Modeling Platform Ecosystems

Platforms facilitate the creation of complementary modules by third parties and act as intermediaries between different groups of actors. Due to the high degree of collaboration between actors, ecosystems evolve around such platforms. As a result of digitalization, platform business models are becoming viable in more and more domains. Despite the increasing variety of different platform ecosystems, means to clearly specify them are scarce. This conceptual ambiguity impedes comparability of research and knowledge accumulation. To solve this problem, we propose a domain-specific platform ecosystems modeling language (PEML) which builds on seminal platform ecosystem literature. We demonstrate PEML by modeling two real-life platform ecosystems based on online case studies. Our results support researchers and practitioners alike in clearly specifying platform ecosystems.

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