Online digital platforms organize and mediate an ever-increasing share of economic and societal activities.Moreover, the opportunities that platform-mediated markets offer not only attract enormous numbers of entrepreneurs, but also support the growth of entire ecosystems of producers, sellers, and specialized service providers. The increased economic and business significance of digital platforms has attracted an outpouring of studies exploring their power dynamics and general impact. This research has largely overlooked the power imbalance that entrepreneurs experience as members of the platform ecosystem and provided little guidance on how these far more numerous firms should compete. Drawing upon Emerson's power-dependence theory, we show that the power asymmetry at the heart of the relationship between the platform and its ecosystem members is intrinsic to the economics and the technological architecture of digital platforms. We undertake a conceptual analysis of the sources of this power, and we unravel the novel component of risks that emanate from this imbalance. Our analysis suggests that the conditions of engagement for platform entrepreneurs are so different from traditional entrepreneurship that these entrepreneurs are more usefully termed "platform-dependent entrepreneurs" (PDEs). Further, we explore the strategies that PDEs are developing to mitigate their dependence. Finally, our study provides a framework for policy makers that are considering regulating platform-organized markets.

Academics have always been endowed with the privilege of autonomy, but the diffusion of evaluation systems based on publication outcomes potentially jeopardizes the benefits deriving from behaviors that address other pillars of higher education. Besides research and teaching, academic citizenship, i.e., the service behaviors carried out within and outside organizational boundaries, are in fact cornerstones of university functioning. We investigate the relationship between academic citizenship and research after the introduction of an evaluation system that moves research performance to center stage on a dataset collecting publication records and service activities of 353 Italian scholars in the accounting discipline in the 2004-2013 period. A cluster analysis reveals different academics' orientations towards research and academic citizenship. We contribute to the debate on academic choices by showing that a large number of university members tend to focus on a single type of academic citizenship or to adopt a research orientation, while a significant part remains stuck in the middle without achieving satisfying performance in any domains according to international standards, and discuss implications for the design of behavioral incentives.

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Extensive research shows that atypical actors who defy established contextual standards and norms are subject to skepticism and face a higher risk of rejection. Indeed, atypical actors combine features, behaviors, or products in unconventional ways, thereby generating confusion and instilling doubts about their legitimacy. Nevertheless, atypicality is often viewed as a precursor to sociocultural innovation and a strategy to expand the capacity to deliver valued goods and services. Contextualizing the conditions under which atypicality is celebrated or punished has been a significant theoretical challenge for organizational scholars interested in reconciling this tension. Thus far, scholars have focused primarily on audience-related factors or actors’ characteristics (e.g., status and reputation). Here, we explore how atypical actors can leverage linguistic features of their narratives to counteract evaluative discounts by analyzing a unique collection of 78,758 narratives from crafters on Etsy, the largest digital marketplace for handmade items. Marrying processing fluency theory with linguistics literature and relying on a combination of topic modeling, automated textual analysis, and econometrics, we show that categorically atypical producers who make more use of abstraction, cohesive cues, and conventional topics in their narratives are more likely to overcome the evaluative discounts they would ordinarily experience.

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