Interest in platform competition has grown significantly over the last three decades. This interest continues to grow rapidly with the rise of the Internet that has dramatically increased both the scale and scope of platform competition, to the point where business media outlets describe the current economic landscape has been described as a “platform economy”. 

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Management, UCL School of Management’s Joost Rietveld and co-author Melissa Schilling from New York University provide a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the academic literature on platform competition.

The explosive rise in platform competition has seen a dramatic increase in the number of academic articles covering the platform competition, a total of 333 articles between 1985 and 2019. The four key prominent themes identified were;

• Network Externalities and their Implications
• Platform Ecosystems  and Corporate Scope
• Platform Compliment and User Heterogeneity
• Platform Governance and Ecosystem Orchestration.

Learn more about the paper on this website where you can browse all the papers included in the review, apply filters based on your interests, explore the journals by publication count, and view a number of interactive data visualizations summarizing the findings.

Watch this excellent short 4-minute video to get a better understanding of the four key themes dominating the research field.