Two-sided platform competition with multihoming agents: An empirical study on the daily deals market

The Internet and mobile revolutions gave birth to many information-based platforms that have low entry costs with highly imitable business models. Exploiting granular deal-level data, we empirically study the U.S. daily deals promotion market, characterized by frequent multihoming of consumers and merchants leading to intense competition in over 150 regional markets between two major platforms, Groupon and LivingSocial. Consistent with the...