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Article Economics

How do comparison shopping sites make a living? An update

First published on IPdigIT. Comparison shopping sites, also known as shopping robots or shopbots, have been around for about two decades. Sites such as Shopping.com, Shopper.com, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Vergelijk or Kelkoo help us find goods or services that are sold online by providing us with loads of information (products sold, price charged, quality, delivery and […]

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Article Economics

The multisidedness of crowdfunding platforms

First published on IPdigIT. A number of posts on this blog have already dealt with multisided platforms (see here) and with crowdfunding (see here). My aim with this post is to link the two topics and show that crowdfunding platforms are a prime example of multisided platforms. Crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) facilitate the interaction between entrepreneurs […]

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Article Economics

Mind. your own. business school – a case study of a multi-sided platform

First published on IPdigIT. This blog post is based on the comments of Master students to an article posted by Paul Belleflamme on IPdigIT in April 2014. source: mybs.eu A large part of today’s most successful and fastest growing business ventures is in fact multi-sided. Meaning they enable and derive value from the interaction between […]

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Article

A ‘multisourced’ case-study of a multisided platform

First published on IPdigIT. To paraphrase a famous Belgian surrealist artist: “This post is not a post“. More precisely, it is not a post yet, but it should become one once all your comments will be pieced together. My goal, in a very lazy educational way, is to build a case study of a specific […]

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Article Economics

What drives self-regulation in the nascent P2P “ride-sharing” industry?

First published on IPdigIT. The American company Uber has been all over the news in Belgium over the last three weeks. Uber connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for ride-sharing services; it appears therefore as a typical two-sided platform. As Evans (2011) explains it, a business opportunity emerges for a two-sided (or multi-sided) platform when […]

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Article IT&IP Law Law

Do you believe in sharing or in owning? Do you rely on commons or on private property?

First published on IPdigIT. An article in the Financial Times (Tim Harford, ‘Do you believe in sharing?’, F.T., August 31/Sept. 1 2013) reminds us of an eternal debate: shall we believe in the ability of humans to adequately share and reasonably use the resources offered by our planet? Or do we have to define property […]

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Article Economics

Online banking, switching costs and competition: a complex story

First published on IPdigIT. (Updated February 7, 2013) In an article published in October 2012 in the New York Times, Nelson D. Schwartz suggests that online banking creates switching costs and, thereby, reduces competition in the US banking sector. The title of the article summarizes the argument in a forceful way: “Online Banking Keeps Customers […]