*How Jean Tirole’s Work Helps Explain the Internet Economy* by Claire Cain Miller For anyone who has wondered how it’s possible to get so much stuff from web companies free or at too-good-to-be-true prices — whether Google searching, Facebook socializing, Uber riding or Amazon shopping — Jean Tirole, the new Nobel Prize winner in economics, has an answer. In 2002, two years before Google went public or Facebook was founded, he wrote that Internet-era companies operate as two-sided platforms, with consumers on one side and software developers or advertisers on the other. Even if tech entrepreneurs have never read his work, they are referencing it when they throw around words like “platform” and “network effect.” […] Continua qui: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/upshot/how-jean-tiroles-work-helps-explain...