Study of penguin problem on platform mediated networks

Abstract

Two sided networks have been part of our lives for a very long time. Offline two-sided networks manifested themselves as market places where multiple vendors came to sell their good and buyers had an incentive of visiting the marketplace because of greater variety and better chances of price discovery. E-commerce has taken the marketplace to the web where buyers meet sellers in a virtual world. Online two-side networks are not just restricted to marketplaces like ebay etc. They have multiple manifestations as will be discussed in this report. Through this study we discuss what are two-sided or platform mediated networks, what are their characteristics and types. We would introduce the Penguin Problem that plagues all two sided networks. Penguin problem will be looked at in the context of each of the platform types and we will try to see why it is not trivial to solve this problem in each of the types. The study would also cover a few identified network platforms and try to get an insight into how they solved this problem. The learnings from this exercise would be applied to other networks to see if there is a running the mein solving the penguin problem.