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Digital platforms consist of technical elements such as software and hardware and associated social elements such as organizational processes and standards. When such social or technical elements seem logical individually but inconsistent when juxtaposed they form tensions. Prior research on platforms often focused on individual elements of digital platforms but neglected possible related and conflicting elements which offers limited insight about underlying tensions. While some studies on platforms considered tensions, they largely assumed that centralized platform owners being responsible for responding to tensions, neglecting collective response mechanisms in blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) where decentralized participants typically respond to tensions. The examination of tensions in the context of centralized platforms and decentralized autonomous organizations offers an opportunity to surface conflicting elements that form novel types of socio-technical tensions which require collective and technology-enabled response mechanisms. This thesis explored what tensions exist in centralized and decentralized digital platform contexts and how platform participants can respond to selected tensions. For this purpose, this thesis comprises five essays that employ multiple different research methods including interviews analyzed by using techniques of grounded theory, qualitative meta-analysis of published case studies, and systematic literature reviews. The findings derived from all five essays contribute to a better understanding of tensions in digital platforms. In particular, this thesis (1) offers a lens for analyzing platforms as collective organizations in which tensions arise at the collective meta-organizational level requiring collective responses, (2) identifies new tensions and response mechanisms related to generativity and collectivity, and (3) points to a novel category of socio-technical tensions that are especially salient in digital platforms.
Blockchain technology enables the automated recording of information and execution of contract content – utilizing so-called Smart Contracts – without relying on trusted intermediaries (Beck et al., 2016). A blockchain is best described as a decentralized digital ledger (Atzori, 2015). The decentralized data storage on the blockchain makes the recorded information tamper-proof and creates transparency along the value chain. Therefore blockchain changes fundamentally the way data and information are processed (Al-Jaroodi & Mohamed, 2019; Avital et al., 2016). This has given rise to numerous use cases for blockchain in a wide range of industries.
Fundamentally, blockchain technology can be used at any time when information needs to be stored in an automated and tamper-proof manner (Crosby et al., 2016). In the financial industry, blockchain helps to automate peer-to-peer transactions. This makes middlemen obsolete, which can reduce transaction costs (Cai, 2018). In the public health sector, blockchain is primarily used for decentralized storage of patient records. By using blockchain technology, these patient records are secured against manipulation and unauthorized access by third parties (Mettler, 2016). Another interesting use case can be seen in the electricity market. Blockchain technology makes it possible to integrate micro producers of electricity, such as private households, into the power grid in a cost-efficient way (Cheng et al., 2017). However, blockchain technology also offers several applications in the creative industries to support the daily work of professionals.
The term creative industries encompasses industries and sectors which hold intellectual property at the core of their value creation (Caves, 2000). According to DCMS (1998),creative industries include not only classic art sectors such as fine art, painting or crafting, but also areas such as marketing, game developing, film and video or music. As the main drivers of innovation, the creative industries have a steadily increasing influence on the overall economic impact. Often, ideas, products and services from the creative industries ultimately flow into other areas, such as the automotive sector, and support them in achieving their entrepreneurial goals (Banks, 2010; Jones et al., 2004). In order to continuously maintain the position as an innovation driver, a certain form of organization has prevailed in the creative industries.
For the creative industries to react flexibly to new requirements and a constantly changing environment, work is usually carried out as project-based (DeFillippi, 2015). For this purpose, the teams of the project-based organization are predominantly formed using freelancers who are specialists in the required field. As a result, many recurring organizational activities arise, such as contracting, team finding or onboarding (DeFillippi, 2015; Eikhof & Haunschild, 2006). Therefore, professionals from the creative industries have to spend significant time on activities that do not serve their core task of creating intellectual property. These tasks not only reduce the efficiency of their work, but also hinder their creative flow (Foord, 2009; Hennekam & Bennett, 2016). In this regard, blockchain represents a promising technology to support professionals in the creative industries.
For the creative industries, blockchain is primarily used to automate formal processes and secure intellectual property rights (O’Dair, 2018). Blockchain technology enables artists and creatives more freedom for their own creative activities. By automating repetitive activities, professionals from the creative industries are freed from typical management tasks (Arcos, 2018; Cong & He, 2019). Furthermore, for the first time, intellectual property can be secured in a cost- and time-efficient way by utilizing blockchain technology. This is made possible by the decentralized nature of the blockchain, which makes subsequent manipulation of the contents of the intellectual property impossible (Avital et al., 2016; Beck et al., 2016; Regner et al., 2019). Ultimately, the use of so-called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) create the opportunity for artists and creatives to sell unique digital art (Regner et al., 2019). Thus, blockchain generates entirely new ways for creative industries to organize their projects and opens new markets to sell their work. While several use cases of blockchain technology can be identified in the creative industries, the widespread use of blockchain is still lacking.
So far, no Blockchain service or blockchain application has managed to take a dominant market position in the creative industries. At first sight, this seems surprising since artists and creatives could fundamentally benefit from this technology. At the same time, professionals from the creative industries would not be dependent on middlemen or central entities. This circumstance gave the impulse for the research presented in this thesis. I was able to identify that professionals from the creative industries are still underutilizing blockchain technology for three main reasons: (1) When using blockchain technology, professionals from the creative industries experience strong resistance from their stakeholders, who want to prevent the use of blockchain. (2) The perceived constraints by artists and creatives in using blockchain still deter many from using this technology extensively. (3) Several blockchain applications lack a persuasive design, resulting in many artists and creatives continue to prefer conventional services and products.
Free digital platforms constitute one of the most important phenomena of modern times; they create value by bringing together customer groups that would not have interacted without digital technology or that could have done so only by incurring increased costs. In the free digital platform model, firms pay for the interaction with end consumers that use the digital platform for free. Extant research on two-sided markets has provided rich evidence for how digital platforms can attract enough members from both customer groups to enable the interaction between the customer groups. However, this research lacks insights into how free
digital platforms can create value for their customer groups once these customer groups joined the platform, and extract this value for themselves.
To address this substantial research gap, in this dissertation, I investigate the overall research question of how activities of free digital platforms affect the value creation for their customer groups and the ability of the platform to extract this value. In a first step, I examine this value creation and value extraction by focusing on concrete activities of free digital platforms. In Study 1, I investigate how offering firms the possibility of personalizing and positioning their search ads on search engines affects consumers’ search engine click behavior. In Study 2, I examine how adapting ad positions to consumers’ previous online shopping behavior on search engines influences consumers’ click and conversion behavior. In Study 3, I investigate the impact of a review platform’s policy of tagging reviews as written on either mobile or nonmobile devices on consumers’ perceptions of review helpfulness. In a second step, in Study 4, I generalize these findings by investigating the overall impact of such customer-oriented activities on value creation for customer groups and on the extraction of this value by free digital platforms.
These four studies yield three major findings. First, free digital platforms’ activities toward one customer group always affect the value creation of the other customer group as well. Second, free digital platforms should emphasize value creation activities especially for non-paying customer groups. Third, internal, operative, and macro-environments influence the value creation and value extraction of free digital platforms.
With this dissertation, I make substantial contributions to research on two-sided markets, customer orientation, search engine advertising, and online reviews. In addition, my dissertation provides numerous actionable recommendations for managers of free digital platforms and outlines promising avenues for further research.
An increasing number of companies report that eco-sustainable initiatives have a positive impact on firms’ economic performance and concurrently allow the combination of social and commercial goals by optimizing environmental and economic decisions simultaneously. These initiatives are considered an integral part of organizational sustainability transformations, which are a special case of multilayered, complex organizational change efforts that relate to environmental, organizational, and individual factors. Institutional logics and information systems (IS) have shown to be two important perspectives from which to explore mechanisms and processes central to organizational sustainability transformations. Institutional logics offer a unique perspective to investigate organizational change for sustainability because they provide a new approach to organizational change that incorporates macro structures, culture, and agency to explain how actions are enabled or constrained. It thus allows for insights into the complex and miscellaneous interplay of external and internal determinants that govern organizational transformation processes towards sustainability. By providing insights into institutional changes of practice and behaviors, an institutional logic perspective allows for a detailed analysis of organizational transformations. Within these change processes, IS have shown to be an efficient and pervasive tool to leverage sustainability by integrating human and technological factors. Since IS have become a key resource for the encouragement of organizational sustainability transformations, adopting an IS perspective allows for an understanding of mechanisms and processes that enable IS to foster sustainability in organizations. Thus, this dissertation draws on four studies by investigateing an institutional logic perspective as well as an IS perspective to explore organizational sustainability transformations and facilitate an in-depth understanding of organizational, human, and technological factors that encourage sustainability in organizational transformations.
In der wissenschaftlichen Literatur existieren zahlreiche Versuche, das Cloud-Computing-Ökosystem als rollenbasiertes Beschreibungsmodell abzubilden. Diese Modellvorschläge unterscheiden sich jedoch in Bezug auf ihre enthaltenen Konstrukte und Darstellungsform erheblich voneinander. Zudem wurden nur wenige dieser Modelle einer den wissenschaftlichen Standards genügenden Evaluation unterzogen. Demzufolge existiert gegenwärtig ein nur unzureichendes Wissen hinsichtlich der tatsächlichen Struktur und Zusammensetzung des Cloud-Computing-Ökosystems. Vor diesem Hintergrund besteht das erste Ziel dieser kumulativen Dissertation in der Analyse und Synthese der bisherigen Modellvorschläge sowie der anschließenden auf einer quantitativen Querschnittanalyse basierenden Evaluation und Finalisierung des daraus resultierenden, integrierenden Cloud-Computing-Ökosystemmodells im Hinblick auf Strukturäquivalenz und Vollständigkeit. Dieses Modell schafft die bislang fehlende, aber dringend benötigte Transparenz und stellt zugleich ein feingranulares und differenzierendes Kategorienschema für Organisationen des Cloud-Computing-Ökosystems dar, das zukünftige zielgerichtete Forschung ermöglicht. Das zweite Ziel dieser kumulativen Dissertation ist die Verwendung des Cloud-Computing-Ökosystemmodells zur Identifikation von dominanten Rollenclustern, isolierten und nicht-isolierten Rollen auf Basis eines erstellten umfangreichen Datensatzes bestehend aus 758 Unternehmen. Daneben wird das Modell zur feingranularen und zielgerichteten Ermittlung der erfolgswirksamen Geschäftsmodellcharakteristika der drei Kernrollen des Cloud-Computing-Ökosystems – IaaS-, PaaS- und SaaS-Anbieter – eingesetzt. Dazu werden zwei explorative multiple Fallstudien mit 21 beziehungsweise 19 erfolgreichen Unternehmen durchgeführt. Bei der Analyse der Geschäftsmodelle wird besonderes Augenmerk auf die Forschungslücke des Kampfs um Marktanteile zwischen den global agierenden Hyperscalern und der Vielzahl an regionalen Anbietern im IaaS-Segment gerichtet.
Nowadays, consumers are often required to disclose private data in various contexts such as while surfing the internet, downloading a mobile application, or engaging in a business relationship with a firm. Privacy-related decision-making research has so far mainly investigated data disclosure as a cognitive risk-benefit trade-off analysis. While this cognitive approach might be appropriate for situations where consumers have the opportunity for cognitive evaluations, there are many situations in the modern landscape where consumers cannot or do not want to engage in cognitive processing. Decision-making under stress or data disclosure to a business network of collaborating firms, for example, constitute challenges to purely cognitive decision-making approaches, calling for an extension of the established paradigm of cognitive privacy-related decision making. This dissertation advocates for the crucial role of affective processing in many modern data disclosure situations, where consumers do not engage in purely cognitive processing due to external hindrances or a lack of personal involvement in the data disclosure situation.
Durch den Einsatz immer größerer Containerschiffe zum Transport containerisierter Güter über den Seeweg gewinnt die Produktivität der zur Be- und Entladung der Containerschiffe eingesetzten Containerbrücken in Seehafencontainerterminals immer mehr an Bedeutung. Einen erheblichen Einfluss auf die Produktivität der Containerbrücken hat die Containerbrückeneinsatzplanung. Gegenstand dieser Arbeit ist das im Rahmen der Containerbrückeneinsatzplanung auftretende Container Sequencing Problem, welches hier erstmals unter Berücksichtigung von Ladelukendeckeln und Rehandlecontainern verschiedener Containerkategorien untersucht wird. Die Problemstellung wird als ganzzahliges lineares Optimierungsmodell formuliert. Zur Lösung des Problems werden verschiedene heuristische Verfahren vorgeschlagen. Deren Leistungsfähigkeit wird anhand numerischer Experimente analysiert.
Data is an important resource in our economy and society, substantially improving overall business efficiency, innovativeness and competitiveness, and shaping our everyday lives. Yet, to leverage the data's full potential, its access and availability is vital. Thus, data sharing across organizations is of particular importance. This thesis examines the role of data sharing in the digital economy and contributes to a better understanding why data sharing matters, why it is still underutilized, and how data sharing can be encouraged. Thereby, the thesis contributes to the ongoing academic debate as well as the practical and political efforts on how to promote data sharing.
The thesis is comprised of three studies. Study 1 examines personal data sharing among (competing) online services. Particularly, it investigates the consequences of Article 20 in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, May 2018), ensuring the right to data portability. This relatively new right allows online service users to transfer any personal data from one service provider to another. Focusing on a) the amount of data provided by users and b) the amount of user data disclosed to third party data brokers by service providers, the study investigates the right to data portability's effect on competitiveness and consumer surplus. Study 2 and Study 3 focus on non-personal data sharing among competing firms. Study 2 examines the literature to identify and classify barriers to non-personal, machine-generated data sharing. The study explains firms' reluctance to sharing data and discusses policy and managerial implications for overcoming the data sharing barriers. Study 3 focuses on data sharing via platforms. It investigates the Business-to-Business (B2B) data sharing platform design implications for promoting industrial data sharing. In particular, Study 3 investigates the dimensions control and transparency regarding their effect in eliciting cooperation and encouraging data sharing among firms.
In summary, this thesis examines and reveals how access and availability of data can be increased through creating beneficial data sharing conditions in B2B relationships. Particularly, the thesis contributes to the understanding of a) the implications of data sharing laws, defined in the GDPR for personal data and b) the challenges and measures of the not yet successfully established, non-personal data sharing.
Data is an important competitive resource in digital online markets. As a result, the access and availability of data can be the basis for a competitive advantage. This thesis analyzes the role and competitive effects of data in digital markets and contributes to an improved understanding of data as a (potential) basis for market power. Thereby, the thesis also contributes to the ongoing policy debate on how to safeguard a fair and open competitive environment for internet-based digital (i.e., online) services as well as traditional services.
In doing so, Study 1 surveys the literature and discusses (i) the challenges that are associated with assessing market power in digital markets, (ii) the challenges in creating a level playing field in digital markets, e.g., by harmonizing regulatory obligations for online and offline services, and (iii) the vital role of data and data protection in the context of data-driven business models. Study 2 and Study 3 focus on the competitive effects of transferring data between online competitors. The study on social logins (Study 2) highlights the strategic effects as well as welfare implications if competing online services deliberately and voluntarily decide to share user and usage data. Whereas Study 2 abstracts from the user’s decision how much data to provide to an online service, Study 3 focuses on the amount of data that firms require for their services and that is provided by users. In particular, Study 3 investigates the competitive and welfare effects of a new fundamental consumer right: The right to data portability. This right is part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which becomes effective in May 2018 for all online services available to users in the European Union and allows users to transfer their personal data from one online service to another (competing) online service (c.f., GDPR Article 20). In this context, the study examines the firms’ strategic reactions to the introduction of such a right and identifies the ensuing market outcomes as well as policy and managerial implications.
In conclusion, this doctoral thesis contributes to an improved understanding of (i) the competitive effects that arise from data as an economic good or valuable asset for digital services, and (ii) the aspects that may constitute market power in digital markets. Moreover, from a policy perspective, the thesis can be understood as a theoretically founded research project that (i) informs which market failures may arise in the context of digital (data-driven) markets and that (ii) highlights the peculiarities that need to be considered to define appropriate legal requirements in order to establish a level playing field between online services and traditional (established) services, but also between competing online services. Therefore, the thesis also contributes to the discussion on whether and how dominant online platforms should and can be regulated.
The described secondary data provide a comprehensive basis for modeling conditional mean nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentration levels across Germany. Besides concentration levels, meta data on monitoring sites from the German air quality monitoring network, geocoordinates, altitudes, and data on land use and road lengths for different types of roads are provided. The data are based on a grid of resolution 1 × 1 km, which is also included. The underlying raw data are open access and were retrieved from different sources. The statistical software R was used for (pre-)processing the data and all codes are provided in an online repository. The data were employed for modeling mean annual NO2 concentration levels in the paper "Agglomeration and infrastructure effects in land use regression models for air pollution - Specification, estimation, and interpretations" by Fritsch and Behm (2021).