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This chapter shows how the theory of industrial organization can help us understand some important aspects of crowdfunding that go beyond the finance sphere of the firm. A special attention is devoted to the role and behavior of crowdfunding platforms, which intermediate between entrepreneurs and contributors.

Because of the attention increasingly being focused on digital transformation, interest in business models of platform-enabled ecosystems is rising rapidly. Although there are different theoretical views on the role of ecosystems, a synthesis of research, with a focus on governance and orchestration in dynamic, multi-industry eco-systems, is lacking.

A systematic literature review was conducted by following a rigorous search protocol in the scholarly databases covering both journal articles and conference papers These papers were subsequently filtered, and finally, 48 relevant papers were selected for analysis.

The review identifies five key aspects of platform governance design that need close consideration: the meta-organisation or ecosystem design, coordination mechanisms, mechanisms for value co-creation, value appropriation mechanisms and architectural principles. To achieve balance among a set of competing demands, platform leaders need to devote adequate attention to these aspects.

Based on a literature review, the authors provide an overview of underlying theoretical views, research methods and key trends to develop a sound theoretical grounding for research on platform governance design. The paper also suggests research gaps in the existing literature and sets directions for researchers to strengthen the understanding of effective platform governance design. The paper also provides valuable information to managers in developing or leading a successful platform ecosystem.

The paper uses existing literature published in this topic and original in nature.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the platform literature and synthesize the various topics of research into a common framework to reveal the relations between platform-based service innovation, system design and other platform-related factors.

A quantitative descriptive analysis led to an overview of the distribution of research focuses of the 187 sample articles identified by a well-established search strategy. A qualitative in-depth review was then used to clarify the detailed research topics and generate an overall conceptual model to link them, with a focus on platform-based service innovation and system design.

In total, 11 research topics of three research perspectives were identified and linked by a framework that accounts for the relationships between platform-based service innovation and system design and their influences on platform evolution. A small panel of industry experts validated the accuracy and utility of the proposed framework.

This paper provides an integrated framework for separately developed research perspectives and the topics investigated in the platform literature. Through the proposed framework, this paper helps to improve the knowledge on platform study and management, and lays a foundation for exploring the research opportunities in platform-based service innovation and system design.

The study aims to analyze factors impacting firms’ success and persistence in a digital platform competition using the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) framework. The study also includes real-life cases that are beneficial to academicians and practitioners to understand and develop strategies for success and persistence during uncertainty.

A literature review to identify the factors that impact success and persistence in a digital platform competition was conducted following Webster and Watson (2002). Findings were integrated into a SCP framework to examine and understand the identified factors’ relational impact.

While analyzing factors under the SCP framework, all factors were divided into three categories: those impacting positively, those impacting negatively and those with ambiguous impact on the success and persistence in digital platform competition. Digital platform firms can exploit the positively impacting factors to increase market share by being distinctive from other digital platform firms and becoming dominant by withstanding competition. On the other hand, negatively impacting factors increase barriers to entry, intensify competition and reduce the distinctiveness of digital platform firms. Lastly, a few factors may have either a positive or a negative impact depending upon the particular characteristics of the firm/industry.

The study opens the scope for future research on empirically testing the developed conceptual framework and relationships by developing propositions to posit the possible impact of these factors on digital platforms’ success and persistence.

The study contributed to the existing literature by using SCP framework to analyze the factors affecting firm’s success and persistence in a digital platform competition. Also, the study has discussed the relational impact of factors rather than their impact in isolation.

A network of partners helps and assists a crowdfunding platform (CFP) in scouting, assessing and selecting projects. This cooperation increases the number of successful projects by attracting a sizable number of investors, proponents and attracting marginal investors when a campaign falls short of the threshold for success. This study examines the role of partner networks in a platform ecosystem, specifically in terms of number of different partners and their diversity in the performance of the crowdfunding campaign.

Using logistic and linear regressions, we analyze a sample of 233 projects, both funded and not funded, launched by 10 Italian equity CFPs between 2014 and 2018.

Our findings indicate that the variety of partners in a platform's network influence the probability of campaign success and how much capital the proponent company raises. CFPs are resource-constrained new ventures, and a network with a wider variety of partners ensures the strategic resources and competencies that are required in an early stage market, thus facilitating campaign funding.

The variety of partner networks could help CFPs to offer unique and strategic value propositions and define the competitive positioning of platforms.

This study provides a deeper understanding of the determinants of equity crowdfunding campaign performance by emphasizing the role of CFP's network of partners on the entire crowdfunding ecosystem and its underlying organizational elements.

The purpose of this paper is to identify funders’ motivations for investing in crowdfunding. It applies trust theory to propose a research model including three subject measures – fundraiser-related, project-related and platform-related factors. Trust has been categorized into cognitive and affective dimensions to specifically analyze the influential factors.

Bootstrapping is employed to analyze data collected from respondents with investment experience on equity crowdfunding projects. Structural equation modeling techniques are adopted to examine the factors that influence trust between funders and crowdfunding as well as the outcomes of this trust.

The results indicate that calculus trust and relationship trust collectively or separately transmit the effect of some antecedents to investment intention. However, there is no evidence indicating the mediating effects of calculus trust and relationship trust on the relationship of structural assurance and value congruence to investment intention.

This paper provides insights for crowdfunding fundraisers on how to build a strong relationship with funders, and it also gives crowdfunding designers advice on how to improve and perfect the platform functions.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the driving forces of calculus and relationship trust and their influence on investment intention. It is also the first to address a funder’s trust using a theoretical model describing the investor intention in crowdfunding and thereby extending the knowledge base of trust theory.

Social media networks make their services freely available to all users. Users pay for the service received with the time and attention taken by the advertisements. This chapter argues that social media platforms are a unique form of monopoly driven by “the more the merrier” effect (i.e., network effects) in users' consumption. These monopolies exercise market power, not by charging higher prices to users but by “tying” larger amounts of advertising to their content. Traditional antitrust instruments designed to address excessive pricing and reduced output by monopolies need to be reframed to tame the attention economy problems in the social media industry. This chapter discusses five antitrust instruments grouped in three categories: structural, behavioral, and market-based remedies. Market-based solutions are the least explored in the literature, despite being the most promising instruments to lower the attention costs imposed on users, while preserving the economies of scope in production and the network effects in consumption, and possibly maintaining free access to social media, as we know it today.

The purpose of this paper is to alert international business (IB) and international entrepreneurship (IE) researchers of a new phenomenon and novel research opportunities arising as a result of digital innovations brought about by the new, decentralized internet popularly known as “blockchain”. The paper contains a general overview of the blockchain technology and maps connections with the IB/IE literature, focusing on explaining accelerated internationalization of firms that are born global on blockchain.

The paper is a viewpoint based on the author’s ongoing research on blockchain and fintech and reflections on the born global literature. The paper has benefited from the author’s insights through her involvement in the global blockchain community as an investor and advisor.

The author argues for establishing a theoretical link between the born global literature and the literature on the economics of information goods and platform economics to explain the pace of international growth in the context of blockchain start-ups.

The author urges IB/IE researchers to pay attention to research opportunities in the blockchain area, especially those related to explaining rapid internationalization of digital start-ups and a new organizational form for organizing cross-border activities known as decentralized autonomous organization.

Three factors are shown to contribute to a rapid internationalization of blockchain start-ups: network effects, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and building an ecosystem around the evolving technology.

The purpose of this paper is to design a qualitative model of crowdfunding dynamics through the document model building (DMB).

Methodology in this paper is the qualitative system dynamics through DMB. In DMB, the authors identify the variables that are drivers of its growth and collapse, and the model will be developed by using the systematic review of the literature.

Designing of the dynamics of crowdfunding model through DMB. Identifying variables that are drivers of crowdfunding growth and collapse. Determining leverage points in crowdfunding diffusion.

This paper, for the first time, with the aim of identifying and explaining the efficient positive and negative dynamics in this method, examines crowdfunding systematically and structurally.