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The Impact of Uncertainty of the Emergence of Dominant Platform on Complementors' Across Platform Mobility: A Study of Google's Android and Apple's IOS

2018-07-03

Venue: Room 1102, Library & Information Center Building C, Zijingang Campus

Speaker:

Lori Qingyuan Yue, Marshall Dean’s Associate Professor in Business Administration and Associate Professor of Management and Organization at USC-Marshall School of Business.

Abstract:

The surpassing of a competing platform over the focal platform in installed bases creates uncertainty surrounding the emergence of a dominant platform. This in turn triggers complementors’ anxiety and thus increases their migration to the competing platform. However, as platform competition evolves and demonstrates that multiple platforms with strategic differentiation (e.g., quality- versus quantity-driven) could coexist, the migration tendency recedes. Consistent with our argument, we find that the increasing gap between installed bases of Android and iOS has an inverted-U effect on iOS developers’ likelihood of moving to Android, and that low performers and free-app developers have been the primary contributors to the inverted-U shaped pattern. App developers that migrate to Android at a highly uncertain time also experience a high rate of product failure.