Platform competition processes: A future research outlook

Platform competition for market share can have broad ranging implications within or across industry sectors. It is subject to the complex and changing socioeconomic context in which it unfolds. Three trends provide evidence for this: (i) the number of relevant factors for platform market dominance is steadily increasing, (ii) industries converge, and (iii) historically platform competition cases take less time to unfold. These trends suggest that the delays involved in how relevant factors influence the market outcome of platform competition have been changing ultimately influencing the trade-offs managers face in platform development and competition. Nevertheless, none of the existing frameworks in the literature is equipped to account for delays explicitly. Hence, no empirical studies based on these frameworks take this directly into consideration either. The article argues that a way forward is the systematic use of modelling and simulation when applying these frameworks to platform competition cases and outlines the research agenda this opens up.