Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Email: philip. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4. How do organizations in a sector where powerful platforms have emerged cope with the new constraints and opportunities that platforms induce? A growing number of studies highlight the power of digital platforms to re-organize markets and thereby create new forms of dependence.
But there are also indications that organizations are capable of countering platform power especially by demanding their regulation. This paper expands this view to investigate also strategies at the organizational level. It draws on the algorithmic game studies of strategic responses to environmental changes to study how organizations strategically respond to the rise of digital platforms.
We distinguish between three types of hotels—small family-run, luxury, and chain hotels, and identify three types of strategic responses: bypassing, optimizing, and mitigating. Finally, we find that hotels with fewer resources small family-run hotels are less equipped to counter platform power, suggesting that platforms risk fostering existing hierarchies and segmentation in markets.
Over the past decade, digital platforms have emerged in many sectors and tend to disrupt existing markets. As a new form of economic organization Kenney and Zysman, , platforms create new market hierarchies and control market transactions.
Platforms re-organize markets Ahrne et al. There are indications that platforms are not as powerful as to single-handedly drive organizational change without being contested. So far, this question has been addressed in the realm of gig workers Vallas and Schor, : Do platforms similarly affect all types of organizations? To answer these questions, we propose a qualitative study of the hotel industry in Switzerland. Functioning as new intermediaries Bessy and Chauvin, , these platforms have supplanted traditional booking methods for a large part of customers.
