平台治理如何影响互补者知识共享——平台开放度的控制与激励作用

How Does Platform Governance Affect Complementors' Knowledge Sharing?The Control and Incentive Roles of Platform Openness

促进互补者知识共享和协同创新是平台治理的重要目标。根据竞合理论,从平台开放度这一兼顾控制和激励的治理手段入手,探讨平台开放度对互补者知识共享的作用机制。通过对创新型平台上320家应用程序开发企业的调查研究,结果表明:平台开放度中的可访问性与透明度对互补者知识共享具有负向影响,且该影响在知识复杂性较高的互补者中会得到缓解,在知识多样性较高的互补者中会被放大;此外,将知识复杂性机制引入战略独特性后,存在三阶调节作用,即战略独特性越低、知识复杂性越高,可访问性与透明度对互补者知识共享的负向影响越弱。强调平台治理政策与手段设计对互补者交互和价值创造具有重要影响,在兼顾互补者异质性的同时,进一步丰富了平台治理研究。

Knowledge sharing among complementors is an important source to promote collaborative innovation and value co-creation in the platform ecosystem.However,knowledge sharing often leads to issues of knowledge theft and imitation,while platform enterprises are unable to coordinate complementary activities;moreover,complementary activities have heterogeneity.Thus,knowledge sharing among complementors is challenged.Platform enterprises need to consider the design and deployment of platform governance rules to influence complementors'knowledge sharing.Platform openness,as an important rule to manage platform access and control,has received more and more attention in the research on platform governance.A platform should be considered open if its development,use,and commercialization are unrestricted,or if all restrictions are reasonable and applied equally to all participants.However,most of the existing research on platform openness regards complementors abstractly and studies their interaction behaviors with platforms without consideration of how the interaction behaviors between complementors are affected by platform governance rules or detailed studies on different dimensions of platform openness.Following the theory of coopetition,this paper focuses on the influence of accessibility and transparency on knowledge sharing and considers the knowledge characteristics and strategic motivations of complementors to remedy the above-mentioned deficiencies.According to the research on coopetition and platform governance,it is in the common interests of all complementors to expand the scale of users,and it is in the private interests of complementors to increase the market share of individual users.Complementors may have an incentive to cooperate with others by sharing knowledge to attract more users in pursuit of common interests.Platform openness influences complementors'focus on private and common interests through accessibility and transparency.Accessibility is a control measure that indicates whether complementors are allowed to join and access the platforms.Transparency is an incentive measure that reflects whether the information policies of the platforms can be understood.It will intensify competition in the platform market by improving accessibility and transparency,and then complementors will pay more attention to private interests,weakening the motivation of knowledge sharing,which may vary with the differences of the complementor's knowledge base,including the complexity and diversity of knowledge,as well as the influence of strategic orientation.This reflects the strategic distinctiveness of enterprises'positioning between consistency and differentiation.By investigating 320 application developers on innovative platforms,the study confirms that accessibility and transparency have a significant negative impact on knowledge sharing among complementors,and it is alleviated in complementors with higher knowledge complexity and amplified in complementors with higher knowledge diversity.In addition,when the mechanism of knowledge complexity is introduced into strategic distinctiveness,there is a three-way moderating effect,that is,when strategic distinctiveness is lower and knowledge complexity is higher,accessibility and transparency have weaker negative effects on knowledge sharing among complementors.The primary contributions of this paper lie in three aspects.First,different from previous studies of platform governance and complementors that focused on the interaction between complementors and platforms but paid little attention to the interaction between complementors themselves,this paper highlights the important influence of the interaction between complementors on platforms and enriches the research on platform governance with a deep analysis of knowledge sharing behavior among complementors.Second,from the perspective of control and incentive,platform openness is refined into two dimensions of accessibility and transparency,and the coopetition theory is used to analyze the competition and cooperation incentive mechanism of how platform openness affects the knowledge sharing of complementors.It is stressed that the selection of openness should consider the balance between these two incentives,which enriches the research on platform openness.Finally,the existing studies have shown that increasing platform openness will hinder the contribution of complementors to the platforms,and this paper further supplements that relaxing platform access control and improving transparency will reduce knowledge sharing among complementors,but these effects vary among different complementors,which emphasizes the value of integrating heterogeneous characteristics of complementors to promote the study on platform governance and complementors'behaviors.