Platform Performance Based On The Network Externality

An increasing number of markets today are organized around platforms that enable consumers to access and/or purchase various goods and services. Considering the presence of network externality, we study the precondition in which whether the buyer will join the platform. Moreover, this paper investigates the performances of platform in the supply chain in which the leadership belongs to the retailor. We find the optimal decision-making strategies, and the sellers will join the online platform when the network externality is large enough. In addition, the retailer’s optimal profit and demand on offline platform will increase with the rising of network externality, whereas their demand on online platform will decrease, and the manufacturer’s optimal profit and demand on online platform will increase

Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032

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

Adoption of Software Platforms: Reviewing Influencing Factors and Outlining Future Research

Software platforms have received attention as the dominant model for cooperative software development. Growing the ecosystems around software platforms through increasing adoption by users and developers is of great importance for platform owners. However, there is a lack of research on how to increase adoption and growth of software platforms systematically. To address this issue, we conduct a literature review and make an in-depth analysis to uncover and organize factors that drive adoption of software platforms. Additionally, we derive effective directions of these factors on the respective sides. Finally, we outline three avenues for future research: aligning research on platform governance and platform launch and growth, taking an evolutionary, growth-oriented perspective on governance of software platforms and further detailing platform launch and growth strategies towards a design theory for platform launch. This paper contributes to the understanding of software platforms by reviewing factors driving adoption and triggering network effects

A Stirring Effect of the Loss Leader Strategy in a Two-Sided Online Platform

Loss leader strategy refers to a pricing strategy in which sellers set much lower prices than the original ones for specific products to attract user attention. Similar to brick-and-mortar stores, online marketplaces often try to expose their platforms more visibly to potential buyers by offering a particular product at a lower price. Yet, the effects of the loss leader strategy on the online marketplaces is indeterminate and largely remains an empirical question due to distinguished characteristics of online marketplaces from the traditional retail setting. This study examines the effects of the loss leader strategy in the context of the two-sided online platform, focusing on the changes of both buying and selling sides after the introduction of loss leader. We collaborate with an online travel marketplace that introduced loss leaders (ticket products with lower price) to parts of sub-markets, providing a natural experimental setting for examining the effect of the loss leaders

The Internationalization of B2B Digital Platform Providers: The Role of Cross-National Distance and Digital Characteristics

Digitalization offers new opportunities and changes how firms can explore and enter new markets. Current literature has deepened our understanding of the internationalization process of the digital-based firms, but it provides very little guidance on how the specific characteristics of digital artifacts enable and accelerate internationalization and how the cross-national distance and cultural difference may play a role. We use a longitudinal single case approach to explore how a Business-to-Business (B2B) platform provider internationalized its operations from the inception. The case study illustrates that the ongoing development of the digital service and the integration with new devices played an important role in the firm’s internationalization and expansion into new markets. We also observed that cross-cultural distance and cultural differences played an unexpected role. Last, we propose avenues for future research

Techno-legal entanglements as new actors in the policy-making process

The mechanisms by which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) support public sector reforms have been widely studied in e-government literature. This paper contributes to this literature analyzing how the entanglement of law and technological systems shapes the trajectory of policy-making. The paper discusses the case of the policy-making which led to the approval of changes in key articles of the Italian Digital Administration Code (DAC). The paper contributes to the e-government literature highlighting that the policy-making choices and options are constrained by how previous law and technology have been entangled to support the digitalization of the public administration. The paper provides valuable insights to better understand the impacts associated with the digitalization of the public administration, specifically of legal norms and procedures, on policy-making processes

Add-on Solution Success: A Configurational View on Knowledge Sharing in Digital Platforms

Digital platforms serve as a foundation upon which manifold firms develop complementary add-ons to address heterogeneous customer needs. In order to successfully stimulate partner contributions platform vendors need to share knowledge with partners that enables them to develop add-ons. Vendors face a trade-off between addressing idiosyncratic needs of partners while ensuring the scalability of knowledge sharing. Literature indicates that standardized or idiosyncratic knowledge sharing does not per se result in successful outcomes, but rather depends on how knowledge sharing addresses characteristics of the platform’s architecture. In order to increase our understanding of this trade-off we derive a typology of platform architecture and knowledge sharing. We conduct an empirical study at a large enterprise platform vendor to uncover configurations of knowledge sharing approaches. We distill successful knowledge sharing approaches following a set-theoretic approach. Our research in progress offers insights into our preliminary results and gives an outlook on our future research

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