Amateurs Crowds & Professional Entrepreneurs as Platform Complementors / Kevin J. Boudreau.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Boudreau, Kevin J.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24512.

NBER working paper series no. w24512

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

Platforms often have "crowds" of amateurs working on them as complementors, in other cases professional entrepreneurs--or both. What can a platform owner do to implement these outcomes? I document evidence on mobile app developers showing that just small, incremental changes in platform design--related to the bare minimum costs required to build an app and factors affecting non-pecuniary payoffs--can lead the "bottom-to-fall-out" of the market to amateurs. Where the bottom-falls-out, there is a flood of lowest-quality developers who nonetheless are long-lived on the platform and engage in relatively high development activity. I find no evidence that amateurs crowd-out development activity of top developers in this context. Moreover, the bottom-falling-out is associated with the generation of significantly greater numbers of highest-quality products. I discuss several interpretations.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2018.