March 2021 agricultural “platforms” in a digital era

Excessively dominant Platforms can 
create their own forms of market 
distortions and inefficiencies. 
 
 
 
Across numerous industries, Platforms have
repeatedly re-intermediated markets, 
introducing themselves as new kinds of 
middlemen rather than simply eliminating 
layers of market participants. In agriculture, 
the current, relatively high-degree of 
consolidation of dominant agribusinesses 
can be replaced with even more dominant 
Platform businesses, reducing competition. 
When these Platforms accumulate enough 
power, this can lead them to a position of 
being able to extract monopoly or quasi-
monopoly rents, as the Platform operator 
essentially controls access to users and 
even markets. Such platforms could use 
exclusionary practices to discourage their 
users from engaging with competitors or ‘lock 
in’ users with anti-competitive contracts. 
Strong enough Platforms might even use their 
scale to compete in adjacent markets, entering 
and competing in these markets based not 
on their competitive advantages, but on their 
ability to cross-subsidize their activities.
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Parker, Geoffrey G.; Van Alstyne, Marshall W.; Choudary, Sangeet Paul (2019). Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Trans-
forming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You. W. W. Norton & Company
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2. PLATFORM-USER COMPETITION: 
Platform operator competes with
users on its own Platform. 
In some industries, Platforms have, over 
time, competed with users by offering their 
own pipeline goods or services. Regulators 
have often viewed this as negative market 
distortion, as the Platform operator can 
unfairly compete through access to more and 
better data (including data on all users of the 
Platform) and by giving their own products 
and services more visibility compared to those 
of other Platform users. An example is
Amazon, which has been criticized for using 
its Platform power to rapidly acquire or 
displace companies that are dominant in 
different product categories.
3. DISPLACEMENT: Supplanting of