Page - 86 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

The technology giants from the USA known under the acronymGAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook, andApple, all generate a large part of their market value by operating hybrid platforms. The same applies to the Chinese counterparts BAT: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Apple, for example, offers developers for mobile applications an innovationplatform for appswith the iOSenvironment.These apps will then be offered and monetized to iPhone users via the AppStore transaction platform. Transaction platforms (e.g., eBay) and innovation platforms (e.g., Android) share the common feature that functionalities andmechanismscontrol the activities of the actors on the respective platform and influence the benefits for the respective actors. In general, platforms all function similarly as different actors exchange certain value units within an existing architecture. These actors can be buyers and sellers or socialmediausers, amongother roles.Thearchitecture canbe a development environment or a marketplace, and value units are, e.g., goods, services, money, or information. In each of thementioned scenarios, the platform sponsor has three possibilities to control the ecosystem of the actors, the platform, and the platformmechanisms through his dominant role (Adner 2017; Jacobides et al. 2018).With these activi- ties, a platform owner needs to ensure the value-added for the platform users and thevalue capture for theplatformowner.Theadaptationof theplatforms’ technical infrastructure can be described as platformmanipulation. The sponsor can, for example, significantly intervene in the actors’ scope of action by adding or removing features or functionalities (Ozalp et al. 2018).Ahighdegree of technical specifications for the use of the architecture, for example, contributes to raising the entry barriers for new actors into the ecosystem. At the same time, such a policy often reduces thepossibilities ofmulti-homing; i.e., the actors create the sameoffer on different platforms, since the individual requirements have a negative effect on an agnostic application design (Cennamo et al. 2018). Amazon is a popular example of a platform sponsorwho acts as an activemarket participant (=market interaction) on his own platform and selectively competes with complementors (Zhu and Liu 2018). Even if in some cases this leads to the displacement of complementary actors, inother casesunsatisfieddemands fromcertainusers canbe met and cross-side network effects on the platformstrengthened.UsingAmazon as an example, displacement can manifest itself in the platform owner offering bat- teries on themarketplace under its ownAmazonBasics brand and thus taking over market shares from independent battery dealers. Through ecosystem governance, platform sponsors can intervene in the rules and regulations of the platform and thereby model the value propositions and, in particular, the possibilities of value capture for different actors. In addition, governance-drivenquality controls, such as peer-to-peer reviews, have a positive effect on the confidence-building character of the intermediate platformmodel (Jacobides et al. 2018) (Fig. 1). Platformmanipulation, aswell asmarket interaction andecosystemgovernance, is interdependentwith theaforementionedplatformcharacteristics:multi-sidedness, network effects, and winner-takes-all.Multi-sidedness describes the market con- ditions inwhichdigital platformsplay an interdependent role.Both the supply side and the demand side have to be managed. In the dimension of platform 90 L. Göcke and P.Meier