استراتژی های انحصاری و ظهور بازارهای موفق در اینترنت  Exclusionary strategies and the rise of winner-takes-it-all markets on the Internet

1. Introduction The rise of winner-take-almost-all markets on the Internet has attracted closed scrutiny from regulators and major attention in the public debate. Prominent examples are Google “owning” search; Facebook, social networking, eBay ruling auctions, Apple dominating online content delivery, Amazon, retail (e.g. Wu, 2010). Economic arguments trying to explain the monopoly-enabling aspects of Internet businesses are typically centered around the presence of direct and indirect network effects in markets with two-sided platforms. Whereas most major Internet success stories have relied on network effects, the question whether network effects may constitute an insurmountable barrier to entry remains controversial. Evans and Schmalensee (2007) argue that indirect network effects are bound to lead two-sides platforms to compete for the market. All things being equal, first movers would have an advantage: As a result of positive feedback effects, the firm that obtains a lead tends to widen that lead and therefore wins the race for the market (Shapiro & Varian,1999). First-mover advantages have been observed in telecommunications markets (Eggers, Grajek, & Kretschmer, 2011; Whalley & Curwen, 2012). However, evidence in Internet markets seems to contradict the hypothesis that network effects confer a first mover advantage, constituting an insurmountable barrier to entry. The history of digital markets supports the thesis that companies that create radically new markets are not necessarily the ones that scale them up into big mass markets (Markides & Geroski, 2005). Online bookstores were already in place when Amazon entered the market in 1995. When Google entered the market in 1998, Altavista was the leading search engine (Haucap & Heimeshoff, 2014). However, today, Amazon dominates online-retail and e-book markets, Google is the global leader in search and online advertising, and Facebook, another late entrant, enjoys a quasi-monopoly in the social networking arena. Obviously there is no guarantee that the benefits of network effects and lock-in, albeit important market forces in most digital markets, will go to the first mover (Rangan & Adner, 2001). If scale and network effects were a major barrier to entry, incumbents would find it easy to maintain market dominance. The fact that new entrants were able to surpass incumbents suggests scale and network effects do not confer sustainable first-mover advantages (Bork & Sidak, 2012). Practitioners such as Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thiel highlight the advantages of late mover tactics, suggesting late entrants outperforming incumbents might “enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits” (Thiel, 2014, p. 58), an argument strongly rooted in Schumpeterian competition economics. Schumpeter’s dynamic theory of competition focuses on the “creative destruction” of old incumbents by new entrants, who are rewarded with dominant market positions until being replaced by the next round of insurgents (Schumpeter, 1942).