Critical Perspectives on Digital Platform Ecosystems: Governance, Influence, and Consequences

Éditeurs invités

• Hemant Bhargava, University of California, Davis
• Andreas König, University of Passau
• Jan Krämer, University of Passau
• Chayanin Wipusanawan, University of Passau

Synthèse

This special issue examines digital platform ecosystems and their multifaceted effects on society and the economy. Platforms have become central to value creation globally, influencing organizational strategies and reshaping industries, while also raising critical questions about their governance, design, and regulation. The issue seeks to understand how platform ecosystems shape societal outcomes across labor arrangements, content moderation, user protection, fairness, data practices, and policy interactions.

The collection invites theoretical and empirical contributions from information systems and related disciplines that address both the enabling potential and societal risks of digital platforms. Research may employ quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches and can take various forms including conceptual papers, empirical studies, and position papers.

Thèmes proposés

• Platform Governance and Ecosystem Orchestration: Governance mechanisms, rule-setting, boundary resources, and the allocation of decision rights across platform owners, complementors, and users; centralized, decentralized, and hybrid governance models.
• Strategic Conduct, Market Power, and Competitive Dynamics: Strategic positioning, platform envelopment, self-preferencing, lock-in, multi-homing, and the implications of dominant platforms for competition and market structure.
• Innovation, Complementor Dynamics, and Value Co-creation: Generativity, innovation governance, API and data access, developer relations, incentive structures, and strategies for value creation and capture across ecosystem participants.
• Content Governance, Speech, and Public Discourse: Content moderation, recommender systems, platform policies, and their effects on online speech, civic participation, and political communication across jurisdictions.
• Societal Risks, Safety, and Equity: Fairness, inclusion, and distributional effects of platform governance and algorithmic decision-making; information integrity and the maintenance of digital trust; safety, well-being, and protection of vulnerable users.
• Regulation, Policy, and Institutional Change: Antitrust and platform regulation, interoperability and portability, liability regimes, standards, oversight of platform policies and algorithmic systems, and the interaction between platform governance and public policy.
• Platforms and Socio-Economic Development: Platformization trajectories, local innovation ecosystems, informal economies, and societal impacts in emerging and developing contexts.