Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Moore School of Business

First Advisor

Necati Tereyağoğlu

Second Advisor

Sriram Venkataraman

Abstract

Online platforms inhabit every corner of daily life, from social media, to medicine, to retail, and everything in between. Platform owners are met with a litany of challenges as they seek to maximize the platform's value and implement novel strategies to foster widespread adoption. This dissertation focuses on empirically assessing the impact of online platforms in both sustainability and service operations contexts. In the first chapter, we examine the impact of introducing an agricultural advisory platform on smallholder farmer potato production in a single district in Rural India. We find positive impacts to overall production, and we explore the mechanism behind this decision. We show that one key strategic input changed after the platform's introduction: the area of land allocated to potato farming. We do not find significant changes in fertilizer usage or irrigated area, which provides evidence that online platforms focused on agriculture can provide production benefits without sacrificing on sustainability efforts. The second chapter of this dissertation quasi-experimentally studies the cross-platform spillover effects caused by a platform's giveaway promotion. We collect an extensive video game player traffic dataset for the Steam gaming platform, and we show that traffic increases by more than 24% for games that are given away by Steam's competitor. We explore the temporal dynamics of these giveaways, and we also find that word-of-mouth significantly increases during the giveaway promotions. We find that Steam review activity for the affected games is significantly increasing, and we find that spillover effects are larger when games make use of Steam's unique features that are inaccessible on the competing platform. The third, and final chapter builds on the findings of the second chapter. We design an incentive-compatible online experiment to elicit consuemrs' individual valuation of extra platform features.

Rights

© 2025, Timothy Campbell Clarkson

Download

Included in

Business Commons

Share

COinS