Introduction to Managing Platforms and Ecosystems Minitrack

N/

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

Too Big to Fail? Overcrowding a Multi-Sided Platform and Sustained Competitive Advantage

Multi-sided platforms are increasingly common, which is no surprise given the winner-take-all dynamics in platform-based markets. That is, the platform with the biggest installed base of buyers and sellers can arguably sustain its competitive advantage because of positive indirect network effects. We reexamine this argument with an agent-based simulation model, where we allow for variety seeking and probabilistic buyer affiliation with platforms and interactions with sellers. Against the extant literature, we show that incumbency advantage is more unlikely to last when increasing the relative number of sellers to buyers on the incumbent platform. This is because extreme competition for buyers drives sellers and hence buyers, because of positive indirect network effects, to increasingly affiliate with the uncrowded entrant platform. We thus add to the literature by explaining how sustaining an installed base advantage is contingent on avoiding overcrowding a platform with too many sellers

THREE ESSAYS ON COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES FOR DIGITAL PLATFORM BUSINESSES

As businesses in many industries adopt the platform business model, many aspects of the traditional business are going through a shake-up, including competition and strategies for gaining competitive advantage. When platforms are competing with each other, the network effects due to having a strong installed base create a strategic advantage and shape the competition. Additionally, another level of competition in the world of platforms is between complementors on a given platform which is also influenced by the presence of the network effects. In the three studies of this dissertation, we focus on competitive strategies for digital platform businesses. In the first essay, we look at competition between platforms and examine the emergence of Winners-Take-Some (WTS) market outcome in IT platform markets, where such markets are expected to yield a Winner-Takes-All (WTA) outcome. We use the cyclical video game console market as an appropriate context to investigate the influential factors in the market outcome in platform markets. We find a consistent increase in multi-homing among the most popular video-games that can pave the way for the emergence of WTS outcome. In the second essay, we are turning our focus to the strategies that platforms can adopt to improve emerging success metrics such as user engagement. We examine how digital content platforms can improve users’ engagement by providing popularity information signals. We evaluate the effect of conflicting and aligned information signals on users’ engagement in the context of music content platforms. We find that conflicting popularity information signals are more effective in increasing user engagement than the aligned popularity information signals. In the third essay and in the context of mobile app platforms, we focus on the competition between complementors. We study the role of app category characteristics on the performance of mobile app developers who offer apps in those categories and strive to gain competitive advantage. We evaluate category concentration and category popularity as two important factors and find that respectively, they negatively and positively influence new app’s performance for a given developer. We find that the negative effect of category concentration is stronger than the positive effect of category popularity