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Coopetition in a platform ecosystem: from the complementors’ perspective

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Abstract

With the platform owner entering complementors’ product space, the cooperative nature of the platform ecosystem shifts into coopetition, a mixed strategy of cooperation and competition. Since a disproportionately large number of complementors are small in size and suffer from insufficient resources, their platform owner’s unfair competition can pose existential threats to them. Although the literature acknowledges the significance of the research domain, there still exist the challenges of inadequate conceptualization, inefficient measures, and insufficient studies of coopetition. This study attempts to fill the research gap by elucidating the relationship among coopetition balance, capability, and intensity from the complementors’ perspective and by operationalizing the coopetition via latent congruence modeling. The survey data collected from 365 complementors at Amazon suggest that coopetition balance and coopetition capability impact on relationship performance, and that coopetition capability and coopetition intensity moderate the relationship between coopetition balance and relationship performance.

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Fig. 1

Adapted from Luo, 2007)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Information Systems, Reginald F. Lewis College of Business, Virginia State University, 1 Hayden Dr., Petersburg, VA, 23806, USA

    Dong Kyoon Yoo

  2. Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, William G. Rohrer College of Business, Rowan University, 201 Mullica Hill Rd., Glassboro, NJ, 08028, USA

    James J. Roh

  3. Department of Information Systems, Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, 1201 West University Dr., Edinburg, TX, 78539-2999, USA

    Sunyoung Cho

  4. Department of Management, College of Business and Public Management, West Chester University, 50 Sharpless Street, West Chester, PA, 19383, USA

    Mark M. Yang

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  1. Dong Kyoon Yoo
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Correspondence to Dong Kyoon Yoo.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Survey items and measurement analysis
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Yoo, D.K., Roh, J.J., Cho, S. et al. Coopetition in a platform ecosystem: from the complementors’ perspective. Electron Commer Res 24, 1509–1532 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-022-09565-5

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