Multihoming -the decision to design a complement to operate on multiple platforms -is becoming increasingly common in many platform markets. Perceived wisdom suggests that multihoming is beneficial for complement providers as they expand their market reach, but it reduces differentiation among competing platforms as the same complements become available on different platforms. We argue that complement providers face tradeoffs when designing their products for multiple platform architectures -they must decide how far to specialize the complement to each platform technological specifications. Because of these tradeoffs, multihoming complements can have different quality performance across platforms. In a study of the US video game industry, we find that multihoming games have lower quality performance on a technologically more complex console than on a less complex one. Also, games designed for and released on a focal platform have lower quality performance on platforms they are subsequently multihomed to. However, games that are released on the complex platform with a delay suffer a smaller drop in quality on complex platforms. This has important implications for platform competition, and for managers considering expanding their reach through multihoming. The logic is that multihoming offers potential additional revenues at limited costs for complementors, implicitly assuming that complements are the same on different platforms. But many platforms are not simple (two-sided) markets enabling transactions; they are also technology infrastructures whose features shape the development of third-party complementary products (Anderson et al. 2014;Gawer 2014, Tiwana et al.2010, Yoo et al. 2010. 2 Complements frequently must be tailored to a platform's core technological functions and interface specifications to take full advantage of its performance (Anderson et al. 2014, Claussen et al. 2015b, Tiwana 2015. In developing for multiple platforms, complementors must decide how far to specialize the complement to one platform (Schilling, 2000, Tiwana 2015, Yoo et al. 2010. We ask how the tradeoffs complementors face when designing products for multiple platforms affect the quality performance of multihoming complements across platforms. , Tiwana et al. 2010, Gawer 2014. As a system comprises the platform and its complements, the effect of platform architecture on both platform performance and complement supply matters for value creation at the system level (Cennamo 2016). the core technology components (e.g., processor cores), and the larger the number of specialized processors requiring a specific programming language for optimal utilization (i.e., no clean interface to handle the interdependencies), the more complex the platform. Complement developers must therefore choose to either use that language to optimally "conform" (Tiwana 2015) to the complex platform's specifications at the expense of integration and performance on other platforms, or to design the complement so it uses the lowest common denominator acr...

We study intergenerational platform-technology transitions as instances of potentially disruptive innovation at the ecosystem level. Examining the launch of 12 platform technologies in the U.S. videogame industry covering three console generations from 1993 until 2010, we show that incumbents introducing next-generation platform technologies with advanced capabilities increase the challenges of developing complements for the platform technology, steepening complementors' learning curves and disrupting the very same complementors that platform owners need to thrive in the next-generation competition. We find that, because of these struggles, platforms with advanced capabilities but high complement-development challenges show a pattern of defection of complementors toward rival, less challenging platforms. Our study extends mainstream disruptive-innovation theory to the context of platform-based ecosystems by offering a systemic view that accounts for disaffection on the part of technology complementors-rather than end users-as the main reason for disruption.

Blockchain technology has been receiving much public attention recently, promising to disintermediate transactions through a decentralized governance and a distributed datainfrastructure. However, the majority of the previous studies have focused on the technical aspects, and overlooked blockchain investigation from a managerial perspective. In this paper, based on platform-ecosystem, transaction cost economics, and open-source literature, we contrast and compare blockchain-based platforms and centralized platforms; in other words, decentralized versus centralized governance of the platform. We base our conceptual analysis on three dimensions-transaction cost, cost of technology, and community involvement-, exploring the conditions under which blockchain-based platforms are more advantageous than centralized platforms. We, first, compare gains from lower opportunism and uncertainty thanks to protocols and smart contracts in blockchain technology versus costs of higher coordination and complexity of (re)writing those contracts. Second, we compare gains from immutability and transparency in blockchain-based platforms versus the technological cost of verification and distributed ledger infrastructure. Finally, we compare intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of community around centralized and blockchain-based platforms to participate and different mechanism involved, i.e. pricing mechanism in the former and crypto-incentives in the latter.