Two-sided Airport Markets Reprised

The paper views the airport firm as an organisational platform with interdependencies between aeronautical and non-aeronautical sourced revenues and presents this relationship within the framework of two-sided market theory. When two-sided theory was first applied to airports, it was contextualised by focusing on end-consumers and on network externalities as a unilateral relationship. Following Parker and Van Alstyne's (2000) terminology we redefine the airport as a 'content provider' and argue that externalities flow bilaterally between airport commercial services and user airlines. This interpretation has important repercussions for understanding the pricing structure of airport services and, in turn, for competition analysis and regulatory policy.