ODC Webinar
Research in Progress on Designing for Platform Participation
Thursday, June 19th, 2025 at 3PM CET
In this ODC "Research in Progress" (RiP) webinar, organized and moderated by Jonathan Jensen (LMU Munich School of Management) two PhD students – Shun Yiu (Wharton) and Yuping Li (Leeds School of Business) – will present their research on how platform design choices affect user participation. Specifically, Shun will present his paper on “How Distributed Decision Rights Erode Participation” on a blockchain platform and Yuping will present her paper on “How Platform Owner Entry Affects Open-Source Contribution” (each about 20 mins). The presentations will be followed by a discussion from Christoph Riedl (Northeastern University). The webinar will end with feedback/comments from the audience. Please see below for the papers’ abstracts and the participants’ bios.
Jonathan Jensen [Organizer and Moderator]
Jonathan is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization at the LMU Munich School of Management. His research addresses fundamental questions in strategy and organization design, asking how individuals, firms, and platforms can improve collaboration and decision-making under uncertainty. His main interest is to study how modern collaboration between firms and freelancers in Online Labor Markets is changing our understanding of firm boundaries. Another of his interests is studying how new technologies such as Generative AI are affecting collaboration and knowledge dynamics. Before joining LMU, Jonathan obtained his PhD in Management from Aarhus University.
Shun Yiu [Presenter]
Presentation Title: Appropriation Hazards and Platform Governance: How Distributed Decision Rights Erode Participation.
Abstract: This paper examines the effect of distributing decision rights on platform participation among complementors. Platforms rely on complementor participation to create value. However, complementors face appropriation hazards from platform owners who have centralized control over platform architecture, potentially deterring their willingness to participate. Emerging perspectives propose that platform owners can alleviate such appropriation concerns by distributing decision rights to complementors. This paper advances the literature by building theory on how complementors will respond to the distribution of decision rights in digital platforms. Distributing decision rights can alleviate appropriation hazards from platform owners but shift the locus of appropriability from platform owners to other complementors. Unlike platform owners though, other complementors lack vested interests in the platform’s success and therefore pose greater appropriation hazards than platform owners to the focal complementor. In turn, distributing decision rights can deter rather than encourage participation. I test this prediction by examining the staggered adoption of distributed governance structure among 105 cryptocurrency exchange platforms. Analyzing depositor participation with a staggered difference-in-difference framework, I find that distributing decision rights is associated with a significant decline in the number of participating depositors and total amount of deposits. This research contributes to the literature on platform governance, providing theory and evidence on how governance arrangements that involve complementors in platform decision-making processes can have unexpected adverse effects.
Bio: Shun Yiu is a PhD Candidate in Management at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His research lies at the intersection of digital economy, governance, and the future of work. His dissertation examines how novel governance structures enabled by blockchain technology transform exchange relationships on digital platform ecosystems.
Yuping Li [Presenter]
Presentation Title: How Platform Owner Entry Affects Open-Source Contribution? Evidence from GitHub Developers
Abstract: This study investigates how platform owner entry impacts complementor innovation by influencing crowd developers’ incentives to contribute to complementors’ open source technologies. Leveraging AWS’s phased introduction of its own product, which competes with Elastic by building upon Elastic’s open source software Elasticsearch, as a natural experiment, my staggered difference-in-differences analysis reveals several key findings. Platform owner entry leads to a decline in contributions from existing contributors, particularly those with significant prior investment in the project and strong intrinsic motivation. Simultaneously, it drives an increase in contributions from new contributors, attracted by the heightened visibility of the technology following the platform owner’s entry. This influx of new contributors results in an overall increase in contributions to the open source technology. Further analysis reveals that this replacement effect—where new contributors replace existing ones— has introduced qualitative changes to the contributor base, thereby altering the characteristics of the contributions made. These findings highlight the need to consider complementors’ external knowledge sources in open source communities and reveal the nuanced effects of platform owner entry on community members’ innovation incentives.
Short Bio: Yuping Li is a PhD candidate in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business. Her research focuses on open-source innovation, corporate strategy, digital platforms, and entrepreneurship.
Christoph Riedl [Discussant]
Christoph Riedl is professor for Information Systems and Network Science at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. He holds a joint appointment with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and is a core faculty member at the Network Science Institute. He is a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard and the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT. He is recipient of a Young Investigator Award (YIP) from the Army Research Office (ARO) for his work on social networks in collaborative decision-making. His work has been funded by NSF, ARO, ONR, and DARPA. He recently received a $1.5M Army Research Lab grant to study human-AI teams as principal investigator. His work has been published in leading journals including Science, PNAS, Nature Communications, Organization Science, Management Science, Information Systems Research, Academy of Management Discoveries, practitioner journals like Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review, as well as top computer science venues such as AAAI and CHI. His research has been featured, among others, in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. He currently serves as a member of the editorial board of Organization Science. His research interests are to understand how social and economic networks shape collaboration and decision-making on the individual, group, and community level. He is known for his scholarship on how the Future of Work will look like and how we can organize teams, crowds, and human-AI teams to be collectively.
Last date of registration is 18th June 2025, 9 am EST.
Hope you will be able to join us!
