Coopetition in the platform economy from ethical and firm performance perspectives

Abstract

The platform economy facilitates a model of sharing economy, where competition and cooperation among the competitive firms are very common. Nevertheless, there are very few studies to date which investigate how competition and cooperation influence firms’ ethical dilemmas, and how these in turn affect performance outcomes. As such, there is a lack of understanding of the outcomes of platform-based sharing economy from conflict management and firm performance perspectives. Thus, the aim of this study is to examine the coopetition in platform economy from ethical and firm performance perspectives. Building on literature from the relational view and resource-based view, we perform an empirical analysis on a dataset of 328 Indian platform-based firms. The study finds that there is a significant impact of coopetition in platform-based sharing economy which creates conflicts and increases the firms’ ethical dilemma that eventually decreases the performance of firms.