Sustaining Superior Performance in Business Ecosystems: Evidence from Application Software Developers in the iOS and Android Smartphone Ecosystems

We study the phenomenon of business ecosystems in which platform firms orchestrate the functioning of ecosystems by providing platforms and setting the rules for participation by complementor firms. We develop a theoretical framework to explain how the structural and evolutionary features of the ecosystem may shape the extent to which participating complementor firms can sustain their superior performance. The structural feature, which we refer...