Amateurs Crowds & Professional Entrepreneurs as Platform Complementors
Kevin Boudreau
No 24512, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Abstract:
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.
JEL-codes: D04 E26 J4 L1 L8 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-ind, nep-lma, nep-mac and nep-pay
Note: PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24512.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24512
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w24512
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().
