Software platforms make services available through APIs. Developers benefit from these because they avoid having to write some of their own code. Users benefit from a greater variety of and lower prices for applications. The economics of multisided platforms provides a set of tools for understanding the past, present, and future of software platfor

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The most important shift in restaurants in the past decade has been the rise of online ordering and delivery. UberEats, Postmates, Doordash, and a handful of other apps have been knife-fighting (in extremely uneconomical ways) for the privilege of becoming food delivery aggregators. Own enough customer demand, the thinking goes, and not only will r... See more

Like all multisided platforms, the pricing structures of the software platforms we have encountered in this book reflect the need to get all unintegrated sides on board: end users, application/game/content developers, and manufacturers of hardware and peripheral equipment. The structures we have examined have three remarkable features. First, all o

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Before the pandemic, delivery apps made sense to drive incremental sales for restaurants that primarily made money on dine-in customers, says Chris Monk, founder and chief executive of Your Fare, an Austin, Texas-based startup that sells a system to restaurants for consolidating orders from delivery services. For most restaurants, though, the math ... See more