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Paytm is a payment app in India providing e‐wallet services; it is also the most prominent mobile e‐commerce app in the world’s third‐largest economy. This article uses Paytm as a case study to better understand the global platform economy and its implications for social and economic inequities. We contextualize the emergence of Paytm by drawing attention to its relationship with India’s developing digital infrastructure and marginalized populations—many of whom are part of the platform’s user base. We use a political economy lens to investigate Paytm’s market structure, stakeholders, innovations, and beneficiaries. Our research is guided by the question: What resources, infrastructures, and policies have given rise to India’s digital payment ecosystem, and how have these contributed to economic and social inequities? Accordingly, we audited the international and Indian business press and Paytm’s corporate communications from 2016 to 2020. Our analysis points to the tensions between private and public interests in the larger platform ecosystem, dispelling notions of platforms as neutral arbiters of market transactions. We argue that Paytm is socially beneficial to the extent that it reduces transaction costs and makes digital payments more accessible for marginalized populations; it is detrimental to the time that it jeopardizes user data and privacy while suppressing competition in the platform economy.

We study price competition and entry of platforms in multi-sided markets. Utilizing the simplicity of the equilibrium pricing formula in our setting with heterogeneity of customers’ membership benefits, we demonstrate that in the presence of externalities, the standard effects of competition can be reversed: as platform competition increases, prices, and platform profits can go up and consumer surplus can go down. We identify economic forces that jointly determine the social inefficiency of the free-entry equilibrium and provide conditions under which free entry is socially excessive as well as an example in which free entry is socially insufficient.

How do firms respond to entry in multi-sided markets? We address this question by studying the impact of Craigslist, a website providing classified-advertising services, on local U.S. newspapers. We exploit temporal and geographical variation in Craigslist's entry to show that newspapers with greater reliance on classified-ad revenue experience a larger drop in classified-ad rates after Craigslist's entry. The impact of Craigslist's entry on the classified-ad side appears to propagate to other sides of the newspapers' market. On the subscriber side, these newspapers experience an increase in subscription prices, a decrease in circulation, and an increase in differentiation from each other. On the display-ad side, affected newspapers experience a decrease in display-ad rates. We also find evidence that affected newspapers are less likely to make their content available online. Finally, we estimate that Craigslist's entry leads to $5.0 billion (year 2000 dollars) in savings to classified-ad buyers during 2000-2007. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify strategic options and challenges that arise when an industrial firm moves from providing smart service toward providing a platform.Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual study takes on a multidisciplinary research perspective that integrates concepts, theories and insights from service management and marketing, information systems and platform economics.FindingsThe paper outlines three platform types – smart data platform, smart product platform and matching platform – as strategic options for firms that wish to evolve from smart service providers to platform providers.Research limitations/implicationsInvestigating smart service platforms calls for launching interdisciplinary research initiatives. Promising research avenues are outlined to span boundaries that separate different research disciplines today.Practical implicationsManaging a successful transition from providing smart service toward providing a platform requires making significant investments in IT, platform-related capabilities and skills, as well as implement new approaches toward relationship management and brand-building.Originality/valueThe findings described in this paper are valuable to researchers in multiple disciplines seeking to develop and to justify theory related to platforms in industrial scenarios.

The theory of multi-sided markets has recently been increasingly applied to the team sports industry. However, empirical studies providing information on the existence and strength of network effects between the different platform sides have been lacking so far. We address this research gap using revenue figures from the annual financial statements of 107 European football clubs (n = 476) published between 2015 and 2019. The results show that even when other relevant demand determinants are taken into account, (a) matchday revenues are positively dependent on commercial, media, and previously generated matchday revenues, (b) commercial revenues are influenced by matchday revenues, and (c) media revenues are independent of other revenue streams. The quantification of revenue dependencies provides the first empirical evidence for the existence of network effects in the team sport industry. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

A business model for sensor-based services is proposed where a platform creates a multi-sided market. The business model comprises a platform that serves as an intermediary between human users, app developers, and sensor networks, so that the users use the apps and the apps process the data supplied by the sensor networks. The platform, acting as a monopolist, posts a fee for each of the three sides so as to maximize its profit. This business model intends to mimic the market-creating innovation that main mobile apps platforms have generated in the smartphone sector. We conduct an analysis of the profit maximization problem faced by the platform, show that optimum prices exist for any parameter value, and show that these prices always induce an equilibrium in the number of agents from each side that join the platform. We show that the relative strength of the value that advertisers attach to the users determines the platform price structure. Depending on the value of this relative strength, two alternative subsidizing strategies are feasible: to subsidize either the users’ subscription or the developers’ registration. Finally, all agents benefit from an increase in the population at any of the three sides. This result provides a rationale for incentivizing not only the user participation, but also the entry of developer undertakings and the deployment of wireless sensor network infrastructure.

Online short video platform usually adopts advertising mode and mixed mode as the pricing mode. How to choose the optimal pricing mode for the online short video platform is a topic worthy of our attention. This paper discusses the pricing mode that should be adopted by the online short video platform and investigates the effects of the viewer’s nuisance cost and cross-network externality intensity on the pricing mode selection of short video platform. The results show that, when the viewer’s nuisance cost is low and the intensity of cross-network externality is high, the platform should choose the advertising mode; otherwise, it should choose the mixed mode; when the cost is high and the intensity is low, the advertising price under the advertising mode is higher than that under the mixed mode; otherwise, the advertising price under the advertising mode is lower than that under the mixed mode; when the cost is relatively low and regardless of the intensity, the payment cost under the mixed mode is higher than that under the advertising mode; otherwise, the payment cost under the mixed mode is lower than that under the mixed mode. Importantly, we also find that, under certain conditions, interests of online short video platform and video content providers may be inconsistent.

The long-standing economic model is one where customers receive and pay for goods and services. However, in today’s modern network economy, why are vendors willing to provide free services and goods to free-riders at an apparent loss? The objective of this study is to provide a theoretical framework explaining why free network services emerge and how they work. This study adopted the multi-case study method, summarized 28 types of revenue model patterns from 51 indicative free network services, and inferred the causes for the antecedent conditions of each revenue model with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), in order to confirm the causal relationship between the various antecedent conditions, configurations, and revenue models as conclusive evidence. In addition, this study established seven conditional propositions via their links with related theories, which were taken as the basis for providing in-depth explanations of the revenue model of the free network service, and expanded the demonstration of the original network economy.

Car-hailing platform governance is an emerging topic of research and practice. The governance of the data-driven platform economy is challenging the research paradigm of competition regulation in the context of open innovation. This research is trying to reveal the market allocation structure of China’s online car-hailing industry from the perspective of personal data allocation by the study of Application Programming Interface (API) of sample platforms. On the basis of the networked nature of personal data allocation via APIs, this research constructs a mathematical model of the edge weight of data resource connections between platforms. Furthermore, this research optimises the structural hole analysis of complex networks to discuss the state of personal data resource allocation in China’s car-hailing industry. Results reveal that there are obvious structural holes within the sample network. When compared with related indicators, we found that accessing personal data resources is an essential component of the sample network competition capability and sustainable innovation. Social media platforms and online payment platforms more greatly impact car-hailing platform competition than other types of platforms within the multi-sided market context. This research offers a research perspective of personal data allocation for further study of competition, regulation and sustainable innovation of data-driven platform economies.

The complexity of development and deployment in today’s IT world is enormous. Despite the existence of so many pre-fabricated components, frameworks, cloud providers, etc., building IT systems still remains a major challenge and most likely overtaxes even a single ambitious developer. This results in spreading such development and deployment tasks over different team members with their own specialization. Nevertheless, not even highly competent IT personnel can easily succeed in developing and deploying a nontrivial application that comprises a multitude of different components running on different platforms (from frontend to backend). Current industry trends such as DevOps strive to keep development and deployment tasks tightly integrated. This, however, only partially addresses the underlying complexity of either of these two tasks. But would it not be desirable to simplify these tasks in the first place, enabling one person – maybe even a non-expert – to deal with all of them? Today’s approaches to the development and deployment of complex IT applications are not up to this challenge. “On-The-Fly Computing” offers an approach to tackle this challenge by providing complex IT services through largely automated configuration and execution. The configuration of such services is based on simple, flexibly combinable services that are provided by different software providers and traded in a market. This constitutes a highly relevant challenge for research in many branches of computer science, information systems, business administration, and economics. In this research note, it is analyzed which pieces of this new “On-The-Fly Computing” ecosystem already exist and where additional, often significant research efforts are necessary.