“Let Them Guide, but not Decide!” Platform Governance Power Asymmetry and Complementor Participation

Power asymmetries in platform governance create value appropriation uncertainties for complementors, eventually reducing their contributions to the ecosystem. Appropriate open governance structures should address these uncertainties by balancing governance power. However, in such structures still single actors can unilaterally dominate governance decision-making. Therefore, we aim to analyze the influence of different degrees of power concentration in governance decisions on the participation intensity of complementors. We use a new panel data set located in the web3. We observe 18 Decentralized Autonomous Organizations between July 2020 and April 2024, resulting in 4714 contribution observations. Conducting Poisson regression analyses, we can show an inverted-U-shaped relationship between governance power concentration and complementor’s participation intensity. We further show that the extent of IP license permissions is an important moderator of this relationship. Interestingly, the inverted U-shape flips as restrictions increase. Our study makes valuable contributions to the literature on the design of open platform governance and its implications for the viability of platform ecosystems. We further provide empirical evidence for complementor’s preferences regarding dynamic tensions of power dependency relationships in platform ecosystems.