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The aim of this paper is to explore the internationalization of digital platform firms, specifically to investigate the advantages digital platform firms build during the internationalization journey, which helps them overcome the liability of foreignness. More importantly, drawing on network theory and Luo’s framework of new OLI advantages, a new framework of Platform OLI (P-OLI) advantages is developed for digital platform firms.

This study adopts a multi-case method to empirically understand the internationalization phenomenon of digital platform firms in the emerging economy of India, which is a less researched area. Twenty semi-structured interviews from top executives of 12 Indian headquartered digital platform firms were inductively analyzed based on Gioia’s method, and a cross-case examination was conducted to explore the respondent firm’s internationalization journey.

Several novel open resource and linkage advantages were identified for digital platform firms that are not covered by the new OLI advantages proposed by Luo. Furthermore, a new “I” advantage, which is information and knowledge advantage, has evolved from the data. This resulted in enhancing the scope of the new OLI framework and network theory and further enabled us to develop the P-OLI framework, a new framework for digital platform firms that reflects the specific advantages a digital platform firm builds during internationalization.

This is the first study which evaluates the new OLI framework from the perspective of a digital platform firm to develop a novel framework, P-OLI. Further, this study is among the few studies with an Indian digital platform firm focus and relies on primary interview data to study digital platform firms’ internationalization phenomenon.

This paper systematically reviews and scrutinises the current development of studies concerning digital platform use in firms’ internationalisation. It also provides a research agenda for future work. Despite more than two decades of research, the study of how traditional firms enter foreign markets using digital platforms remains in its infancy. This paper contributes insights into the academic and managerial relevance of this field.

A systematic review of the literature based on content analysis was undertaken, drawing from peer-reviewed journal articles in international business, international marketing, information systems, and electronic commerce. The articles were published between 1999 and 2023, and the review employed a vote-counting method.

This analysis of 61 papers indicates that research on digital platform use in firms’ internationalisation is growing rapidly. However, the field itself is fragmented, and the research findings are inconsistent. This dynamic area reflects a growing trend, is dominated by several theories, relies primarily on survey data, and frequently uses China as a research context.

In acknowledging the vibrancy and managerial importance of this field, the authors offer a comprehensive overview of the existing studies to serve as a repository of knowledge on digital platform use in internationalisation for both academics and practitioners. Based on the aforementioned analysis, this study develops a reconciling framework to address current research gaps and identify future study directions.

Circular economy firms, unlike those in a linear economy, encounter significant challenges due to the nature of nonstandardized products, such as asymmetric information on product specifications and highly dispersed supply and demand. Consequently, achieving large-scale operations becomes inherently difficult for them. However, when digital platform-based circular firms adopt diversified business models, their value creation has the potential to achieve significant scale. This study aims to answer “How do digital platform-based circular firms scale up value creation through business model diversification?”.

The authors use a qualitative case study design with a longitudinal (2011–2023) analysis of the various business models developed by ATRenew, a leading firm in the Chinese preowned electronics industry.

The authors find that the recycling business model can act as a “cornerstone” business model for a circular firm to integrate the business model portfolio by leveraging the most synergies (or complementarities) with other business models. Besides, digital platform-based circular firms can effectively scale up value creation by leveraging capability complementary on the supply side, through establishing industrial infrastructure shared with the platform ecosystem; and by leveraging customer complementary on the demand side, through activating the dual role played by platform users as suppliers and consumers.

The authors contribute to the circular business models literature with three mechanisms to scale up circular value creation through business model diversification and advance a set of propositions to be tested in future research. This also has important practical implications for circular economy platform businesses.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of quality loss in transit on e-commerce supply chain pricing, production and financing decisions.

The authors consider a Stackelberg game model with a supplier, logistics firm and e-commerce platform. The logistics firm is capital-constrained and obtains funding from the e-commerce platform by debt financing or equity financing. Through backward induction, this paper first solves the equilibrium results under the two financing schemes and then reveals the financing preferences of all parties.

The results demonstrate that equity financing reduces financing costs and promotes production significantly. However, it may also lead to overproduction, particularly in markets with poor profitability and high cost factors. When the percentage of product quality loss is large, equity financing is preferable. With the increasing of transportation level, the benefits of debt finance are steadily growing. In addition, equity financing is the Pareto dominant scheme for all firms under certain circumstances. The extensions consider hybrid financing and another quality loss type.

The paper derives the equilibrium solutions and financing preferences, then specifies the threshold for applying financing schemes. Provide guidance for logistics firms’ finance model innovation and core enterprise involvement in the logistics industry.

The paper investigates how logistics firms’ financing strategies are impacted by product quality loss.

The aim of this study is to understand how digital platforms and context-specific characteristics of China – such as swift guanxi – affect opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) entering this market.

This study adopts a qualitative approach based on a multiple-case study of Italian SMEs in the wine industry that have activated international activities in China. Primary data consist of 32 interviews with SMEs’ managers, local consumers and other stakeholders involved in firm internationalization.

The findings of this study highlight that in SMEs’ internationalization, the process of knowledge/learning on digital platforms takes place in a bidirectional way thanks to the interactions among multiple stakeholders, which activate consumer education and knowledge sharing.

While previous research has emphasized firms' knowledge acquisition in the internationalization process, this study incorporates both the consumer perspective and the firm perspective, along with considering interactions with various stakeholders.

The dynamic and evolving nature of the market calls for attention to digital platform firms' survival strategies, building agility for persistence in a continuously changing business environment. In India, the government’s adoption of the Digital Policy is one such change in the business environment for the firms that impact almost all sectors. Such policies cause a disruption wherein digital platform firms must be agile and create a strategic response that will endure any changes. The present study attempts to gain insight into the competitive strategies adopted by the digital platform firms of the consumer durables industry in India, which are implemented to facilitate their growth.

The entire study is conducted in two phases. Phase one includes identifying strategies sampled digital platform firms adopted in response to the digitalization policy, and the second phase evaluates the significance of the adopted plans to persist.

While clubbing the 42 strategic responses to a few aggregate dimensions, the study found four types of responses adopted by the digital platform firms in the consumer durable industry to persist in the market. Using a two-step system, the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach, the study found that all four dimensions are statistically significant, positively impacting these firms' profitability.

The study contributes to the knowledge base of strategic responses to persist for the incumbent platform firms in a dynamic business environment.

The study answers the pertinent research question of how such strategic decisions may be informed in favor of profitability.

This study aims to develop and test a framework of the antecedents to and performance outcomes of exporters’ use of different services offered by Internet-based Business-to-Business (I-B2B) platforms.

We test the model based on a unique survey dataset of 350 Chinese exporters who subscribed to Alibaba.com, a major I-B2B platform.

Drawing on the signaling theory, export and I-B2B platform literature, we develop a typology of exporters’ use of services offered by I-B2B platforms. We find that the extent to which firms have cost efficiency advantages, adopt an export diversity strategy, operate under high levels of psychic distance and experience high levels of domestic regulatory uncertainty are all positively related to exporters’ use of I-B2B platform services. The use of those services is either positively or negatively related to export success depending on the services in question. The magnitudes of these performance relationships are contingent on the exporters’ transparency strategies.

This is the first study to examine the antecedents to and consequences of exporters’ use of the services offered by I-B2B platforms.

This study investigates how the extant literature approached the issue of small firms’ international market entry enabled by digital platforms.

The paper presents a systematic literature review of the internationalization of small firms using digital platforms. It includes only empirical papers from Scopus and Web of Science databases, covering 2016 to mid-2023.

The study provides both (1) a descriptive analysis of the selected papers, encompassing their temporal and spatial distribution, methods, theoretical perspectives and the type of platform examined and (2) a qualitative analysis of the articles’ content in a narrative review structure, culminating in an integrated framework of key findings and suggested research questions on the role of digital platforms in small firm internationalization.

There is still a very limited number of studies addressing the phenomenon, with several scholars recently calling for further research. This paper compiles, synthesizes, analyzes and integrates the empirical literature on SME internationalization enabled by digital platforms, offering possible future avenues to advance research.

The digital platform-based sharing economy has become ubiquitous all over the world. In this paper, we explore how market actors’ conflicting interpretations of digital platforms’ business models give form and shape value co-creation and capture practices in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets.

Integrating insights from the broader literature on digital platforms and the contemporary turn to “meaning-making” in social theory, we adopt a problematization method to unpack the collective contest over the interpretation of value co-creation and capture from ridesharing platforms in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets.

Collective contest over the interpretation of digital business models may give rise to competing meanings that may enable (or impede) digital platform providers’ ability to co-create and capture value. We present an integrative framework that delineates how firms caught up in such collective contests in contexts marked by weak institutions and underdeveloped markets may utilise such conditions as marketing resources to reset their organising logic in ways that reconcile the conflicting perspectives.

The paper presents propositions constituting a contribution to a meaning-making perspective on ridesharing digital platforms by offering insights into how digital business models could potentially be localised and adapted to address and align with the peculiarities of contexts. It goes further to present a theoretical model to extend our understanding of the different sources of contestation of meaning of digital platforms.

The meaning-making perspective on digital platforms extends our understanding of how the collective contest over interpretations of value co-creation and capture may offer a set of contradictory frames that yield possibilities for ridesharing platform providers, and their users, to assimilate the organising logic of digital business models into new categories of understanding.

Building on the theory of resource-based view (RBV), this paper is determined to explore the key drivers that drive platform ecosystem adoption by small businesses and mediation mechanisms that facilitate the translation of these drivers into improved firm financial and nonfinancial performance.

In this study, structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data. A survey questionnaire was taken from 430 small businesses operating their businesses on various digital platform ecosystems in China to investigate the links between parameters by testing hypotheses. Digital startups operating their businesses on popular Chinese platform ecosystems, including Alibaba, Taobao, Jingdong, Maituan and HelloChe, were chosen.

The finding deciphers a nuanced interplay of the adoption drivers, with innovation capability emerging as a mediation mechanism translating these drivers into improved financial and non-financial performance.

The acknowledgment of potential drawbacks, such as the focus on specific drivers of platform ecosystem adoption, highlights the need for future research to explore additional factors that may influence adoption decisions. By examining institutional factors, market conditions or external shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities surrounding platform ecosystem dynamics and offer insights into adaptive strategies for businesses facing uncertainty.

The outcome benefits policymakers and ecosystem designers by creating and overseeing platform ecosystems that support the highlighted drivers. This study further serves as a roadmap for both platform owners and prospective small enterprises as they map their path toward the digital frontier.

The findings from the research indicate that small enterprises that embrace platform ecosystems can experience improved financial and non-financial performance, which in turn promotes economic development and the generation of jobs. By utilizing innovative strategies and maximizing their strategic advantages, these enterprises can not only prosper but also make significant contributions to community development and help alleviate joblessness. This highlights the significance of assisting with the incorporation of digital technology in small businesses to achieve wider societal advantages.

Research originality lies in bridging the gap between strategic inputs and measurable outcomes, stressing the vital function of a firm’s innovation in turning ecosystem-driven opportunities into enhanced performance. This means the pivotal role of this study lies in exploring platform ecosystem adoption drivers based on the theory of RBV and the way innovation capability of platform ecosystems facilitates the translation of these drivers into improved financial and nonfinancial performance.