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E-marketplace platforms focus on attracting and retaining sellers to secure the platform’s long-term viability and success. Although sellers’ behavioral intentions have been linked to control modes deployed on e-marketplace platforms, little is known about how and why perceptions of input control and clan control affect sellers’ crucial behavioral outcomes. Drawing on IS control literature, we conducted two online surveys with sellers on Amazon (n = 286) and Etsy (n = 185). Our results revealed that perceived input control had a negative effect on sellers’ perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and continuance intentions, whereas positive effects were observed with perceived clan control. In addition, we find that intrinsic motivation mediates the observed direct effects. Our study contributes to the literature by introducing control modes in the context of e-marketplace platforms and examining the effects of input control and clan control on sellers’ beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. Furthermore, our study has important practical implications for platform providers in how to apply different control mechanisms and increase complementors’ willingness to keep contributing to e-marketplace platforms, thereby nurturing platform health and sustainability.

Existing information systems (IS) research on platform control has largely focused on examining how input control (i.e., the mechanisms used to control platform access) affects complementors' intentions and behaviours after their decision to join a digital platform. Yet, our understanding of how input control is perceived before this decision and how such perceptions influence prospective complementors' intention to join a platform is still nascent. In this regard, our study views input control as a salient signal that shapes prospective complementors' expected benefits and costs (i.e., their performance and effort expectancy), and ultimately their decision to join a digital platform. Drawing on signalling theory and the antecedent-benefit-cost (ABC) framework, we conducted a randomized online experiment in the context of donation-based crowdfunding.The experiment results offer empirical support for this view by showing that input control has distinct and complex signalling effects for prospective complementors. In particular, our findings reveal curvilinear and competing signalling effects, with perceived input control increasing both performance expectancy (at a decreasing rate) and effort expectancy (at an increasing rate). Also, we find that performance

Although Information Systems research has been increasingly exploring the role of control mechanisms on digital platforms, empirical research on the effects of control mechanisms on complementors' behavioral intentions in platform ecosystems is sparse. Control mechanisms refer to measures employed by platform providers to influence desirable behaviors of complementors and thus to manage dynamics, growth, and evolution of their digital platforms. Drawing on IS control literature and goal attainment theory, we conducted an online survey with 116 complementors from two major reward-based crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Our findings reveal that input control (self control) decreases (increases) complementors' intention to stay on their respective digital platform. Furthermore, we shed light on the role of complementors' perceived effort, perceived usefulness and satisfaction in shaping these relationships. Thus, our findings contribute to the literature on digital platforms in general and control mechanisms in particular.