Hemant Bhargava, University of California, Davis

Andreas König, University of Passau

Jan Krämer, University of Passau

Chayanin Wipusanawan, University of Passau

Digital platforms and their ecosystems have become central to value creation in the global economy, but their concentrated power raises significant concerns about societal impacts. These platforms now mediate how people work, communicate, access information, and engage in public discourse, making it crucial to understand their design, governance, and regulation.

This special issue seeks scholarly contributions examining critical questions about digital platform ecosystems, addressing both their innovative potential and their societal risks. Contributions should address governance mechanisms, market power, content moderation, platform regulation, protection of vulnerable users, and the socio-economic development implications of platform-mediated activities across different contexts.

Appel publié par Electronic Markets. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• 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.

Timeline

• July 1, 2026: Open for submissions
• December 1, 2026: Submission deadline