Abstract
As in any industry, firms in platform industries choose competitive strategies to achieve competitive
advantage. However, in platform industries the standards definition of competitive advantage
that dichotomizes firms into those with or without competitive advantage is insufficient.
We use a dynamic model to characterize types of competitive (dis-) advantage in platform industries
and demonstrate that in such industries, market structures can be mapped into these types of
competitive advantage. We simulate the model to find the optimal competitive strategy for each
type of competitive advantage. Mapping these results back into market structure, we derive
guidelines for determining a firm's optimal competitive strategy conditional on the firm's competitive
position within the market, namely its competitive position within its platform and the
position of its platform within the industry.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 29 |
| State | Published - Feb 2007 |