Platform competition: Strategic trade‐offs in platform markets

Because the literature on platform competition emphasizes the role of network effects, it prescribes rapidly expanding a network of platform users and complementary applications to capture entire markets. We challenge the unconditional logic of a winner‐take‐all ( WTA ) approach by empirically analyzing the dominant strategies used to build and position platform systems in the U.S. video game industry. We show that when platform firms pursue two...