PhD defence I.F. (Ioannis) Kanellopoulos

Brief summary of the doctoral thesis:

Online platforms are digital environments that serve as intermediaries in people’s pursuit of goods or connections with other people. Through online platforms, people can remotely fulfill their needs by accessing a wider portfolio of goods or people than they would in an offline setting. As a result, the presence of online platforms has become an attractive area for investment opportunity, growing remarkably over the last two decades with online platforms now operating in numerous areas such as product purchases, entertainment, job seeking, and dating. The evolving field, growing competition, and increasing understanding of user needs warrant the attention of platform owners who need to continuously monitor for both external and internal platform challenges and adapt their strategies accordingly. Naturally, the area of platform strategy has attracted considerable interest from researchers from different fields such as economics, marketing, organizational strategy, and information systems, who study platforms and how they can adapt to the challenges they face. Nevertheless, new challenges emerge either due to emerging competitive platforms that are based on new technology or due to the existing platforms’ better understanding of the environment in which they operate and inefficiencies within it. In this dissertation, we contribute to these dynamic relationships by studying three of these challenges.