Partner Economics

Model one partner relationship as a small P&L - attributable revenue net of every partner cost, against partner CAC, ramp, and incrementality - to decide sign, scale, renegotiate, or prune. Two structural facts frame the whole exercise; state them plainly rather than paper over them:

• No canonical "partner P&L" template exists. Practitioners converge on the same revenue and cost components, but vendors publish incompatible definitions, and any claim to the standard (PARTNERNOMICS-style certification included) is a proprietary product, not industry consensus.
• Most widely quoted partner benchmarks are vendor marketing, not research. The famous "80% of channel revenue from 20% of partners / only 11% hit incentive goals" figures are untraceable; so are the "most partners never transact" claims. Label every number's evidence class; quote nothing as settled fact without a named source. Read references/benchmarks-and-figure-grading.md before citing any figure: the graded benchmark set, plus the untraceable figures to refuse.

What the field genuinely offers:

• Hans Peter Bech's channel-partner P&L - model the PARTNER's own 3-5 year economics, because "it is crucial that the channel partner takes ownership of the P&L." The single most articulated practitioner method for one relationship.
• Spengler's double marginalization (1950) and the two-part tariff fix (Jeuland & Shugan 1983; McGuire & Staelin 1983) - the peer-reviewed root of margin stacking.
• Blake, Nosko & Tadelis (2015, Econometrica) - when eBay halted brand-keyword ads, 99.5% of clicks were retained, the canonical proof a channel can show strong attributed revenue while being nearly non-incremental.
• Dyer & Singh's relational view (1998, AMR) - "relational rents", profit neither firm could generate alone - and Gomes-Casseres' Third Law (Remix Strategy, 2015): the value split must motivate both parties to keep contributing.
• Dyer, Kale & Singh (2004, HBR) ally-vs-acquire, plus Anderson & Schmittlein (1984, RAND J. Econ.) and the 2006 AMJ TCE meta-analysis - peer-reviewed grounding for whether a partner channel is even the right mode before any economics get modeled.

Interview

Ask before modeling anything. One question per message; offer multiple-choice options; skip whatever the user already answered.