From Hierarchies to Markets: Placing Platform-Based Governance Forms Into The Governance Space

We create a taxonomy of platform-based governance forms and show how they alter our understanding of traditional hierarchies and markets. Specifically, we place these new hybrid forms into the governance space and discuss how the emergence of some of these forms brings market features inside the firm. Our theoretical examination also points out a “reverse evolution” among platform-based governance forms, where platform participants remove the platform-providing firm from the ecosystem and split ownership and control rights among themselves. Finally, we provide an examination of factors yielding the emergence of platform-based governance forms.