility on each other while competing for shared resources. To reduce this disutility, the platform can exercise greater control over transactions, charge sellers higher transaction fee, or both, but these strategies have trade-offs. Using a game-theoretic model, we show that a market in our setting can be divided into two distinct types based on the relative strength of buyers’ same-side negative externality and cross-side positive network effect. Our study provides several interesting insights. First, when buyers face relatively weak same-side negative externality, the platform can exert more effort to improve their experience, even when effort becomes costlier. Second, it may decrease its effort despite an increase in buyers’ same-side negative externality in both types of markets. In either case, the platform’s profit is not necessarily hurt. Further, transaction fee can decrease with an increase in the cross-side positive network effect.

Rajib Saha is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Indian School of Business (ISB). He works broadly in the areas of Economics of IT and IT-enabled business models and data mining. His research explores questions related to crowds and platforms, pricing and operationalisation of digital goods, B2B contracts, network analytics, and more.

Prior to joining ISB, he taught graduate-level courses in the area of Operations Management and Information Systems at the University of Rochester, and worked in the IT industry for several years at organisations such as Oracle and Novell.

Professor Saha received his MS and PhD in Business Administration from the University of Rochester, New York and B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Rajib Saha
Rajib Saha