Summary

Digital platforms create value by orchestrating interactions among users, complementors, and platform owners. Through governance mechanisms such as trust-building, integration, and design changes, platform owners seek to stimulate participation and innovation while capturing value. However, governance mechanisms can generate inherent tensions: the same mechanisms that enable value creation may simultaneously undermine it. This dissertation examines the dualities of platform governance and the trade-offs platform owners face when coordinating ecosystem participants.

Drawing on three empirical studies, this thesis investigates how governance mechanisms shape interaction dynamics at different levels of the platform ecosystem. The first study analyzes how trust, stemming from platform certification and repeated transactions, affects complementors’ platform revenue. Distinguishing between calculative and relational trust, it highlights that excessive trust can lead to disintermediation and weaken complementors’ platform revenue. The second study examines the impact of platform integration on complementors’ knowledge-sharing behavior. While integration expands market access, it intensifies competition and discourages knowledge sharing, particularly among non-manufacturer and multihoming complementors. The third study explores how platform design changes influence user engagement, using Twitter’s increase in character limits as a natural experiment. It shows that relaxing constraints on content creation can lead to greater user engagement.

Taken together, these studies advance platform governance research by theorizing the dualities and trade-offs of trust, integration, and control, providing both theoretical and practical insights for sustaining value creation within platform ecosystems.