And the Winner Is …? The Desirable and Undesirable Effects of Platform Awards

Abstract

We study platform firms’ decision to recognize innovation by complementors ex post through awards. Despite being purely symbolic, awards might set incentives for complementors’ product strategies that can eventually lead to both desirable and undesirable outcomes for the platform firm. We depart from signaling theory and derive hypotheses on the effects of awards on complementors’ product strategies. To test them, we implement a quasi-experiment in the context of the Google Android mobile platform and the prestigious Google Play Award. We infer the effect of the award by estimating the difference-in-differences between award winners and runners-up, before and after the conferral. The main sample encompasses 125 award nominees and their 793 apps between 2016 and 2018. We report three findings. First, the award encourages recipients to focus on releasing complement improvements rather than new complements. Second, the award increases recipients’ likelihood of multihoming. Finally, the award increases new complement releases in the recipients’ market niche by attracting other complementors. We contribute to the platform governance literature by informing about the effects of awards. Additionally, our findings have theoretical implications for understanding “soft” platform governance mechanisms.

Does imitation increase or decrease demand for an original product? Understanding the opposing effects of discovery and substitution

“…Additionally, we contribute to past research that has demonstrated that product entry can create discovery of an entire category (Foerderer et al, 2021). However, we study how imitation impacts product discovery of individual products, where the original is linked to an imitation with a citation or a reference.…”

“…To help in discovery, new products typically appear at the top of search results and are curated into lists (Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018). These marketplaces also list related products (e.g., “ Customers also purchased ” or “ Similar Products” ) that serve a similar or complementary purpose (Dzyabura & Hauser, 2019), and implement certifications or awards (Foerderer, Lueker, & Heinzl, 2021; Rietveld, Schilling, & Bellavitis, 2019). These systems are critical to helping customers identify available products.…”

Sustaining complementor engagement in digital platform ecosystems: Antecedents, behaviours and engagement trajectories

“…For instance, platform awards represent a cooperative governance mechanism. They have been found to increase the winners' likelihood of multihoming in the short term (Foerderer et al, 2021), which is associated with a decrease in CE with the original platform. Hence, despite the positive evaluations of winning an award and gaining additional customer attention, complementors decided to reduce their engagement in the short term and focus on other platforms instead.…”

Boosting Performance in Data Science Competition Using Topic-Driven Analytics: Evidence From Recommendation System Design on Kaggle

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