Publications

We regularly publish our research in the leading business journals. Here you will find an overview of our journal publications. A complete list of publications can be found here.

Estimating career benefits from online community leadership: Evidence from stack exchange moderators

Förderer, J. und Burtch, G. (2024). Management Science, 71, 1–24.

Many IT professionals seek to improve their job prospects by engaging as leaders of online communities, for example, by serving as a moderator or admin. We investigate whether such community leadership leads to (causal) improvements in individuals’ careers. We assemble a data set, including job histories of IT professionals who have sought election as moderators (mods) in Stack Exchange question-and-answer communities, between 2010 and 2020. We estimate the career benefits of moderatorship under two complementary identification strategies: difference-in-differences (DID) and regression discontinuity (RD). We observe qualitatively consistent results under each design, finding that election to a moderator role has a significant, causal, positive effect on job mobility. We estimate that moderatorship increases the probability of a job change by between 4.7 and 12.3 percentage points over the two years following the election. We also report a series of secondary analyses that speak to associated salary increases and show evidence consistent with the notion that social capital and signaling play a role. Our findings help us understand the benefits of online community leadership, and they extend our understanding of the motivations for online community engagement.

Ban targeted advertising? An empirical investigation of the consequences for app development

Kircher, T. und Förderer, J. (2024). Management Science, 70, 1070-1092.

On many multisided app platforms, the supply-side monetizes their work with targeted advertising. The targeting of ads has raised concerns over user privacy and has led to calls for platform firms and regulators to bar this practice. Important for this debate is to understand the consequences that a ban on targeted advertising would have for app development. To inform, we exploit that Google, in 2019, banned targeted advertising in Android children’s games. This setting represents an ideal real-world laboratory and permits a quasi-experimental research design. Our overall finding is that the ban on targeted advertising caused substantial app abandonment. The ban reduced the release of feature updates, particularly for games of young, undiversified, and advertisement-dependent firms. Only games of exceptionally high quality and demand showed an increase in development. Corroborating this picture, affected games were more likely to be delisted. Developers shifted their efforts toward their unaffected games and released fewer new games on average. Further tests substantiate that targeted advertising represented a crucial form of monetization for affected games and that the ban obliterated ad revenues used for app development. Our findings have several implications. To avoid a loss in app innovation, platform firms should consider implementing measures to reduce the burden on developers, especially by creating alternative monetization opportunities. Consumers and policymakers should be aware that targeted advertising plays a crucial role for app development and can use our estimates for designing policies. Thus, consumers’ demand for privacy can conflict with platform firms’ goal to foster app innovation.

How deadline orientation and architectural modularity influence software quality and job satisfaction

Kude, T., Förderer, J., Mithas, S. und Heinzl, A. (2023). Journal of Operations Management, 69, 941–964.

The implementation of digital transformation programs requires careful allocation of software developers to a variety of digital products and services with different levels of modularity. This paper investigates how deadline orientation (an individual-level preference of developers for completing work close to deadlines) and architectural modularity (a characteristic of products) influence central outcomes in software development. We argue that architectural modularity positively interacts with deadline orientation to influence software quality and the job satisfaction of developers. Our empirical analyses, using rare and high-quality data from 131 software developers and 29 product owners working at a captive software development center in India of a leading global software firm, confirm our hypotheses. We contribute to the literature on software development by showing that the fit between the technological characteristics of the software product (i.e., architectural modularity) and people factors (i.e., the temporal work style preferences of developers) plays an important role in shaping both software quality and job satisfaction. Our study has wider implications for the literature on software development, temporal work styles, and architectural modularity. It is instructive for practitioners tasked with hiring or allocating software developers for software products with varying technological characteristics in their digital transformation efforts.

Data breach announcements and stock market reactions: A matter of timing?

Förderer, J. und Schütz, S. W. (2022). Management Science, 68, 7298-7322.

Although firms’ announcement of data breaches can lead to reputational or operational damages, extant research suggests that stock markets are relatively unresponsive to such announcements. We investigate whether markets’ unresponsiveness can be explained by firms strategically timing the announcement to coincide with busy days in the media, thereby reducing attention and, ultimately, attenuating market reactions. We leverage novel data on data breach announcements in the United States between 2008 and 2018 and create a measure of busyness in the trade press—news pressure—based on the Wall Street Journal. To investigate, we conduct two complementary studies. In Study 1, we employ an instrumental variable approach to assess whether announcements coincide with days of predictably high news pressure. We find that this is the case. On days with a one-standard-deviation-higher predictable news pressure, 4.44% more data breaches are announced (or approximately 19.024 data records). Strategic timing is more prevalent for breaches that are severe, that have firm-internal causes, and that leak healthcare data or credentials. In Study 2, we utilize a stock market event study to assess market reactions conditional on news pressure on the announcement day. We find that data breach announcements are associated with negative market reactions, yet these are attenuated by higher news pressure on the announcement day. If news pressure is on its empirical mean (respectively, one standard deviation above), we estimate a median decline in market capitalization of $347 (respectively, $85) million. We conclude that firms’ strategic timing might explain inconsistent findings in prior work.

Qualitätssicherung in Digitalen Plattform-Ökosystemen: Implementierung von Kontrollsystemen am Beispiel von Apple iOS

Lindenmayr, M. und Foerderer, J. (2022). HMD : Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, 59, 1312-1322.

To evolve in a highly competitive environment and to realize network effects, mobile apps platforms increasingly integrate third-party app developers. This allows platform providers to increase the value generated for consumers. At the same time, platform providers lose the full control of the platform and quality deficiencies in the form of inferior or defective apps appear. This makes mechanisms for quality control necessary. Platform providers implement control systems that determine the scope of interaction within the platform ecosystem. They enforce the rules by the use of controls and penalties. This paper describes the process of implementing quality control on mobile apps platforms. Using the example of Apple iOS, the measures are evaluated. The findings can be used by other platform providers to ensure a high quality of their digital platforms.

And the winner is …? The desirable and undesirable effects of platform awards

Förderer, J., Lüker, N. und Heinzl, A. (2021). Information Systems Research : ISR, 32, 1155-1172.

We study platform firms’ decision to recognize innovation by complementors ex post through awards. Despite being purely symbolic, awards might set incentives for complementors’ product strategies that can eventually lead to both desirable and undesirable outcomes for the platform firm. We depart from signaling theory and derive hypotheses on the effects of awards on complementors’ product strategies. To test them, we implement a quasi-experiment in the context of the Google Android mobile platform and the prestigious Google Play Award. We infer the effect of the award by estimating the difference-in-differences between award winners and runners-up, before and after the conferral. The main sample encompasses 125 award nominees and their 793 apps between 2016 and 2018. We report three findings. First, the award encourages recipients to focus on releasing complement improvements rather than new complements. Second, the award increases recipients’ likelihood of multihoming. Finally, the award increases new complement releases in the recipients’ market niche by attracting other complementors. We contribute to the platform governance literature by informing about the effects of awards. Additionally, our findings have theoretical implications for understanding “soft” platform governance mechanisms.

Interfirm exchange and innovation in platform ecosystems: evidence from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference

Förderer, J. (2020). Management Science, 66, 4772-4787.

Platform firms’ success depends on complementary innovation. This paper studies the relation between opportunities for interfirm exchange and complementary innovation. An empirical study of a sample of app developer firms attending Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference suggests three findings. First, the opportunity to exchange stimulated innovation in the form of major app updates that received positive consumer feedback. Second, the effects were more pronounced for older and larger firms, potentially because these firms have more experience and resources to leverage exchanges and safeguard against knowledge spillovers. Third, part of the effects may be attributed to learning and collaborations.

Knowledge boundaries in enterprise software platform development: Antecedents and consequences for platform governance

Förderer, J., Kude, T., Schütz, S.W., Heinzl, A. (2019). Information Systems Journal, 29, 119–144.

The widespread uptake of platform strategies turns many vendors of enterprise software into curators of an ecosystem of firms that collaboratively develop and commercialize a shared technology. As a platform owner's effectiveness in integrating knowledge across ecosystem participants will distinguish it from its competitors, we investigate the management of development-related knowledge across firm boundaries. Our exploratory, multiple-case study of 4 platforms illustrates how “knowledge boundaries” emerge between platform owners and complementors. We observe that knowledge boundaries are influenced by a platform's functional extent, interface design, and evolutionary dynamics, which create differences, dependencies, and novelty of development knowledge, resulting in qualitatively distinct types of knowledge boundaries. To overcome knowledge boundaries, platform owners provide various resources at the boundary, including information portals, documentation, helpdesks, and alignment workshops. We observe that in shaping these resources, platform owners face a trade-off between providing knowledge at the right scope, while allowing for the scalability of knowledge resources for the entire ecosystem. Depending on their scope and scale, we classify knowledge boundary resources as broadcasting, brokering, and bridging, each representing qualitatively distinct patterns in managing knowledge in platform ecosystems. We conclude with implications for researchers and managers.

Does platform owner’s entry crowd out innovation? Evidence from Google photos

Förderer, J., Kude, T., Mithas, S., Heinzl, A. (2018). nformation Systems Research : ISR, 29, 444–260.

We study how platform owners’ decision to enter complementary markets affects innovation in the ecosystem surrounding the platform. Despite heated debates on the behavior of platform owners toward complementors, relatively little is known about the mechanisms linking platform owners’ entry and complementary innovation. We exploit Google’s 2015 entry into the market for photography apps on its own Android platform as a quasi-experiment. We conclude based on our analyses of a time-series panel of 6,620 apps that Google’s entry was associated with a substantial increase in complementary innovation. We estimate that the entry caused a 9.6% increase in the likelihood of major updates for apps affected by Google’s entry, compared to similar but not affected apps. Further analyses suggest that Google’s entry triggered complementary innovation because of the increased consumer attention for photography apps, instead of competitive “racing” or “Red Queen” effects. This attention spillover effect was particularly pronounced for larger and more diversified complementors. The study advances our understanding of the effects of platform owner’s entry, explicates the complex mechanisms that shape complementary innovation, and adds empirical evidence to the debate on regulating platforms.