Time: 2019-7-8 (Monday) 10:00 am

　　Location: Main Building 317

　　Speaker: Assistant Professor Zhao Xia, University of Georgia

　　Title: Platform Compatibility and Developer Multihoming

　　Introduction:

　　The competition between technological platforms often evolves around the ecosystems of the platforms. A platform makes itself compatible with other platforms in order to attract more developers on board and provide a larger number and variety of apps to users. This study investigates how a platform’s compatibility strategy impacts the developers’ multihoming decisions, exclusive app contribution decisions and performance using a large data set collected from the app stores of the two largest web browsers, Chrome and Firefox. The results show that after Firefox introduced a platform compatible strategy, a larger number of developers with a small user base on their primary platform (Chrome) multihome to Firefox. The platform compatibility strategy also encourages multihoming developers with a small user base on Firefox to develop exclusive apps for Firefox, and weakens the negative effect of market competition on exclusive app development. Moreover, we find that platform compatibility strengthens the positive relationship between multihoming developers’ app performance across platforms and the moderating effect is weaker for exclusive apps.

　　Speaker profile:

　　Professor Zhao Xia is currently assistant professor of the University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree from Tsinghua University.Professor Zhao Xia's main research interests include e-commerce, online market, IT strategy, and e-health. He has published several papers in top international journals such as Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, and Journal of Management Information Systems.