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 - and then performing necessary tasks (such as discovery, matching, fulfillment, financial payments, trust etc.) to make it is easy for this to happen. 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, some of which I have worked on and are discussed below.

Academic Research Publications

Platform Ecosystems Modeling and Regulation
- Hemant K. Bhargava, “The Creator Economy: Managing Ecosystem Supply, Revenue-Sharing, and Platform Design”, Management Science (available as Articles in Advance) (July 2021).
- SBO Revenue-Sharing in Platforms: Hemant K. Bhargava, Kitty Wang, and Luna Zhang, “Fending off Critics of Platform Power: Doing Well by Doing Good”, Management Science (forthcoming) (2022).
- Hemant K. Bhargava, “Bundling for Flexibility and Variety: An Economic Model for Multiproducer Value Aggregation”, Management Science 27 (Apr. 2021), pp. 2365–2280.
Platform Thinking in the Electric Vehicle Industry

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)

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

The Move to Smart Mobile Platforms and Its Implications for Antitrust Analysis of Online Markets — Aug 21, 2016 11:20:39 PM