As organizations increasingly use digital platforms to facilitate innovation, researchers are seeking to understand how platforms shape business practices. Although extant literature offers important insights into platform management from a platform-owner perspective, we know little about how organizations manage industry platforms provided by external parties to generate opportunities and overcome challenges in relation to their infrastructure and work processes. As part of larger ecosystems, these digital platforms offer organizations bundles of digital options that they can selectively invest in over time. At the same time, organizations’ previous investments in digital infrastructure and work processes produce a legacy of digital debt that conditions how they manage their digital platforms over time. Against this backdrop, we investigate how digital options and digital debt were implicated in a large Scandinavian media organization’s management of a news production platform over nearly 17 years. Drawing on extant literature and the findings from this case, we theorize the progression of and interactions between digital options and digital debt during an organization’s digital platform management in relation to its infrastructure and work processes. The theory reveals the complex choices that organizations face in such efforts: While they may have to resolve digital debt to make a platform’s digital options actionable, hesitancy to plant digital debt may equally well prevent them from realizing otherwise attractive digital options. Similarly, while identified digital options may offer organizations new opportunities to resolve digital debt, eagerness to realize digital options may just as easily lead to unwise planting of digital debt.

In the context of software platforms, we examine how cross-side network effects (CNEs) on different platform sides (app-side and user-side) are temporally asymmetric, and how these CNEs are influenced by the platform’s governance policies. Informed by a perspective of value creation and capture, we theorize how the app-side and the user-side react to each other with distinct value creation/capture processes, and how these processes are influenced by the platform’s governance policies on app review and platform updates. We use a time-series analysis to empirically investigate the platform ecosystem of a leading web browser. Our findings suggest that while the growth in platform usage results in long-term growth in both the number and variety of apps, the growth in the number of apps and the variety of apps only leads to short-term growth in platform usage. We also find that long app review time weakens the long-term CNE of the user-side on the app-side, but not the short-term CNE of the app-side on the user-side. Moreover, we find that frequent platform updates weaken the CNEs of both the user-side and the app-side on each other. These findings generate important implications regarding how a software platform may better govern its ecosystem with different participants.

Digital platforms can use application programming interfaces (APIs) to support third-party development of new apps and achieve growth at an unprecedented scale. However, there is also a dilemma between original new development and copycatting by third-party suppliers. Motivated by this tension, we examined how APIs provided by digital platforms may influence two types of third-party new app development: original apps and app copycatting. We also investigated how these influences are dependent on app market conditions. We empirically tested our theoretical conjectures using data on a leading web browser platform, and applying analytics techniques on app source code to identify original apps and copycat apps. Based on a difference-in-differences identification strategy, our findings suggest that the provision of platform APIs enhance the original new development of apps. While platform APIs may facilitate app copycatting as well, our findings suggest that platform APIs can enhance app suppliers’ relative attractiveness to original new development in comparison to copycatting. The enhancing effect of platform APIs on original new development is strengthened by app market potential and high market-level app complexity. The enhancing effect of platform APIs on app copycatting is strengthened by app market potential and high market concentration. Our study has important theoretical and practical implications.

We illustrate the emergent spectrum of human-AI hybrids in digital platforms and discuss some implications for IS research by using one class of digital platforms: digital labor platforms. Recognizing the service orientation and the expanding role of AI in digital platforms, we define digital labor platforms as online environments where digital services are sourced and delivered in exchange for compensation, with constituent tasks for the services determined, executed, and coordinated by human and AI agents. Work done on these platforms is, by definition, digital and can thus be modularized into tasks which require a range of cognitive skills for execution and coordination, providing a rich context to illustrate human-AI hybrids and some key issues for next-generation digital platforms.

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Subscription-based crowdfunding (SBC) is an emerging platform for creators of digital content (e.g., music, comics, stories, and videos) to build their person brands and garner support from fans. A unique feature that sets SBC apart from other crowdfunding models is the creator-centered freemium model. That is, creators can offer free content to attract fans, who can then subscribe to financially support a creator; in return, the backers gain access to the creator’s premium content and exclusive perks. In doing so, creators receive regular (e.g., monthly) subscription payments from their backers to sustain their ongoing creative activities. The SBC context engenders unique creator-centric dynamics and mechanisms that are ill-understood in crowdfunding literature. In this study, we investigate the effects of SBC creators’ two information control strategies: (1) earnings concealment and (2) private postings. From a brand management perspective, we theorize that earnings concealment improves brand authenticity, whereas private postings foster brand differentiation, co-creation, and attachment. These will lead to a positive impact on the financial (backer base) and nonfinancial (fan participation) outcomes of an SBC campaign. Furthermore, we propose a reinforcing dynamic between information control and SBC performance whereby better SBC outcomes will increase the creators’ tendencies to engage in information control. To test our hypotheses, we obtained panel data from a large SBC platform that contains monthly observations of 92,850 creators from August 2016 to December 2017. The results of our empirical analyses provide evidence for the benefits of the two information control strategies in SBC and demonstrate the reinforcing relationships between information control and SBC outcomes for creators. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

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