Catalyst Code
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| Author | David S. Evans Richard L. Schmalensee |
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| Language | English |
| Subject | Business Strategy |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Harvard Business School Press |
Publication date | May 9, 2007 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Hardback |
| Pages | 228 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-1-4221-0199-5 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies is a book by Market Platform Dynamics founder (and professor at University College London and lecturer at University of Chicago) David S. Evans and MIT economist (and former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management) Richard L. Schmalensee, published in 2007.
It is the first book-length treatment of the unique strategic problems faced by economic catalysts (or multi-sided platform businesses): enterprises that add value by facilitating interactions between two or more groups of customers who need each other in some way. Familiar examples of economic catalysts include matchmakers old and new, auction houses, securities markets, magazines, search engines, shopping centers, credit and debit cards, and software platforms. (Evans and Schmalensee have analyzed the last two of these in Paying with Plastic and Invisible Engines, respectively.) The authors argue that the decline of newspapers is only one example of the growing power of Internet-based catalysts, like Google, to disrupt traditional industries and create entirely new ones.
Catalyst Code draws on recent advances in economic theory, begun by Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, as well as extensive interviews conducted by the consulting firm Market Platform Dynamics, with which both authors are affiliated. Catalyst Code explains how economic catalysts differ from ordinary, single-sided businesses and presents and develops a new six-part framework for devising strategies for launching and sustaining successful catalyst businesses. References: Armstrong, Mark, “Competition in Two-Sided Markets”, RAND Journal of Economics vol. 37, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 668-691. Eisenmann, T. G. Parker, and M. van Alstyne, “Strategies for Two-Sided Markets,” Harvard Business Review (October 2006). Evans, David S., “The Antitrust Economics of Multi-Sided Platform Markets,” Yale Journal on Regulation vol. 20, no. 2 (2003): 325-381. Evans, David S. and Richard Schmalensee. Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Evans, David S., Andrei Hagiu, and Richard Schmalensee. Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Evans, David S. and Richard Schmalensee, “The Industrial Organization of Markets with Two-Sided Platforms,” Competition Policy International, vol. 3, no. 1 (2007): 151-180. Hagiu, Andrei, “Merchant or Two-Sided Platform?” Working Paper, Harvard Business School, May 2007. Rochet, Jean-Charles and Jean Tirole, “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets,” Journal of the European Economic Association vol. 1, no. 4 (2003): 990-1209. Rochet, Jean-Charles and Jean Tirole, “Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report,” RAND Journal of Economics vol. 37, no. 3 (Autumn 2006): 645-667.