Two-sided platform competition with multihoming agents: An empirical study on the daily deals market.

•We empirically study platform competition in the online daily deals promotion industry.•There is no evidence of meaningful differences in deal terms between promotion platforms.•Merchants that performed worse in the first promotion were more likely to switch to a competing platform for the next promotion.•Being first in a regional market provided an advantage to the platform in coupon sales, but that advantage quickly attenuated as promotions were repeated.•In the presence of multihoming agents, the daily deal platforms appear to find it difficult to create a competitive bottleneck in either side of the market.