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Publishers face an existential threat from a variety of news aggregators, such as free aggregators (e.g., Google News, Yahoo News), micropayment-facilitating aggregators (e.g., Blendle), and subscription-charging aggregators (e.g., Apple News+). The authors seek to theoretically examine whether publishers can collaborate and compete with the different types of news aggregators and, if so, what pricing and content-sharing strategies publishers should pursue. In the absence of a news aggregator, publishers sell their content as a composite publication; this intensifies interpublisher price competition and hurts publishers’ profits. A free aggregator, however, could help unbundle the articles of a publisher. Moreover, if publishers share articles on the same topic with a free aggregator, they can completely eliminate interpublisher competition and replace it with competition between the aggregator and the publishers, but they only partially eliminate interpublisher competition if they share articles on different topics with it. Yet, the free aggregator needs to bring sufficient additional traffic to the publishers to motivate them to share content and collaborate with it. Conversely, publishers will be willing to collaborate with a micropayment-facilitating aggregator even if it does not bring additional traffic to the publishers. This is because a micropayment-facilitating aggregator helps publishers unbundle their content and price discriminate. Lastly, publishers can be motivated to collaborate even with a subscription-charging aggregator that is powerful enough to dictate the terms of the revenue-sharing arrangement with the publishers. This is because the subscription-charging aggregator improves its profits without hurting the publishers’ surplus.

Companies that provide a two-sided platform for users to proactively seek a match face great challenges in increasing matching efficiency and ensuring match quality. This paper examines how information designs can be used to improve matching outcomes when users derive utility from a match's vertical attribute (i.e., quality) and its horizontal attribute (i.e., idiosyncratic fit). We consider a game-theoretic model in which competing senders propose matching requests to competing receivers and users on the two sides are differentiated both horizontally and vertically. We first demonstrate that users' preference for the vertical attribute intensifies competition and hurts matching efficiency, and to avoid competition a sender may switch from a close receiver to a distant receiver even when the weight that he places on a match's horizontal closeness increases. Second, we examine four information designs in which one type of information from one side of the market is withheld. Designs that withhold either side's vertical information increase the number of matches, with the improvement from withholding receivers' information being greater. By contrast, designs that withhold either side's horizontal information can cause all requests to concentrate on one receiver and lead to the most severe match failure. Third, an increase in matching volume comes at the expense of certain users' welfare, as withholding one side's vertical information can hurt not only high-quality users on both sides but also the low-quality users on the opposite side. Although withholding one side's horizontal information may increase the matching volume under certain conditions, it can be Pareto dominated by a design that withholds one side's vertical information. Fourth, when strategic user pricing is involved, it not only redistributes user welfare but also corrects for matching distortion. Finally, in contrast to the result when strategic pricing is absent, when strategic pricing is present the platform withholding one side's vertical information can benefit all users on the opposite side, while withholding one side's horizontal information can benefit all users on the same side.

Some media platforms earn their profits from both consumers and advertisers (e.g., Spotify, Hulu), whereas others earn their profits from either advertisers only (e.g., Jango, Tubi) or consumers only (e.g., Tidal, Netflix). Thus, media platforms adopt divergent strategies depending on how they allocate the limited space or bandwidth between content and advertising. In this paper, we examine media platforms’ content provision strategies and their implications for the profits of media platforms as well as content suppliers, taking into account the cross-side effects of a multisided media market and the nature of competition in the content supplier market. To facilitate the analysis, we propose a model where media platforms interact with three sides: content suppliers, consumers, and advertisers. First, our analysis of a perfectly competitive content market shows that though consumers’ desire for content raises the willingness to pay, it can hurt platforms’ profits. Second, counter to our intuition, platforms’ profits can increase with the cost of procuring content. Third, advertisers’ desire for consumers reduces a monopoly content supplier’s profits under a paid-content-with-ads strategy. Fourth, a monopoly content supplier cannot extract all the profits from competing platforms. Furthermore, competing content suppliers may even charge higher prices than a monopoly content supplier. Finally, we highlight how the nature of competition in the content market shapes platforms’ choice of a no-ad strategy.

Dr. Du is a marketing scholar interested in researching platform companies. Keen on learning new marketing trends, he looks forward to co-creating knowledge with his students.