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This paper aims to explore the governance of external entities that lie outside the boundaries of digital platform firms by using the theoretical lens of the transaction cost theory (TCT). TCT offers alternative modes of governance for effectively managing transactions in market, hierarchy or hybrid scenarios providing a perfect framework to study platform governance.

The paper explores governance issues between restaurant partners and online food delivery platforms in India via qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews of various stakeholders, including restaurant partners and platform managers.

The study reveals that information asymmetry, opportunism, control and trust deficit are the major strategic governance issues in online food delivery platforms.

Though care had been taken to cover all types of restaurants, due to lockdown number of restaurants studied was restricted in number. Despite the restrictions, findings provided valuable insights into the governance issues of the digital platform. Challenging times like Covid-19 make the study even more crucial from the strategic perspective. The study also adds to the literature on platform governance and provides practical implications for account managers and policymakers.

The study uncovers various critical governance issues. These, if resolved using the right combination of governance mechanisms, will lead to increased partner participation and value creation on the platform.

Platforms outsource the value creation to external entities without having any hierarchical control over partners. The paper studies governance outside the boundaries of the firm using TCT. Hence, it helps to extend governance outside the boundaries of the firm.

Platform ecosystem governance is a decisive issue for orchestrators, as the motivation and behaviors of the complementors in an ecosystem can be distinctly different, shaped by the specific arrangements they have within the ecosystem. However, knowledge about adaptation in the governance of platform ecosystems is quite limited. First, the authors hardly know which obstacles are arising for orchestrators due to typical governance settings and their consequences. Second, the authors know less about governance strategies by orchestrators that help deal with these obstacles.

The authors follow an inductive, multistep case-study-based approach with multiple cases using guidelines proposed by Yin (2018). Based on predefined criteria, the authors selected 41 platform ecosystems with a “hub and spoke” system within and across several industries and collected a wide range of data. The authors conducted 14 interviews with executives of these platform ecosystems to gain further insights, transcribed and/or summarized all interviews, and analyzed the data.

Based on the dataset, the authors identify four significant obstacles and ten strategies of orchestrators in platform ecosystems. This approach allows us to gain insight into innovative approaches orchestrators conduct to cope with these challenges.

The authors already have a broad range of studies on ecosystem governance in the literature. However, research dealing with the dynamics of governance regimes is quite rare. The study examines how orchestrators of platform ecosystems react to emerging obstacles they are confronted with during the evolution of their platform ecosystems. Partly, these strategies might be expected, but mostly they show innovative approaches for handling these obstacles that have not been reported in research so far.

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.

Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are internet-native self-governing enterprises where individual groups, communities, agencies, consumers and providers work together using blockchain-led smart contracts (SCs). This study aims to examine the role of DAO marketplaces in technology-led autonomous organisation design for enterprise technology sourcing industries, with algorithmic trust and governance.

The authors examined the importance of an enterprise marketplace governance platform for technology sourcing using DAO as a decentralised/democratised business model. A total of 98 DAO products/services are evaluated across 11 industries that envisage DAO as a strategic choice for the governance of decentralised marketplace platforms.

The research findings validate how a DAO-led enterprise marketplace governance platform can create a cohesive collaboration between consumers (enterprises) and providers (solution vendors) in a disintermediated way. The proposed novel layered solution for an autonomous governance-led enterprise marketplace promises algorithmic trust-led, self-governed tactical alternatives to a strategic plan.

The research targets multiple industry outlooks to understand decentralised autonomous marketplace governance and develop the theoretical foundation for research and extensive corporate suitability.

The research underpinnings boost the entrepreneurs’ ability to realise the practical potential of DAO between multiple parties using SCs and tokenise the entire product and service offerings over immutable ledger technologies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is unique and the first of its kind to study the multi-industry role of algorithmic trust and governance in enterprise technology sourcing marketplaces driven by 98 decentralised and consensus-based DAO products across 11 industries.

While the theory and practice of open innovation networks are flourishing, green innovation in manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is stagnant. This study explores the mechanism driving green innovation in manufacturing SMEs under open innovation networks based on the role of innovation platforms' relational governance.

A quantitative study was conducted using questionnaires to collect data from 270 manufacturing SMEs in Zhejiang Province and employing a structural equation model to test the developed hypotheses.

The results revealed that innovation platforms' relational governance positively affects green innovation in manufacturing SMEs. Furthermore, the collaborative innovation atmosphere and risk perception mediate this relationship through a respective mediating role and a chain-mediating role.

This study is the first to empirically investigate the mechanism of the influence of innovation platforms' relational governance on green innovation in manufacturing SMEs, provide a new perspective for understanding the antecedents of green innovation under open innovation networks, and expand the theoretical research on open innovation management.

The emerging nonstandard employment (i.e. gig work) makes gig workers face a series of forms of labor insecurity. Prior studies focus on the linkage between gig work insecurity and precariousness. However, how gig workers and platforms jointly handle gig work insecurity has been so far overlooked. To this end, this study aims to explore how gig platforms and workers jointly cope with the insecurity of the gig work model.

Building upon the JD-R model, this study used a double-level perspective to hypothesize how gig platforms and workers jointly cope with gig work insecurity. Second, 248 questionnaire data were collected from workers who worked for several gig platforms (e.g. Meituan, Eleme, DidiTax, Zhihu and Credamo) in China. Third, the analysis method based on the partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the study theoretical model.

Empirical findings show that gig workers can cope with gig work insecurity by crafting their work; gig platforms' formalization governance not only reduces gig work insecurity but also helps gig workers address it by more easily crafting their work.

Gig workers do always have not enough job resources and motivation to work hard. Gig workers merely rely on job crafting to cope with the insecurity of the gig work model, which is insufficient. Gig platforms should also formalize their current governance mechanisms, which can supplement gig workers' job resources and reduce their job demands so as to help them cope with such gig work insecurity.

These results advance the understanding of the joint roles of gig platforms and workers in addressing gig work insecurity and improve governance effectiveness and value of gig platforms.

This paper aims to investigate the role of relational governance in innovation platform development, specifically investigating the context of living labs.

Two longitudinal case studies are presented, derived from auto-ethnographic narratives, qualitative interviews and secondary documents, which cover the critical stages in the development of each living lab.

Empirical insights demonstrate the relevance of coordination activities based on joint planning and activities to support innovation platform development across different stages. The governance role of research actors as platform activators is also identified.

The paper offers a useful perspective for identifying collective goals between living lab actors and aligning joint activities across different stages of living lab development.

The case provides insights into the challenges and opportunities for collaboration between academia, industry and users to support sustainable construction innovation.

A relational governance mode is identified, going beyond top down or bottom up approaches, which contributes a new understanding of how collective goals align within a relational space.

This study investigates both direct and moderation effects of two dimensions of contract control and information technology governance on platform participants' financial performance.

Using data collected from 384 platform participants from China's two largest digital platforms, hierarchical regression is used to validate the conceptual model and hypotheses.

The empirical results show that contract completeness and information technology governance independently improved financial performance, while contract enforcement had an inverted U-shaped effect on financial performance. Furthermore, information technology governance amplified the positive effect of contract completeness, but not of contract enforcement, on financial performance.

This study advances the literature on partnership control by showing the interactive role of information technology governance and contract control. It also enriches research on information technology usage by revealing how information technology governance benefits business partnerships. Finally, it extends transaction cost theory by demonstrating that different dimensions of contracts have different effects on governing interfirm relationships.

The nonconsensual taking or sharing of nude or sexual images, also known as “image-based sexual abuse,” is a major social and legal problem in the digital age. In this chapter, we examine the problem of image-based sexual abuse in the context of digital platform governance. Specifically, we focus on two key governance issues: first, the governance of platforms, including the regulatory frameworks that apply to technology companies; and second, the governance by platforms, focusing on their policies, tools, and practices for responding to image-based sexual abuse. After analyzing the policies and practices of a range of digital platforms, we identify four overarching shortcomings: (1) inconsistent, reductionist, and ambiguous language; (2) a stark gap between the policy and practice of content regulation, including transparency deficits; (3) imperfect technology for detecting abuse; and (4) the responsibilization of users to report and prevent abuse. Drawing on a model of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we argue that until platforms better address these problems, they risk failing victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse and are implicated in the perpetration of such abuse. We conclude by calling for reasonable and proportionate state-based regulation that can help to better align governance by platforms with CSR-initiatives.

Novel technologies such as tokenization have the potential to disrupt value co-creation in sport marketing. Tokenization in particular has generated a hype in sport marketing by facilitating engagement behavior. However, it remains unclear to what extent tokenization can serve as an engagement platform to enable new and innovative interactions between sport organizations and its network of actors.

The study investigated a tokenized governance platform of a professional sport club as engagement platform by means of a case study applying a multi-method approach combining document analyses and semi-structured interviews with sport management, sport club fans and blockchain experts.

Governance tokens indeed foster fan engagement by including fans in decision-making processes. The engagement platform is meant to enable two-way communication between fans and professional sport clubs. However, benefits could be overrated, and fans describe concerns about increasing commercialization due to the application of governance tokens. Thus, opportunities must be balanced out to foster engagement of sport club fans.

The findings contribute to extending the phenomenon of tokenization as a financing model and engagement platform in sport marketing. The results show how tokenized governance platforms can be applied in sport marketing and how they contribute to value co-creation in the digital world of sport clubs.