Open research questions in Digital Platforms and Economics

What the literature leaves open

• Network effect √ Zhang × Coase × Kahn × Desai Bhaskaran × Balasubramanian × √ Choudhary × Jia × Gore × Liu × Ye √ Dou…

  Selling versus leasing? Pricing information goods with valuation enhancement and network effect · 2026 · DOI

• systems, AI-supported advertising architectures, platform infrastructures, and behavioral-engagement systems continuously shape how businesses compete, scale, and sustain profitability. Earlier business-development environments largely depended on human-managed market coordination, direct customer relationships, and relatively transparent commercial systems. Contemporary platform economies increasingly operate through machine-learning infrastructures that govern discoverability, customer acquisition, operational visibility, and transactional momentum in real time. This study has demonstrated that algorithmic control increasingly functions as a governing commercial www.ijrp.org Rifat Can Ishakoglu / International Journal of Research Publications (IJRP.ORG) 1544 infrastructure rather than merely a technical feature of digital platforms. Businesses now compete not only through products, branding, or pricing strategy, but also through their ability to maintain compatibility with evolving recommendation architectures and platform-governed ecosystems. The article has also shown that behavioral acquisition, operational responsiveness, pricing adaptation, and customer-retention continuity increasingly operate as interconnected systems inside AI-mediated markets. Businesses capable of integrating predictive intelligence with operational coordination frequently achieve stronger scalability because recommendation systems reward ecosystem-level responsiveness and engagement continuity simultaneously. At the same time, the study has highlighted the structural risks associated with platform dependency, data asymmetry, algorithmic opacity, and ecosystem volatility. Organizations aggressively optimized around short-term recommendation visibility may weaken strategic independence, profitability sustainability, and long-term resilience beneath strong acquisition performance. Artificial intelligence therefore should not be interpreted merely as a commercial optimization tool. It increasingly functions as the strategic coordination infrastructure shaping visibility allocation, customer interaction, operational adaptation, and long-term market sustainability across interconnected digital economies. Ultimately, the future of business development within platform-driven markets will likely depend not on maximizing algorithmic visibility alone, but on whether organizations can construct adaptive commercial ecosystems capable of balancing recommendation compatibility, operational resilience, behavioral intelligence, diversification, profitability sustainability, and strategic independence within continuously evolving AI-governed market structures.

  Business Development under Algorithmic Control: Strategic Adaptation to Platform-Driven Market Structures · 2026 · DOI

• The main challenge disclosed in this study involves addressing buyer-tilted asymmetries across the bargaining field. From the data, the two most effective strategies for doing so at the roundtable involved consolidating producer associations and professionalized representative teams able to meet higher-volume thresholds and to hold Responsible Alpaca Standard (RAS) certification, which afforded better price offers. In general, organizing smallholders into bargaining consortia improves bargaining position by concentrating supply, coordinating contracts, reducing dependence on brokers, and making dispersed production legible to buyers (Hellin et al., 2009; Markelova et al., 2009; Pietrangeli et al., 2025). This is shown as especially critical in this study, as buyers at the roundtable established minimum purchase volumes that denied market access to nearly half of the event’s producers. Bargaining consortia not only help overcome production capacity shortfalls but also onerous transaction costs (Barrett, 2008; Poulton et al., 2010). Nothing in this asymmetrical cultural gulf was operationalized by the event’s premises.

  Reconsidering the middleman: asymmetries in a direct-contact producer-buyer alpaca fiber roundtable in Peru · 2026 · DOI

• Smith’s Framework: Natural vs. Monopoly Prices Adam Smith’s analysis in The Wealth of Nations provides a powerful lens for understanding how switching costs distort competitive outcomes. In Chapter VII of Book I, Smith distinguishes between a commodity’s “natural price”—determined by the ordinary rates of wages, profit, and rent in competitive markets—and its “market price,” which may deviate from this natural level due to temporary imbalances or artificial restrictions on competition. Most relevant for our analysis is Smith’s discussion of monopolistic barriers, which he argues allow firms to charge prices persistently above their natural levels. As Smith observes: “A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly under-stocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price.” Crucially, Smith emphasizes that such price distortions persist only when artificial barriers prevent the normal competitive process. He contrasts monopoly pricing with competitive pricing, noting that “The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the 4 h t t p s: / / m a i n i c h i. j p / e n g l i s h / a r t i c l e s / 2 0 1 9 0 6 1 0 / p 2 a / 0 0 m / 0 b u / 0 1 2 0 0 0 c. J. Chen et al.1 3 contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion, indeed, but for any considerable time together.” 2.2 Switching Costs as Artificial Barriers to Competition Consumer switching costs represent a modern manifestation of the monopolistic barriers that Smith identified. Like the “exclusive privileges of corporations” and “statutes of apprenticeship” that Smith criticized, switching costs create artificial segmentation that prevents markets from operating according to competitive principles. In Smith’s framework, effective competition requires that consumers can readily shift their purchases toward suppliers that offer better value. When switching costs are high, this reallocation mechanism breaks down. Firms can exploit “locked-in” customers by charging prices above competitive levels, since the firms are secure in the knowledge that the cost of switching deters customer defection even when superior alternatives exist. This creates a parallel to Smith’s monopolists: Firms with captive customers can keep their local markets “constantly under-stocked” in the sense that they need not fully satisfy consumer demand for value, since high switching costs protect them from competitive pressure. The switching cost effectively grants each firm a degree of monopoly power over its existing customer base.

  Reducing Switching Costs to Promote Competition: The Case of Mobile Number Portability · 2026 · DOI

• ➢ The study is limited to policyholders in Coimbatore city, so the results may not apply to other regions. ➢ It focuses only on digital features and does not include other factors like policy cost or offline services.

  IMPACT OF HEALTH INSURANCE PLATFORM ON POLICY HOLDER SATISFACTION AND LOYALTY WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO COIMBATORE CITY · 2026 · DOI

• The study recommends that government and financial institutions should improve and expand electronic payment infrastructure to support effective implementation of cashless policy. Businesses and stakeholders should also promote the use of electronic payment platforms through awareness and improved access. In addition, regulatory bodies should ensure the security and stability of digital financial systems to build public confidence and encourage wider adoption.

  The impact of cashless police on business transactions in Nigeria · 2026 · DOI

• Findings suggest that while the law benefits BVOD services, its long-term viability remains uncertain as SVOD services increasingly incorporate advertising.

  Australia's television streaming market and the battle over prominence · 2025 · DOI

• Netflix, Amazon, and many other VOD platforms have an important role to play in making content available, but little is known about circulation patterns that have developed in the online market.

  Circulation Patterns, Abundance and Scarcity: Film Availability in the Online Era · 2022 · DOI

• For young, tech-savvy workers, using their own devices at work represents a right, rather than a privilege, leading them to initiate a growing, yet under-researched, drive toward IT consumerization.

  Leaving employees to their own devices: new practices in the workplace · 2015 · DOI

• In July 2013, however, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted rule changes eliminating the ban for Rule 506 offerings limited to accredited investors.

  Direct Private Placements · 2014

• In the interim, government regulation and arm-twisting worldwide is acting as a powerful driver, though whether historically HDTV will benefit from such efforts (as computers once did) or lose (as nuclear power has) remains uncertain.

  Economies' Role in the Race Toward Digital TV · 1998 · DOI

• Future research could explore how switching cost reductions interact with firms’ incentives to invest in quality, or how consumer inattention and information frictions compound mobility barriers.

  Reducing Switching Costs to Promote Competition: The Case of Mobile Number Portability · 2026 · DOI

• Additionally, the paper uncovers a philosophical weakness in Winner’s definition of “inherently political technologies” that warrants further attention in PoT literature.

  The Politics of Platform Technologies: A Critical Conceptualization of the Platform and Sharing Economy · 2025 · DOI

• However, despite their ubiquity in our lives, platforms’ relationship to increasing inequality and precarity and its implications for places, democracies and civil society remains underexplored.

  The power of platforms—precarity and place · 2023 · DOI

• Thus, this paper adds to the limited literature by examining how using the internet platform can affect firms' export propensity and intensity by using the World Bank's Enterprise Survey dataset for Turkey.

  The impact of internet platform usage on firms' exports: New evidence for Turkish firms · 2023 · DOI

• In particular, there is a lack of evidence on the effect of backward compatibility on software sales despite its importance in understanding the full range of possible network and sales displacement effects associated with the strategy.

  Don’t Look Back? Backward Compatibility in the Video Gaming Industry · 2022 · DOI

• The presented issue has not been analysed comprehensively in the literature on the subject so far, thus gives the opportunity to recommend avenues for future research.

  Selected Legal Aspects of Protection of Undistorted Competition in the Digital Economy · 2022 · DOI

• While research on platform capitalism and its manifold manifestations abounds, there is a lack of consensus in the literature regarding its key features and characteristics.

  Charting platform capitalism: Definitions, concepts and ideologies · 2022 · DOI

• We reassert the view made by others that network infras- tructure sharing provides a way of mitigating some of the costs, but other avenues such as automation need to be explored.

  5G Is Out There: How to Ride the Market Storm and Thrive · 2021 · DOI

• In so doing, the paper fills a critical gap in the literature, which is so far missing a systematic examination of how complementors can disrupt established firms.

  Disruption Through Complements · 2021 · DOI

• The consequences further depend on how long-run economic trade-offs play out; for some of them, there is relevant experience in other industries to draw upon, but for others there is no experience and no consensus forecast.

  Net Neutrality: A Fast Lane to Understanding the Trade-offs · 2016 · DOI

• Major benefits can accrue to technology leaders, but for platform technologies that require complementary innovation from external complementors to create value for users, those benefits are limited by the difficulty of securing complements.

  Building the Value of Next-Generation Platforms: The Paradox of Diminishing Returns · 2016 · DOI

• The vast majority of commercial transactions are governed by standard form contracts, but little is known about their actual content and the determinants of that content.

  What's in a Standard Form Contract? An Empirical Analysis of Software License Agreements · 2007 · DOI

• The paper concludes that providers of online music largely utilize services marketing strategies to manage the intangibility of their products, although difficult issues such as pricing and consumer valuation of tangibility remain to be solved.

  The Intangibility of Music in the Internet Age · 2006 · DOI

• Furthermore, this interest group influence is not limited to a single industry, but comes from self-interested groups representing both sides of the issue, including newly emerging technology interests.

  Explaining State Internet Sales Taxation: New Economy, Old-Fashioned Interest Group Politics · 2002 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Digital Platforms and Economics

• What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy · Annual Review of Sociology · 2020 · 938 citations
• Platform ecosystems as meta‐organizations: Implications for platform strategies · Strategic Management Journal · 2020 · 519 citations
• Digital platforms’ boundaries: The interplay of firm scope, platform sides, and digital interfaces · Long Range Planning · 2020 · 445 citations
• The adoption of digital technologies in supply chains: Drivers, process and impact · Technological Forecasting and Social Change · 2021 · 431 citations
• The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Data Network Effects for Creating User Value · Academy of Management Review · 2020 · 421 citations
• Platform Competition: A Systematic and Interdisciplinary Review of the Literature · Journal of Management · 2020 · 362 citations
• Some simple economics of the blockchain · Communications of the ACM · 2020 · 338 citations
• The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism · Antipode · 2020 · 324 citations
• The platform economy: restructuring the space of capitalist accumulation · Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society · 2020 · 276 citations
• Governance and Design of Digital Platforms: A Review and Future Research Directions on a Meta-Organization · Journal of Management · 2021 · 244 citations

Most recent work

• Super apps as escrow platforms: An ecosystem analysis of Grab Indonesia · Economy and Society · 2026
• Between Autonomy and Determinism: The Meso- <i>Régulation</i> Approach Applied to Digital Platforms · Review of Radical Political Economics · 2026
• From digital technologies to platform circular economy performance: The role of digital platform ecosystem orchestration and platform structural assurance · Technology in Society · 2026
• The Ethical Foundation for Marketplace Inclusion · Journal of Public Policy & Marketing · 2026
• The moral in the machine: Rentier mechanisms in content recommender system on digital platforms · The Information Society · 2026
• Super apps as catalysts: designing value constellations in open and digital ecosystems · Journal of Business Strategy · 2026
• Reducing Switching Costs to Promote Competition: The Case of Mobile Number Portability · Review of Industrial Organization · 2026
• The impacts of data trading platform on residents' cultural consumption · Industrial Management & Data Systems · 2026
• Robust Pricing and Wage Optimization for On-Demand Service Platforms with Partial Information · Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering · 2026
• Triangular fuzzy game modelling for internal innovation in platform-driven manufacturing enterprises under uncertainty · Scientific Reports · 2026

Related topics in Business, Management and Accounting