Platform-based competition has fundamentally transformed competitive dynamics in digital markets by shifting the locus of rivalry from firm-level products to multi-sided ecosystems sustained by network effects and orchestrated participation. This integrative review synthesizes theoretical and empirical insights from peer-reviewed scholarship to examine how digital marketplaces, network externalities, and ecosystem strategies reshape value creation, competitive advantage, and strategic positioning. Early foundations in two-sided market theory established the centrality of cross-side and same-side network effects in driving platform scale and winner-take-most outcomes. Subsequent scholarship advanced understanding of platform envelopment, multihoming, complementor dynamics, and governance tensions between openness and control. The review identifies persistent strategic paradoxes: platforms must simultaneously encourage generativity to fuel innovation while safeguarding value appropriation and architectural integrity. By organizing the literature into a conceptual synthesis, the paper illuminates the interdependent layers through which platform leaders coordinate users and complementors, navigate openness-control trade-offs, and evolve in response to competitive feedback. Contributions include bridging fragmented perspectives across strategy, information systems, and economics, highlighting the temporal evolution from network effects to ecosystem orchestration, and delineating future research directions for platform evolution amid rapid technological change and regulatory scrutiny. The analysis underscores that sustainable competitive advantage in platform markets derives less from proprietary assets than from dynamic capabilities in governance, orchestration, and adaptive ecosystem design.
Platform-based business models have become central to digital competition because they reorganise how firms create, coordinate, and appropriate value across multi-sided ecosystems. Unlike traditional pipeline models, platforms depend on interactions among users, complementors, developers, advertisers, and other external actors. This shift has made platform competitiveness a strategic phenomenon that cannot be explained only by internal resources or product-market positioning. This systematic review examines how platform-based business models generate and sustain firm competitiveness through three interrelated mechanisms: network effects, ecosystem governance, and value capture. The objective is to synthesise fragmented evidence from strategy, information systems, innovation, and management research. The review focuses on how these mechanisms operate individually and how their interaction shapes platform performance and durability. The findings show that platform competitiveness is supported by architectural design, multi-sided participation, network effects, ecosystem orchestration, and monetization choices. However, the evidence also reveals tensions between openness and control, growth and quality, value creation and value capture, and network expansion and strategic vulnerability. Five tables summarise the review method, platform typology, network effects, governance mechanisms, and value capture models. The review concludes that platform competitiveness should be understood as a dynamic system rather than as the automatic result of scale. Network effects require governance, governance shapes value capture, and value capture can either strengthen or weaken ecosystem health. Future research should therefore examine platform success and failure through longitudinal, comparative, and context-sensitive designs.
Institute for Management, Business, and Accounting Studies