Inconsistent platform governance and social contagion of misconduct in digital ecosystems: A complementors perspective

Abstract

This study investigates how complementors' experiences of platform governance impact their compliance behaviour in digital ecosystems. In an inductive qualitative study of Amazon Marketplace, we find that Amazon sellers engage in behaviours ranging from full compliance to repeated infringement. Sellers also report experiencing sustained discrepancies between the platform's declared practices, which ostensibly support sellers' interests, and its undeclared practices, which appear not to. Additionally, we find evidence that the sellers' experience of this inconsistent platform governance can trigger social contagion of misconduct. We develop a process model that elucidates the mechanisms of this social contagion: when complementors observe the platform to be an unreliable enforcer of its own rules and notice that cheating complementors seem to go unpunished and prosper, it erodes their trust in the platform, which leads some of them to legitimize misconduct as a defense against unfair competition under what they perceive to be the indifferent eye of the platform authority. In our discussion, we develop three contributions: (1) We theorise the observed inconsistent platform governance and suggest that it may be an endemic feature of platform behaviour caused by tensions between the platform's conflicting objectives. (2) We enrich the platform strategy literature by expanding our understanding of how complementors experience platform power. (3) We clarify how the study validates and extends theories of social contagion. We conclude with a discussion of the study's limitations, avenues for future research, and policy implications.