Platform governance matters: How platform gatekeeping affects knowledge sharing among complementors

Yuchen Zhang, Jingjing Li and Tony W. Tong

Strategic Management Journal, 2022, vol. 43, issue 3, 599-626

Abstract: Research Summary Orchestrating complementors' value creation activities is critical to platform owners but is challenging. Emerging literature on platform governance suggests that platform access control can shape complementors' contributions to platforms. We extend this literature by using the coopetition framework from strategic management to examine the relationship between platform gatekeeping, a prominent policy for governing platform access, and knowledge sharing among complementors. Exploiting the iOS 7 jailbreak as an exogenous shock to Apple's gatekeeping policy and tracing iOS and Android app developers' knowledge sharing activity on an online forum, we find causal evidence that a lapse in gatekeeping reduces knowledge sharing among iOS app developers. Further, this effect is mitigated among developers with greater knowledge complexity but magnified among those with greater knowledge routineness. Managerial Summary Platform owners can use governance policies, such as gatekeeping, to control complementors' platform access and shape their value creation activities. This study examines how platform access control affects the interactions among complementors in the form of knowledge sharing. We find that iOS app developers share knowledge less frequently after a lapse in Apple's gatekeeping policy, suggesting that strict platform access control can facilitate complementors' interactions with one another. Further, the decrease in knowledge sharing is more pronounced among app developers with routine knowledge and less so among those with complex knowledge, indicating that complementors' characteristics also matter. This study highlights the value of understanding the impact of the design and deployment of platform governance policies on complementors' interactions and value creation activities more generally.

Date: 2022
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