Platform owners and complementors: the emergence and evolution of platform firms and the performance implications for organizational learning, strategic alliance, and vertical integration behaviors of platform participants

This dissertation examines the impacts of platform firms and platform-mediated business ecosystems in the modern society by utilizing both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. Investigating the emergence and evolution of platform firms, the qualitative chapters of the dissertation construct two different grounded theories of platform firms. The first qualitative chapter builds a theory of the emergence of platform firms. Analyzing 52 publicly available interviews with platform entrepreneurs, managers, and venture capitalists, I develop a theory and a process model showing how platform firms come into existence over four consecutive stages: (1) Inefficient Markets and Incumbents, (2) Entrepreneurial Motivation and Enabling Factors, (3) Efficiency-Enhancing Means, and (4) Platform Firms. Collecting 52 publicly available interviews with platform entrepreneurs, managers, and venture capitalists and 34 review, forum, and analyst articles, I examine the evolution of platform firms in the second chapter of my dissertation. In particular, the process model I built in the second chapter shows that the evolution of platform firms consists of the following stages: (1) Platform Growth, (2) Competition, (3) Adaptive Behaviors, (4) Platform Sustainability, (5) Rebranding Challenges, and (6) Platform Failure. On the other hand, the quantitative chapters of the dissertation utilize a large-scale video game dataset. The third chapter of my dissertation investigates the performance consequences of alliance and vertical integration behaviors of platform owners and complementor firms. I develop a framework for examining competitive and collaborative behaviors among platform participants noting that platform owners’ entry into complementors’ space should not always be viewed as an act of competition. The chapter found a positive relationship between alliance behaviors of platform participants and product performance, and a weakening moderating effect of platform maturity on the alliances between platform owners and complementor firms. Bridging the longstanding exploration-exploitation literature to the platform literature, the last chapter of my dissertation investigates the relationship between organizational learning activities – exploration and exploitation – and alliance performance of platform participants. In particular, the chapter shows that ambidexterity in strategic alliances through partner specialization is positively associated with alliance performance, and finds platform maturity negatively moderates the positive effects of ambidextrous alliances on alliance performance.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference