Milan Miric

Unpaid individuals are an important source of contributions to many ecosystems. An understudied phenomenon is how such contributions are shaped by competition. In this paper, we study how the rate and type of new product creation are shaped by competition. We contrast its impact on “paid” developers that profit by selling their products to that on “unpaid” developers that release their software for free. Using a hand-collected dataset on the jailbreak ecosystem, we find that increasing competition has a stronger negative effect on the rate of innovation by paid developers than that of unpaid developers. We also find that increasing competition is associated with a reduction in the reuse of existing technological components by unpaid developers, relative to paid developers, suggesting that the types of products developed also shift as competition increases. The results suggest that competition has an important role in shaping innovation in platform-based ecosystems, but that it differs for paid and unpaid contributors.

Freemium strategies (offering both a free and paid version) are a commonly used approach to sell digital goods. Academic research into freemium strategies is distributed across disciplines, and each study typically focuses on a single type of freemium strategy within a specific context. This chapter provides a review of the literature on freemium strategies, highlighting the central insights across these studies. The goal of this review is to provide a resource that researchers can use to gain an overview of research into this topic. We then discuss areas where there are opportunities for further exploration, and where the anecdotes that are often used to discuss freemium strategies and the reality of the academic literature do not align. We conclude by highlighting areas for future research into this domain.

This article studies how the entry of an imitative product influences the demand for the original, in markets with a large number of products where consumers are not aware of most products. We suggest that the release of an imitative product triggers two countervailing forces: a discovery effect that increases awareness and demand for the original, and a substitution effect decreasing that demand. When the imitation is horizontally differentiated, the substitution effect is weaker, and the discovery effect leads to increased demand for the original, particularly so when the original is less well-known. However, when the imitation is vertically differentiated, the discovery effect does not benefit the original, and the demand decreases given the substitution effect. We test our theory in the context of 3D-printable products.

In platform ecosystems, the creation of new products is often based on standardized development tools. Complementors often have a choice between either using these tools or creating the functionality themselves. In this paper, we study how the use of standardized development tools is related to the type of products created. By using data on the use of middleware (e.g., game engines) in the console video game market, we show that the use of development tools is associated with products that are less novel but with higher sales on average. We exploit a policy change that affected the ability of U.S.-based developers to hire foreign workers as an instrument for the use of development tools and find further support for these patterns.

This study investigates the gender gap in entrepreneurship in the technology industry. Digitization has created vast economic opportunities in the technology sector and has lowered many barriers to entry, thus reducing traditional frictions regarding entrepreneurship and potentially increasing opportunities for female founders. However, anecdotal evidence has suggested that female technology founders are rare and that women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics roles. Based on individual career histories collected from more than 42 million U.S.-based LinkedIn profiles, including more than 1.3 million founders, we explore whether there are higher rates of female founders in technology companies relative to other industries. Our analysis revealed the following: (1) Females were only half as likely as males to found businesses in the technology industry. (2) Females were less likely to found successive businesses (i.e., serial founders), which was even more pronounced in the technology industry. (3) When we used the gender gap in labor force participation as a baseline, the gender gap in technology entrepreneurship was particularly large, even compared with other male-dominated industries (e.g., construction). (4) The gender gap in technology entrepreneurship was driven by lower rates of entrepreneurship by females in lower positions in the organizational hierarchy. In contrast, females who reached the C-suite in technology sectors were 16% more likely to found firms compared with their female C-suite counterparts in nontechnology industries. Combined, the results provide a nuanced view of the gender gap in entrepreneurship.