How platform owner entry affects open source contribution? Evidence from GitHub developers

Publication Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

12-2025

Abstract

This study examines how platform owner entry reshapes complementor innovation by reconfiguring crowd developers’ incentives to contribute to complementors’ open source technologies. Exploiting AWS’s phased introduction of a competing service built upon Elasticsearch—a commercial open source software provided by its complementor Elastic—as a natural experiment, our staggered difference-in-differences analysis reveals that platform owner entry reduces contributions from existing contributors, while increasing both the extensive and intensive margins of contributions from new contributors, resulting in net contribution growth. Further analysis shows that this replacement effect introduces qualitative shifts in the contributor base, thereby altering the characteristics of contributions. Overall, our findings reveal previously overlooked ecosystem-wide consequences of platform owner entry and identify it as an important contextual factor shaping open source contributor motivations.

Keywords

Platform owner entry, open source complementors, external contributors, contributor incentives, staggered difference-in-differences

Discipline

Strategic Management Policy

Research Areas

Strategy and Organisation

Publication

Wharton 5th Corporate Strategy and Innovation Conference, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2025 December 4

City or Country

Philadelphia

Comments

This paper was also presented at the Strategic Management Society Annual Conference (Istanbul, October 2024), Academy of Management Annual Meeting (Chicago, August 2024), Platform Strategy Research Symposium 2024 (Boston, July 2024), and the 30th Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation (St Gallen, June 2023)

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