Digital platforms confer competitive advantage through superior architectural configurations. There is however still a dearth of research that sheds light on the competitive attributes which define platform competition from an architectural standpoint. To disentangle platform competition, we opted for the mobile payment market in the United Kingdom (UK) as our empirical setting. By conceptualizing digital platforms as layered modular architectures and embracing the theoretical lens of strategic groups, this study supplements prior research by deriving a taxonomy of platform profiles that is grounded on the strategic dimensions of value creation and value delivery architectures. We discover that mobile payment platforms could be delineated based on whether they are: (1) integrative or integratable on their value creation architecture; and (2) have direct, indirect, or open access on their value delivery architecture. The preceding attributes of value creation architecture and value delivery architecture aided us in identifying six profiles associated with mobile payment platforms, which in turn led us to advance three competitive strategies that could be pursued by digital platforms in network economies.
The newspaper industry is challenged by unsustainable business models. To stabilize dwindling revenue streams, publishers opted for digital subscriptions as one avenue for generating additional revenue streams. Large publishers have indeed benefited from rising subscription numbers. However, smaller publishers are challenged to achieve the same results. Some of the root causes are high churn rates, adoption costs and lock-in effects of subscription services. News aggregator platforms may promise newspaper publishers a large pool of paying readers. But platform fees and the loss of direct customer relationships enact commercial barriers among publishers. This study proposes design science research to address the aforementioned shortcomings by designing a collaborative subscription service in a Nordic country. Building on strategic alliance, digital platform and business model literature, this research aims to identify pertinent design principles that create positive conditions for a collaborative subscription services in the newspaper industry.
Blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology (DLT) offer a secure, distributed, and tamper-proof way to store and exchange information. However, apart from standard cryptocurrency-based networks, innovations and process improvements based on the blockchain technology have mostly remained on the conceptualizing stage and have not yet reached mass adoption. There is a high demand for practical experiences from developing blockchain and DLT based systems in various domains outside FinTech. This work seeks to contribute to this gap by presenting real-world experiences from developing a proof of concept for automatizing conditional payments in social benefits and healthcare domains. We found that the key conditions for making these blockchain-based solutions viable are (1) attaining technological maturity and competences, (2) ecosystem thinking and adequate governance of these ecosystems, and finally (3) achieving legal and regulatory predictability. Furthermore, we discuss technological choice, business, and ethical considerations relevant to practitioners and research communities.
This study presents a framework to understand and explain the design and configuration of digital payment platforms and how these platforms create conditions for market entries. By embracing the theoretical lens of platform envelopment, we employed a multiple and comparative-case study in a European setting by using our framework as an analytical lens to assess market-entry conditions. We found that digital payment platforms have acquired market entry capabilities, which is achieved through strategic platform design (i.e., platform development and service distribution) and technology design (i.e., issuing evolutionary and revolutionary payment instruments). The studied cases reveal that digital platforms leverage payment services as a mean to bridge and converge core and adjacent platform markets. In so doing, platform envelopment strengthens firms' market position in their respective core markets. This study contributes to the extant literature on digital platforms, market entries, and payment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.