Platforms

Platforms, or technology-enabled business marketplaces, are transforming the way we think about business. For 200 years, business had been about creating large scale in various aspects and connecting them in a linear fashion: raw materials, parts and components, resources of production and transformation, distribution, etc., and using this large-scale structure to efficiently create and supply something of value to the customer. Today's platform technologies change this in a fundamental way: business and customer value is created by enabling others to create and provide value - with the platform coordinating and providing services (such as discovery, matching, fulfillment, financial payments, trust etc.) to facilitate participants' work. While a typical traditional business might work with hundreds of thoroughly vetted business partners under bespoke contracts, platforms typically feature a dynamic ecosystem with thousands or millions of partners enabled with information technologies that support lightweight automated contracts. This new business model raises plenty of exciting research questions, covering business strategy and governance and policy making, some of which I have worked on and are discussed below.  

Academic Research Publications

• Platform Ecosystems Modeling and Regulation

  • Luna Zhang, Kitty Wang, and Hemant K. Bhargava, “If platforms are exploiting producers, is platform competition the solution?” (Feb. 2024).

Examines why competition between multiple multi-sided platforms may fail to improve economic outcomes (such as higher revenue-sharing rates, or greater participation) for complementors who participate on the platform.

• • Hemant K. Bhargava, Antoine Dubus, David Ronayne, and Shiva Shekhar, “The strategic value of data sharing in interdependent markets” (Feb. 2024).

Examines the economic consequences of regulation on data sharing between generalist tech firms that dominate a main tech market and specialist firms operating in secondary markets which the tech firm enters. 

• • Hemant K. Bhargava, Kitty Wang, and Luna Zhang, “Fending off Critics of Platform Power: Doing Well by Doing Good”, Management Science 68 (Nov. 2022), pp. 7793–8514.

Builds a multi-sided platform model to evaluate the two-tier (small business oriented) revenue sharing structure introduced by Apple App Store and Google Play Store in 2022-23. Finds that the higher revenue share rate offered to small developers will, for the most part, improve the platform's profit and the scale of the developer ecosystem. 

• • Hemant K. Bhargava, “The Creator Economy: Managing Ecosystem Supply, Revenue-Sharing, and Platform Design”, Management Science 68 (July 2022), pp. 4755–5555.

Builds a model of the creator economy, representing the platform and the 3 sides it connects: viewers, creators, and advertisers (brands). Demonstrates how to compute various outcomes including ecosystem scale, profits of all participants, and the strategic interaction between platform design, revenue-sharing rate, and creator participation. 

• • Hemant K. Bhargava, “Bundling for Flexibility and Variety: An Economic Model for Multiproducer Value Aggregation”, Management Science 27 (Apr. 2021), pp. 2365–2280. 

  • Hemant K. Bhargava, David Evans, and Deepa Mani, “The Move to Smart Mobile and Its Implications for Antitrust Analysis of Online Markets”, Business Law Journal 16 (2016), pp. 157–188.

Examines disruptive changes in computing platforms, specifically web and mobile technologies, and how they affect market definition and fundamental issues in managing policy and competition in technology industries.

• Platform Thinking in the Electric Vehicle Industry - More Details

  • Hemant K. Bhargava, Jonas Boehm, and Geoffrey Parker, How Tesla's Charging Stations Left Other Manufacturers in the Dust, HBR Jan 2021. 

  • Edward Anderson, Hemant K. Bhargava, Jonas Boehm, and Geoffrey Parker, “The Business of Electric Vehicles: What Managers Need to Know”, California Management Review 64 (3 Winter 2022).

  • Jonas Boehm, Hemant K. Bhargava, and Geoffrey Parker, “The Business of Electric Vehicles: A Platform Perspective”, Foundations and Trends in Technology, Information and Operations Management 14 (3 Dec. 2020), Also published as a book (Now Publishers, ISBN: 978-1-68083-762-9; e-book ISBN: 978-1-68083763-6), pp. 203–323. 

• Platform Operations and Tactics

• Hemant K Bhargava, Olivier Rubel, Elizabeth J Altman, Ramnik Arora, Jorn Boehnke, Kaitlin Daniels, Timothy Derdenger, Bryan Kirschner, Darin LaFramboise, Pantelis Loupos, Geoffrey Parker, and Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, “Platform Data Strategy”, Marketing Letters 31 (4 2020), pp. 323–334.

• Hemant K. Bhargava, Gergely Csapo, and Rudolf Mueller, “On Optimal Auctions for Mixing Exclusive and Shared Matching in Platforms”, Management Science (6 June 2020), pp. 2653–2676.

• Hemant K. Bhargava and Olivier Rubel, “Sales Force Compensation Design for Two-Sided Market Platforms”, Journal of Marketing Research 56.4 (2019), pp. 666–678. 

Additional Articles

Selling Platforms — Jul 14, 2017 11:31:29 AM

Matching Auctions in Platforms: Mixing 1-1 and 1-to-Many Formats — Aug 21, 2019 11:42:59 PM

Platform technologies and network goods: insights on product launch and management — Jun 21, 2017 10:53:18 PM

Commercialization of Platform Technologies: Launch Timing and Versioning Strategy — Jun 21, 2017 10:33:39 PM

Platforms that Bundle Products from Multiple Producers — Nov 19, 2016 4:31:34 PM

Economics of an Information Intermediary with Aggregation Benefits — Aug 21, 2016 11:36:35 PM 

General Presentations and Articles