EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

When and Who Do Platform Companies Acquire?

Milan Miric, Margherita Pagani () and Omar El Sawy
Additional contact information
Milan Miric: USC - University of Southern California
Margherita Pagani: EM - EMLyon Business School
Omar El Sawy: USC - University of Southern California

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The success of platform companies often depends on their ability to "scale" their customer and supplier base. Existing studies have focused on a variety of approaches that platforms may use to scale but have not systematically considered that platforms might acquire other companies as part of this growth strategy. In this paper, we study the acquisition patterns of digital platformcompanies and contrast these with the acquisition patterns of digital non-platformcompanies. We find that platform companies acquire earlier (shortly after founding) when compared with non-platform companies, and they often first acquire competing platform companies from the same market niche. As platform companies mature, they begin to acquire non-platform companies from other market niches. This contrasts with how acquisitions are made by non-platform companies, as shown in our analysis.

Keywords: Acquisitions; scaling digital platform companies; double helix framework; digital platform ecosystem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in MIS Quarterly, 2021, 45 (4), 2159-2174 p. ⟨10.25300/MISQ/2022/16374⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03188254

DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2022/16374

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03188254