Platform Self-Preferencing: Focusing the Policy Debate

There is considerable debate whether public policy should allow a platform to engage in self-preferencing. In this note, I present a series of statements that I believe are well supported by economic logic and that parties on both sides of the debate must confront when making their arguments. As these statements make clear, the competitive effects of self-preferencing depend on the particulars of the market under consideration, and our current understanding of self-preferencing supports neither