On the Competitive Effects of Single-Homing: The Case of Hybrid Marketplaces

By revisiting the “competitive bottleneck” hypothesis in the context of multi-sided platform competition, this paper shows that the existence of single-homing consumers needs not to raise anti-competitive concerns regarding the behaviour of the online platform running the marketplace, as the nature of the induced competitive effects will critically depend on the specificities of the platforms’ business model. This then suggests that the only sensible way of assessing the likely competitive