Abstract
The markets of mobile applications (aka apps) have grown into an unprecedented socio-economic phenomenon in the digital economy. It has fundamentally changed the ways mobile app platforms interact with complementors from a lock-in to an open logic. Yet it is unclear how firms can leverage on give-away assets where openness has not only weakened the traditional appropriability regimes but also introduced a degree uncertainty of which direction innovation will take. This paper extends the notion of agencements from Callon’s anthropology of markets to account for the creation and operations of the apps markets. We conceptualise the apps markets as collectives of socio-technical agencements through which newness is introduced to reconfigure the on-going surrounds and exchanges for platforms and complementors. We test our model using a panel dataset of the ways apps are created using multiple platforms between 2005 and 2011. The empirical findings show 90% of newness comes from 12.4% of the complementors, and is unevenly distributed and concentrated on the top 20 most popular platforms. Platforms, which belong to these new socio-technical agencements, further attract new complementors to join
Published Version
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