The Antecedents of Transaction Costs in Digital Ecosystems: A Configurational View on the Interplay of App Architecture and Platform Governance

The locus of value creation and innovation in the software industry is shifting more and more to platform ecosystems on which numerous developers create extensions with additional functionalities based on the platforms core architecture. While such complementors may strongly profit from platforms, there are considerable costs. Recent studies therefore examined the costs of fitting apps to the specifications of certain platforms; however, these works largely neglect costs arising from the transactional relationship between platform and complementor. In order to shed light on this, our work examines how design choices of platform governance and app architecture impact the emergence of four types of cost-inducing hazards within the transactional context of the ecosystem. By using a configurational approach based on fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (FsQCA), we display complex interactional effects of the causal conditions on complementors’ perception of hazardous environments and thus provide valuable insights for both practice and theory on platform ecosystems.