Platform owner information capability in digital platform ecosystem: an empirical investigation

The prominence of complementary innovation in digital platform ecosystems has made information-driven decision-making a central concern to platform owners (Cusumano et al. 2020). There are ample successful cases such as Google Android and Tencent, while many platforms ceased due to the misunderstanding of platform complementors or misinterpreting ecosystem-related factors. For example, Atari made a huge mistake of not noticing and responding correctly to the flood of low-quality games, and thus dragged platform complementors into an uncontrollable price competition and vitally curbed complementor innovation (Miric et al. 2019; Wareham et al. 2014). In contrast, when Apple gained knowledge of third-party developers’ jailbreaking iPhones, it reacted by introducing a Software Development Kit (SDK) for developers in 2008, giving rise to one of the first mobile application platform ecosystems (Eaton et al. 2015).