Xiaowei Zhang (张晓伟)
I am an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at CUNEF Universidad in Madrid, where I study how digital platforms and the firms that build on them create value together.
My research asks what happens when a platform owner starts supplying the very products its partners supply. I call this practice first-party complement provision: a platform owner offering its own complements alongside those of its complementors, as when Sony releases in-house games for the PlayStation. The practice is common across platform-mediated markets, from e-commerce to mobile app ecosystems.
Existing work mostly treats it as a threat to complementors, emphasizing the platform owner’s control over platform architecture. I argue that the opposite can also hold. Platform owners can use first-party complements to shape market conditions in ways that serve both private benefit and collective value co-creation — a rising tide that lifts all boats.
A central claim of my work is that none of this happens in an undifferentiated platform space. Platform participants decide within platform-categories — local arenas of demand, learning, competition, and evaluation, such as genres within a console ecosystem. My dissertation treats these categories as both opportunity and evaluation structures, and asks three connected questions:
- When does a platform owner enter a category with its own complements?
- When do complementors respond more favorably, or less unfavorably, to that entry?
- How do complementors reposition their portfolios within a category when several competing benchmarks are available?
I work primarily with data from the console video game industry, and I am extending this research to intelligent and connected vehicles and other distinctive platform ecosystems.
I completed my Ph.D. at Tilburg University under the supervision of Niels Noorderhaven and Xavier Martin, and will defend my dissertation in November 2026.