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PublicationTwo Sides of the Same Coin? Decentralized versus Proprietary Blockchains and the Performance of Digital Currencies( 2020)There is a shared view among practitioners that the blockchain is a revolutionary, decentralized technology that will have a larger impact than the Internet. Firms are increasingly using blockchains for various applications; the most prominent of which to date are digital currencies. In this article, we aim to increase our theoretical understanding of the driving forces behind the success and volatility of digital currencies. We use a detailed dataset of 345 digital currencies for our explorative analysis and identify some of the key factors that can explain their performance. We find that the success and volatility of digital currencies depend on their business type (i.e., whether they relate to a platform business or not) and on their technology type (i.e., whether they are based on their own specialized blockchain technology or on a third-party standardized platform blockchain). Our findings suggest that, paradoxically, to obtain the promised benefits of this decentralized technology, firms need to centralize part of it to retain control over critical strategic dimensions (data and rules for transaction). We discuss the implications of our discovery for other contexts undergoing digital transformation.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
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PublicationPreventing Others From Commercializing Your Innovation: Evidence From Creative Commons Licenses( 2024-08-13)Online innovation communities are an important source of innovation for many organizations. While contributions to such communities are typically made without financial compensation, these contributions are often governed by licenses such as Creative Commons that may prevent others from building upon and commercializing them. While this can diminish the usefulness of contributions, there is limited work analyzing what leads individuals to impose restrictions on the use of their work. In this paper, we examine innovators imposing restrictive licenses within the 3D-printable design community Thingiverse. Our analyses suggest that innovators are more likely to restrict commercialization of their contributions as their reputation increases and when reusing contributions created by others. These findings contribute to innovation communities and the growing literature on property rights in digital markets.
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PublicationManaging Evolving Ecosystems? How Orchestrators Balance High and Low Levels of Control During Ecosystem Evolution( 2023-10-02)
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PublicationCompeting for Attention on Information Platforms: The Case of News Outlets(CEPR Centre for Economic Policy Research, )
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PublicationCompeting for attention on digital platforms: The case of news outlets( 2024)AbstractResearch SummaryPlatforms are often assumed to benefit firms, especially smaller ones, by facilitating access to a broader consumer base and increasing visibility. However, this logic relies on platforms” ability to match consumer preferences to complement characteristics. In addition to this matching mechanism, we posit that platforms also broker consumer attention towards complements, which then compete for this attention. We propose that this attention mechanism is particularly prominent in settings where complement characteristics cannot be observed ex‐ante, and argue that complementors' with larger scale and broader scope are better positioned to capture attention than smaller and less broad ones. We formalize and test this intuition in the context of news aggregators, highlighting the significance of complementors' ability to draw attention in evaluating their benefits from platform participation.Managerial SummarySmall firms are often assumed to benefit most from joining a platform to expand their market reach and visibility. However, this will only be the case if the main function of platforms is to match consumer preferences to product characteristics. We argue that platforms also direct attention towards some products at the expense of others on the platform. This “attention mechanism” is particularly important whenever product characteristics cannot be observed prior to consumption, and we propose that in such settings, larger scale and broader scope of products drive attention towards specific firms on the platform. We test these predictions in the context of online news aggregators, which feature news content by newspapers of different sizes and with different range of articles. We find that indeed large and generalist newspapers benefit most from being on a news aggregators, while small and focused newspapers perform better when they are not featured on the news aggregator at all.
