Andrei Hagiu Q&A On Marketplace Pricing Policies

Want to come on? Familiar face.

Hi, Andrei. Good to see you. Um, I had a question about, um, this kind of question. It came up a little bit earlier in the talk about kind of competition and multi-homing across platforms. So I was curious what you think about, uh, policies where like, uh, you effectively platform can set a minimum price. And if a, if a supply supplier multi-homes across multiple platforms, they just can't charge A lower price somewhere else. So kind of a minimum.

Yeah. So again, you want to be sure like you're— the antitrust regulators don't hear you proposing something like that. So that's like called price parity. And it's like, if you're a large platform, this is definitely like not something you want to do. Like a lot of the large platforms got in hot water for this. Amazon quietly, basically they got sued or whatever, like the FTC went after them. They quietly remove that. And if you're small, I don't think you have the authority to do it. Basically, it's like you don't have enough power to force that. Okay. So I mean, yeah, I think I would try to stay away from price parity. I would definitely like, again, both for large and for small, I would stay away from price parity rules. Again, I know like the temptation is to go to suppliers, hey, be exclusive with me. So that conversation to me, it's like, It can't be, be exclusive or else, right? It should be more like, if you're exclusive to me, like here's all these benefits that you get, right? Or like, okay, you can participate in other platforms, but if you mostly work with me, like, you know, you'll get preferential access to buyers or something like that. So I think it's, that's a much better way to think about it.