Designing Platform Powerhouses: Strategies for Transaction Platforms to Gain a Competitive Advantage and Trigger Positive Network Effects

The thesis addresses the topic of Platform Business, which has a multi-disciplinary relevance in several domains such as business management, economics, technology management, innovation management, and information systems. The topic has also a multi-level perspective of analysis including the single organization, the network of organizations, the industry/industries of reference, and the institutions as well. Finally, Platform Businesses have a value-oriented dimension of analysis, which includes not only the economic and business aspects but also the social and environmental issues, which makes the concept particularly interesting, complex, and worthy of being studied and further explored. In this view, the thesis has a three-fold research objective: - To describe the current state of the art of Platform Ecosystem literature by highlighting the main research areas and related research questions; - To identify the key sources of competitive advantages in digital transaction platforms; - To identify the critical conditions/factors associated with platform performance.