TY  - BOOK
AU  - Boudreau,Kevin J.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Amateurs Crowds & Professional Entrepreneurs as Platform Complementors
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2018///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - April 2018; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w24512
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w24512
ER  -