Because the literature on platform competition emphasizes the role of network effects, it prescribes rapidly expanding a network of platform users and complementary applications to capture entire markets. We challenge the unconditional logic of a winner‐take‐all (WTA) approach by empirically analyzing the dominant strategies used to build and position platform systems in the U.S. video game industry. We show that when platform firms pursue two popular WTA strategies concurrently and with equal intensity (growing the number and variety of applications while also securing a larger fraction of those applications with exclusivity agreements), it diminishes the benefits of each strategy to the point that it lowers platform performance. We also show that a differentiation strategy based on distinctive positioning improves a platform's performance only when a platform system is highly distinctive relative to its rivals. Our results suggest that platform competition is shaped by important strategic trade‐offs and that the WTA approach will not be universally successful. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We build on a stakeholder-agency theoretical perspective to explore the impact of particular corporate governance mechanisms on firm environmental performance. Our empirical evidence shows that several important corporate governance mechanisms such as the board of directors, managerial incentives, the market for corporate control, and the legal and regulatory system determine firms' environmental performance levels. These results suggest that these different governance mechanisms resolve, to some extent, the existing divergence of interests between stakeholders and managers with respect to environmental activities.

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Platform-based technology ecosystems are new forms of organizing independent actors’ innovations around a stable product system. This collective organization is proving superior to traditional, vertically integrated systems in many sectors because of greater “generativity”—the ecosystem’s capacity to foster complementary innovation from autonomous, heterogeneous firms—which extends the usage scope and value of the platform to users. However, greater generativity can also lead to greater variance in the way ecosystem members’ contributions satisfy users’ needs, and it could potentially hinder the ecosystems’ value creation. We draw on collective action theory to examine generativity’s impact on user satisfaction and the mechanisms driving it. We argue that products enhancing user satisfaction contribute to a collective, shared asset, the platform system reputation, from which all participants benefit. Thus, generativity has both a positive (system reputation) and negative (free-riding) effect on the ecosystem members’ incentives for developing products that enhance user satisfaction. We argue that the negative free-riding effect prevails as the platform system matures and competition with alternative platform systems increases. Using data from the video game industry, we find supportive evidence for the free-riding effect, which generates an average loss in total revenue for first-rate games of about $36.5 million and a drop of about 3.3% in the console’s market share. By identifying the conditions that exacerbate free riding in platform ecosystems, our study contributes to the understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of platform ecosystems. It also highlights one feedback mechanism governing collective action in ecosystems and its implications for value creation.

We test whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is driven by strategic considerations by empirically studying the link between competition and firms' social performance. We find that firms in more competitive industries have better social ratings. In particular, we show that (i) different market concentration proxies are negatively related to widely used CSR measures; (ii) that an increase in competition due to higher import penetration leads to superior CSR performance; (iii) that firms in more competitive environments have a superior environmental performance, measured by firm pollution levels; and (iv) that more product competition is associated to a larger within-industry CSR variance. We interpret these results as evidence that CSR is strategically chosen.