Rompre le consensus sur les bonnes pratiques d’amorçage des plateformes bifaces grâce au paradoxe des anniversaires

When two-sided platforms start their business, they face a “circularity problem”. To overcome this problem, the academic literature often advises entrepreneurs to adopt a two-stage strategy. First they are supposed to acquire clients on one side of the market. Then, they have to recruit the counterparts of these clients on the other side of the market. The aim of this article is to show that this sequential launch strategy can be sub-optimal. We propose a more efficient method which can sometimes significantly reduce the early customer acquisition costs of platform owners. Our demonstration is based on a heuristic model and the application of the “birthday paradox” to the concerns of two-sided platforms.