Research

Essays on Complement Provision in Platform Ecosystems: Platform-Categories as Opportunity and Evaluation Structures

My dissertation argues that complement provision does not unfold in an undifferentiated platform space. Platform participants make decisions within platform-categories — local arenas of demand, learning, competition, and evaluation. These categories condition where platform owners intervene, how independent complementors respond, and how complementors adapt their portfolios over time. Three connected studies, drawn from the U.S. console video game industry between 1995 and 2005, examine when platform owners enter categories with their own complements, when complementors respond more favorably to that entry, and how complementors reposition within categories against competing benchmarks. Tilburg University; supervised by Niels Noorderhaven and Xavier Martin. Defense scheduled for 24 November 2026.

[A Novel Contingency for Platform Owner Entry] (title anonymized for double-blind review)

First-party complement provision (FPCP) — a platform owner releasing its own complements alongside those of independent complementors, as when Sony publishes in-house games for the PlayStation — is usually read as a competitive move that discourages complementor participation. We develop a category-contingent perspective that foregrounds the demand-spillover effects of FPCP within a platform-category, treating category strength as multidimensional along uniqueness, commercial performance, and quality. When a category is weak on these dimensions, the spillover value of FPCP becomes more consequential and complementors respond more favorably than they otherwise would. Evidence comes from the U.S. console video game industry, 1995–2005, using fixed-effects Poisson models with extensive robustness checks.

With Xavier Martin and Niels Noorderhaven. Dissertation chapter. First-round revise and resubmit at Strategic Management Journal.

Category Conditions and Strategic Entry: Unveiling the Motives for Platform Owner Entry

Prior work on platform ecosystems largely treats first-party complements as substitutes for third-party ones, emphasizing value capture and competitive displacement. We develop a complementary view in which first-party complement provision can orchestrate the complementor ecosystem. Because first-party development capacity is scarce, platform owners deploy it selectively toward categories where its marginal ecosystem value is greater. On the supply side, it generates and demonstrates platform-specific development knowledge, which matters more where technical requirements are demanding and less where such knowledge has already been revealed. On the demand side, it supplies visible, platform-specific content where a category’s uniqueness or commercial performance is weak. Tested on the U.S. console video game industry, 1995–2005, using hazard models with instrumental-variable robustness checks.

With Xavier Martin. Dissertation chapter. Best Paper Proceeding, Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2025. Targeted at Organization Science.

Within-Category Repositioning Given Benchmark Multiplicity

How do established firms reposition when a category contains more than one benchmark? We examine two: the prototype, the central tendency of comparable products, and exemplars, concrete and favorably evaluated products. Greater distance between a firm’s established portfolio and the prototype creates a larger discrepancy from prevailing category configurations, and is associated with both a greater departure from the firm’s own recent portfolio and a stronger prototype-facing direction of change. These associations weaken when exemplars are prevalent, because a richer set of concrete, well-regarded configurations makes the prototype less exclusive as a reference. Tested on the U.S. console video game industry, 1995–2005, using embedding-based measures of publisher portfolios built from MobyGames descriptions.

With Xavier Martin. Dissertation chapter. Targeted at Organization Science.

Alliance Portfolio and Platform Adoption

How a firm’s existing portfolio of alliances shapes its decision to adopt a platform.

With Xavier Martin. Full draft. Targeted at Strategy Science.

Match, Simplify, or Expand: Salient Market Events and Subsequent Entrepreneurial Entries in Differentiated Product Spaces

Salient market events — products whose performance attracts widespread attention — are a recognized source of information for identifying entrepreneurial opportunities. But existing work examines entry within the same category, treating market structure as setting rather than explanation. We distinguish events by nature (exceptional success, technology failure, customer failure) and distinguish the product spaces entrants move into: a new product may match the category configuration of the event product, expand it by adding categories, or simplify it by retaining only some. Combining the discovery view of opportunities with prototype and goal-based views of categorization, we test the argument on video games, matching salient events on Steam to entrepreneurial entries on Kickstarter — 36 product spaces across 46 quarters (2014–2025), 138 events and over 10,000 entries.

With Jiahe Wang and Xiaofei Qu.

Organizing Routines and Capabilities for Green Transitions

Industry-wide transitions such as the shift toward net zero require large-scale organizational change, and technological innovation is usually central to a firm’s response. Firms often try to reshape what members understand as strategically important and legitimate — what we call shared cognition reframing. Whether that alone produces technological innovation is unclear: many transition efforts are absorbed into existing ways of operating. We argue that cognition sets the direction of technological search while recurrent activity supplies its content, so reframing matters for innovation mainly where routine reconfiguration also occurs. Using large language models on 5,329 corporate sustainability reports, we build separate firm-year measures of each and relate them to subsequent patenting in the Y02 climate-mitigation classification, across 578 U.S. firms and 4,645 firm-years.

With Qinli Lu and Michael Park.

Personalized Recommendation and Complementor Diversification: Evidence from a Social Media Platform

How algorithmic personalization shapes whether complementors broaden or narrow the range of content they produce.

With Yuping Li. Data collection stage.

Relevance of Firm Adaptability in Alliance Formation: Implications from the U.S. Console Video Game Industry

Whether and how a firm’s capacity to adapt bears on the alliances it forms.

With Xavier Martin. Conceptualization stage.

Governing Innovation Ecosystems in Complex Product Systems: Stable Execution Environments and Ecosystem Organization

How stable execution environments shape the way innovation ecosystems around complex product systems are organized and governed.

With Jiuyu Dong. Conceptualization stage.

First Amendment and the Video Game Industry

How constitutional speech protection has shaped competition and content in the video game industry.

With John Li.

Security breaches and organization response strategy: Exploring consumers’ threat and coping appraisals

Published in International Journal of Information Management, 2022

Security breaches can expose sensitive data and provoke sharp consumer reactions, yet how organizations should respond, and how consumers appraise those responses, has remained underspecified. Grounding a conceptual model in risk theory and protection motivation theory, we treat the breached organization as an agent offering a coping strategy and consumers as principals evaluating it. A vignette-based survey shows that variation in an organization’s response strategy produces significantly different consumer reactions.

My contribution: synthesizing the literature, developing hypotheses, and building out the theoretical framework. Written during my Research Master, as a research assistant to Professor Carol Ou in the Information Systems department at Tilburg University.

Recommended citation: Ou, C. X., Zhang, X., Angelopoulos, S., Davison, R. M., & Janse, N. (2022). Security breaches and organization response strategy: Exploring consumers' threat and coping appraisals. International Journal of Information Management, 65, 102498.
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