Taxation and Multi-Sided Platform Industries: A Review

Many of the largest and most influential industries in the global economy operate digitally as multi-sided platforms, catering to different groups whose interactions are interconnected through intergroup network effects. This paper provides a survey of the theoretical literature on the effects of taxing these firms via indirect and corporate taxes. It seeks to establish a framework for understanding why traditional insights from taxation in one-sided markets do not directly apply to firms in multi-sided markets.