Mastering Efficiency: Leveraging Multihoming Boundary Resources for Mobile App Development

Platform complementors (third-party software developers) play a critical role in enriching platform ecosystems. As app development becomes more costly and time-consuming, complementors must strategically allocate scarce resources, which includes selecting the right platforms to target and identifying appropriate boundary resources, such as software development kits (SDKs). Although complementors may aim to maximize market reach by developing apps for different platforms (a practice known as multihoming), multihoming can potentially spread resources thinly across different app versions and compromise app quality. Multihoming SDKs offer a solution by enabling app deployment across multiple platforms using a single codebase. However, this approach can compromise app quality due to insufficient platform specificity. This research examines the impact of adopting multihoming SDKs on app quality, providing theoretical insights at the intersection of technical design and platform governance. In addition, it provides practical guidance for complementors to navigate trade-offs when aligning boundary resource selection with strategic goals

The Influence of User Feedback on Complementary Innovation in Platform Ecosystems: NLP Evidence on the Value of Multihoming

We study how user feedback affects innovation of multihomed applications within and across platform ecosystems. Therefore, we conduct a quantitative NLP based case study. Our sample consists of 10 multihomed applications with more than 325,000 user reviews on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform between January and March 2021. We analyze how user reviews translate into functional feature releases of the selected applications within and across platforms. We report three findings. First, we find that about 61% of the functional feature improvements on both platforms were previously demanded by users in the form of user feedback. Second, we show that user feedback of iOS users is more likely to be incorporated compared to Android users’ feedback. Finally, we observe that about 10% of feature releases are inspired by cross-platform feedback, providing initial evidence that user feedback from multihoming applications might stimulate cross-platform innovation and enhance the applications’ quality and innovativeness

The influence of user feedback on complementary innovation in platform ecosystems: NLP evidence on the value of multihoming

We study how user feedback affects innovation of multihomed applications within and across platform ecosystems. Therefore, we conduct a quantitative NLP based case study. Our sample consists of 10 multihomed applications with more than 325,000 user reviews on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform between January and March 2021. We analyze how user reviews translate into functional feature releases of the selected applications within and across platforms. We report three findings. First, we find that about 61% of the functional feature improvements on both platforms were previously demanded by users in the form of user feedback. Second, we show that user feedback of iOS users is more likely to be incorporated compared to Android users’ feedback. Finally, we observe that about 10% of feature releases are inspired by cross-platform feedback, providing initial evidence that user feedback from multihoming applications might stimulate cross-platform innovation and enhance the applications’ quality and innovativeness

Complementor participation in platforms: Evidence from the 7th and 8th Generations of Video Game Consoles

This paper analyses how the factors breadth of content offerings, boundary resources, and exclusive content explain complementor participation in plat-form-based ecosystems, in the context of video game consoles. Fixed effects regressions on a panel com-prising two generations of consoles across six plat-forms show that the breadth of content offerings posi-tively affects complementor participation. We find that breadth of content offerings, but not boundary resources and exclusive content, are positively related to complementor participation. When studied in one model, breadth of content offerings dominates the relationship. Our results show how complementor ecosystems can be orchestrated to proliferate a varie-ty of complementary product offerings

How do entrepreneurs create indirect network effects on digital platforms? A study on a multi-sided gaming platform

Digital platforms play a central role in today’s market-based competition. To build a successful platform, entrepreneurs must pursue indirect network effects and shape multiple sides of the platform. However, the extant literature provides only a meager understanding of how entrepreneurs can create such indirect network effects. To better understand how this can be done, we conduct a case study that longitudinally traces 16 years of digital game platform growth as the entrepreneurs bring the platform successfully into multiple markets. The analysis advances theorising of the entrepreneurs’ repertoires of moves seeking to increase the number and variety of platform participants conducive to creating indirect network effects. The findings indicate that early moves focus on creating technical solutions that overcome technical challenges and permit platform scaling, whereas later moves seek to create a more flexible and generalisable platform architecture that allows a wider range of interactions. The findings make several contributions to the digital entrepreneurship literature by synthesising a dynamic model of entrepreneurs’ repertoire of competitive moves that will induce indirect network effects.© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Opportunity or Threat: A Complementors’ Perspective on Platform Owner’s Acquisitions

Acquisition of complementors is a prevailing mechanism available to platform owners to leverage digital platforms’ multidimensional growth. Notwithstanding platform owners’ propensity to acquire complementors, little is known about the potential effects of such acquisitions on the non-acquired complementors. While a group of complementors may benefit from an acquisition, others may perceive an acquisition as the platform owner entering into competition with its own complementors. To address this gap, we examine the acquisition of complementors’ effects on the other complementors in the context of a B2B innovation platform whose evolution is considerably influenced by a plethora of acquisitions. As part of an ongoing research project, in this paper we link academic discourses on acquisitions and platform owners’ market entry to derive a set of hypotheses, which we plan to test in the respective B2B innovation platform ecosystem

Essays on platform ecosystems

There has been a tremendous increase in the number and variety of ecosystems. Extant literature has paid more attention to platform owners within ecosystems. In this dissertation, I focus on complementors and try to understand their capabilities and strategies. First, I review the literature and summarize existing research that spans across the three phases of the ecosystem namely nascent, growth and technological change. I highlight some of the gaps in existing research, especially those concerning the nature and role of complementors within the ecosystem. I use empirical studies based on the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Platform Ecosystem to address some of these gaps. More specifically, in one study, I look at the complementor strategy of multihoming and explore the role played by complementor capabilities in terms of their human capital and ecosystem learning facilitated by the complementor’s prior platform partnership in multihoming. In another study, I examine the relationship between platform level competition and complementor performance. When an incumbent platform faces competition from an entrant platform, it tends to engage in steering activities that are aimed at supporting its complementors and dissuading them from joining the rival platform. I analyze the potential role of steering in complementor performance and its differential impact based on the complementors’s human capital profile.Ph.D

Platform Competition: A Systematic and Interdisciplinary Review of the Literature

Over the past three decades, platform competition—the competition between firms that facilitate transactions and govern interactions between two or more distinct user groups who are connected via an indirect network—has attracted significant interest from the fields of management and organizations, information systems, economics, and marketing. Despite common interests in research questions, methodologies, and empirical contexts by scholars from across these fields, the literature has developed mostly in isolated fashion. This article offers a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the literature on platform competition by analyzing a sample of 333 articles published between 1985 and 2019. The review contributes by (a) documenting how the literature on platform competition has evolved; (b) outlining four themes of shared scholarly interest, including how network effects generate “winner-takes-all” dynamics that influence strategies, such as pricing and quality; how network externalities and platform strategy interact with corporate-level decisions, such as vertical integration or diversification into complementary goods; how heterogeneity in the platform and its users influences platform dynamics; and how the platform “hub” orchestrates value creation and capture in the overall ecosystem; and (c) highlighting several areas for future research. The review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of the platform competition research that helps to advance our knowledge of how platforms compete to create and capture value