Data-driven digital platforms have become a key organisational form, with vast economic interest and impact in contemporary societies.
Digital platforms – and, arguably, the underlying data-driven platform logic that they make part of – are having considerable impact on most levels of our daily lives, addressing both public and private sectors and either disrupting or integrating with various markets.
This calls for more scrutiny of the consequences of digital platform economies and what we in this report call platformisation, in particular as a component of the conditions for innovation and economic welfare. One key example is the relationship between global, large-scale tech companies and more traditional incumbents on various markets – or, for that matter, the relationship between said platform corporations and smaller, emerging startups that partially rely on the platform-based infrastructures controlled by these gargantuan platform corporations. Moreover, geopolitical and jurisdictional dependencies abound – for example the different policy landscapes in USA and the EU.
This brief anthology was intended to complement the publication of the Swedish anthology on platformisation, Plattformssamhället, that I edited together with Stefan Larsson, during the same year.
Larsson, S. & J. Andersson Schwarz (2018). Developing Platform Economies: A European policy landscape. Brussels: European Liberal Forum. ISBN 978-91-87379-51-2.
