Boudreau, Kevin J. <br/><br/>
Amateurs Crowds & Professional Entrepreneurs as Platform Complementors / 
Kevin J. Boudreau. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  2018. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w24512 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w24512. .
<br/><br/> April 2018. 
<br/><br/> Platforms often have "crowds" of amateurs working on them as complementors, in other cases professional entrepreneurs--or both. What can a platform owner do to implement these outcomes? I document evidence on mobile app developers showing that just small, incremental changes in platform design--related to the bare minimum costs required to build an app and factors affecting non-pecuniary payoffs--can lead the "bottom-to-fall-out" of the market to amateurs. Where the bottom-falls-out, there is a flood of lowest-quality developers who nonetheless are long-lived on the platform and engage in relatively high development activity. I find no evidence that amateurs crowd-out development activity of top developers in this context. Moreover, the bottom-falling-out is associated with the generation of significantly greater numbers of highest-quality products. I discuss several interpretations. 
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