Developing an Instrument to Measure Perceived Input Control on Online Platforms from the App Developer Perspective

Over the last decade, applications of third-party app developers have increasingly become the cornerstone of software platform ecosystems’ success and sustainability. Given their importance, the procedures and practices used on platforms to screen and sort out applications are crucial means to regulate their influx. Although traditional control mechanisms applied on software-based platforms have been widely studied in Information Systems (IS) research, there is still a lack of research on input control and how it is conceptualized and measured from an app developer perspective. In this researchin-progress paper, we present the initial stages of a scale development process and present an initial construct to measure perceived input control from an application developers’ perspective. We accomplish this by first providing a structured literature review across the leading IS and management journals and conference papers. Based on this review and subsequent open-ended expert interviews, we developed a preliminary measurement instrument that not only captures app developers’ overall perceptions of input control across different platform contexts, but also breaks these perceptions down into distinct input control factors. The results of our study are expected to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of input control in general and platform-specific input control mechanisms in particular.