Competing with the platform

Competing with the platform: Complementor positioning and cross‐platform response to entry

Platforms should calculate the cost of anti-partner behaviour…

“We describe how market entry by the platform owner differs from traditional entry and argue stakeholders may benefit from a deeper understanding of the unique nature of competing with a platform.”

“Generalists experience low repositioning cost and are more likely to shift effort away, while specialists focus their effort on the focal platform.”

“Overall, the findings suggest that generalist firms activate an outside option once faced with a competitor who is the platform owner, whereas specialists double down on the affected area but also keep their options open in unaffected areas. Interestingly, entry into a complementor's market can be a double-edged sword for the entering platform owner. On the one hand, entry can create rents for the platform owner while also increasing effort in the target domain by specialists. On the other hand, generalists with experience on competing platforms are also more likely to shift their effort to them. Remarkably, even products not directly affected by the platform owner entry see a higher likelihood of being abandoned by generalist firms. This suggests that while platform owner entry can encourage effort on the focal platform by specialist firms, it could be also pushing generalists to increase their effort on competing platforms. Platform owner entry thus directly shapes complementor behavior and outcomes as well as the industry structure at a much broader scope than previously known (Chen et al., 2022; Rietveld & Schilling, 2021).”

“They also allocated more effort by being more likely to maintain their products. Model 1 suggests that the number of updates by affected MH developers on the competing platform increased by 83%, on average. Furthermore, Model 2 shows that affected MH developers were more likely to keep their applications active by 5.5% relative to the baseline. Figure 3 displays the effects at the monthly level. The results, taken together with a decline in activity on the affected and unaffected applications on the focal platform, are consistent with the interpretation that MH developers shifted effort away from the affected area (H1) and toward the competing platform (H2)

Kapacinskaite, A., & Mostajabi, A. (2024). Competing with the platform: Complementor positioning and cross‐platform response to entry. Strategic Management Journal.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3643

Balancing professional autonomy and managerial goals amid broad technology adoption pressures

It’s like making a mille feuille: folding, folding, folding and folding again.

“As a starting point, intraprofessional segmentation may arise in the context of broad technology adoption pressures in an organization. These broad pressures heighten expectations on the organization to adopt technologies in a certain technological category, while lacking precise prescriptions of which technologies to adopt, success or failure criteria, and formalized sanctions.”

“First, segmentation emerges as differentiating practices allow a divergence in what professionals say and do regarding technology. Some professionals restrain their uptake of new technological practices, critically framing technology and only making incre- mental substitutions of preexisting ways of using technology. Others, however, reconfigure their work by positively framing new technologies and using more advanced technologies to add new functionali- ties to their work.”

“Managers may enact dual-pronged permitting practices. On the one hand, they may emphatically frame technological adaptation as an important organizational goal. On the other hand, they may also encourage discretion and recognize the autonomy of the professionals, including those who do not embrace technological adaptation.”

“Second, the emergent intraprofessional differentiation around technology is strengthened and made persistent through a set of reinforcing practices. Formalizing practices, initiated largely by managers, inscribe differentiated practices into organizational structure and reorganize work in a manner that allows further pursuit of new technology-related practices. Meanwhile, deepening practices strengthen the differentiation in technology use through the external engagement of the technological enthusiasts and through the hiving-off of technology-related tasks from those professionals restraining their technology use to professionals reconfiguring their technology use. Finally, legitimating practices of both managers and peer professionals support the newly established role specializations by giving this formalized and strengthened differentiation legitimacy within the organization. Ultimately, then, reinforcing practices allow and intensify the intraprofessional segmenta- tion around technology in the organization.”

Koljonen, T., & Chan, C. K. (2024). Balancing professional autonomy and managerial goals amid broad technology adoption pressures: Intraprofessional segmentation at a Finnish School. Academy of Management Journal, 67(3), 798-828.

Search Fatigue, Choice Deferral, and Closure

How might agentic reasoning help a person manage their fatigue over multiple deliberative sessions?

“When a decision-maker’s search process is interrupted without having yet sufficient diagnostic information, the decision-maker has to decide whether to defer the choice. The decision-maker can use the available information to decide right away, or delay the decision until a future time when the decision-maker is again able to search for information. For example, the consumer starts gathering information about a product online and then receives a phone call from the boss about some new work task. The consumer can choose to either purchase the product right away given the available information, or delay choice until the consumer has again a chance to look for information after finishing the phone call and potentially the new tasks. Interruptions can also occur in online shopping, when after shopping for a while the consumer may have to leave the store at some point, without having made a decision.”

Ning, Z. E., Villas-Boas, J. M., & Yao, Y. (2025). Search Fatigue, Choice Deferral, and Closure. Marketing Science.

https://www.jesseyao.com/Choice_deferrals.pdf

Reader Feedback

“Would more agents in a business create less conscientiousness, or more?”

Footnotes

I take a rather extreme stance on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The ICP is the anchor. It’s from the ICP that one derives the insight, the kernel, from which the value proposition is assembled. And, from the value proposition: destiny. For me, the arrow moves in that direction. For others, it can move in an another direction.

Some of the intelligence economy, the agentic side in particular, does not appear to have many ICP alignments. Of course I’m going to find this anomalous. I’ve heard fragments of an argument that goes like this: ~ “Generative AI in particular is a General Purpose Technology (Funnily enough…abbreviated GPT), so an ICP isn’t necessary.”

Hmmmmmm. Okay, maybe, and how general is general? Does it generalize to the point where one doesn’t need an ICP? I’m not sure if it’s enough to get off the stance.

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