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The proliferation of industry platforms has disrupted several industries. Firms adopting a platform business model have experienced a substantial expansion in size and scale, positioning themselves as the foremost valuable entities in market capitalization. Over the past two decades, there has been a substantial expansion in the body of literature dedicated to platforms, and different streams of research have emerged. Despite considerable efforts and the significant progress made in recent years toward a comprehensive understanding of industry platforms, there is still room for further harnessing the field’s diversity. As a result, the aim of this article is to examine the field’s structure, identify research concerns and provide suggestions for future research, thereby enhancing the overall understanding of industry platforms.

We conducted a thorough examination of 458 articles on the topic using bibliometric methods and systematic review techniques.

Through co-citation analysis, we identified five distinct clusters rooted in various bodies of literature: two-sided markets, industry platforms, digital platforms, innovation platforms and two-sided networks. Furthermore, the examination of these five clusters has revealed three key areas that demand further consideration: (1) terminologies, (2) classifications and (3) perspectives.

While previous reviews have provided valuable insights into the topic of industry platforms, none have explored the structure of the field so far. Consequently, as a first step toward advancing the field, we uncover the structure of the literature, identifying three major areas of concern. By addressing these concerns, our goal is to converge different clusters, thereby harnessing the diversity in the field and enhancing the overall understanding of industry platforms.

The dynamic and evolving nature of the market calls for attention to digital platform firms' survival strategies, building agility for persistence in a continuously changing business environment. In India, the government’s adoption of the Digital Policy is one such change in the business environment for the firms that impact almost all sectors. Such policies cause a disruption wherein digital platform firms must be agile and create a strategic response that will endure any changes. The present study attempts to gain insight into the competitive strategies adopted by the digital platform firms of the consumer durables industry in India, which are implemented to facilitate their growth.

The entire study is conducted in two phases. Phase one includes identifying strategies sampled digital platform firms adopted in response to the digitalization policy, and the second phase evaluates the significance of the adopted plans to persist.

While clubbing the 42 strategic responses to a few aggregate dimensions, the study found four types of responses adopted by the digital platform firms in the consumer durable industry to persist in the market. Using a two-step system, the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) approach, the study found that all four dimensions are statistically significant, positively impacting these firms' profitability.

The study contributes to the knowledge base of strategic responses to persist for the incumbent platform firms in a dynamic business environment.

The study answers the pertinent research question of how such strategic decisions may be informed in favor of profitability.

Remote working has brought forward many challenges for employees as the phenomenon is still new for most employees across the globe. Some of these challenges may be addressed by the recent adoption of digital technologies by organizations. In this vein, our study explores the impact of digital platform capability on the creativity of employees through the mediating mechanism of explicit and tacit knowledge sharing.

The data were gathered from higher education institutes (HEIs) in a developing country, Pakistan which recently saw a major disruption during the Covid-19 pandemic. The proposed hypotheses were tested through Structural Equational Modeling (SEM) and the results confirmed our hypotheses.

The findings confirmed that the digital platform capabilities impact both tacit and explicit knowledge sharing among these remote employees. Likewise, the results also supported the mediating role of both explicit and tacit knowledge sharing on the creativity of these remote workers.

Our results are significant as they confirm the impact of digitalization on remote workers’ creativity predisposition. We thus advance the academic debate on the problems of knowledge sharing in remote working. We prove that digital capabilities outweigh the challenges created due to new forms of work driven by the pandemic. It further highlights the important areas to focus on while planning human resource policies in the new normal.

Operational risks can cause considerable, atypical disturbances and impact food supply chain (SC) resilience. Indicatively, the COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions in the UK food services as nationwide stockouts led to unprecedented discrepancies between retail and home-delivery supply capacity and demand. To this effect, this study aims to examine the emergence of digital platforms as an innovative instrument for food SC resilience in severe market disruptions.

An interpretive multiple case-study approach was used to unravel how different generations of e-commerce food service providers, i.e. established and emergent, responded to the need for more resilient operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SC disruption management for high-impact low-frequency events requires analysing four research elements: platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency. Established e-commerce food operators use partner onboarding and local waste valorisation to enhance resilience. Instead, emergent e-commerce food providers leverage localised rapid upscaling and product personalisation.

Digital food platforms offer a highly customisable, multisided digital marketplace wherein platform members may aggregate product offerings and customers, thus sharing value throughout the network. Platform-induced disintermediation allows bidirectional flows of data and information among SC partners, ensuring compliance and safety in the food retail sector.

The study contributes to the SC configuration and resilience literature by investigating the interrelationship among platformisation, structural variety, process flexibility and system resource efficiency for safe and resilient food provision within exogenously disrupted environments.

This study aims to explore the human resource management (HRM) practices related to training and feedback in the app work industry, specifically in online food delivery service, and investigate the emotional and behavioral responses of gig workers.

This study adopts a qualitative approach by interviewing 19 gig workers from six food delivery firms operating in different countries.

The results show limited training and feedback opportunities are provided to app workers, although the complexity of training and delivery methods differ across platforms. To address this shortage, app workers developed response strategies relying on social interaction.

This study adds to the research on HRM practices in the gig economy by portraying the way in which training and feedback unfold in the food delivery app ecosystem and by disclosing the gig workers’ emotional and behavioral responses to it.

This study shows that the way training activities are currently designed may provide little value to the ecosystem and are likely to produce negative emotional responses in gig workers. Thus, platform providers may make use of these findings by introducing more transparent feedback and social learning opportunities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first empirical studies on online delivery gig workers addressing specific HRM practices. It reveals significant insights for training and feedback, suggesting app economy characteristics strongly affect training and feedback practices for app workers.

Drawing from the resource-based view (RBV), this study aims to develop a parsimonious model in the context of digital platforms that links strategic network resources (SNR) and firm performance through considering dynamic capabilities (DC) as important mediating mechanisms. In addition, we also investigate how platform monitoring shapes the relationship between SNR and DC.

This study uses the survey data from 162 firms in eastern China.

The findings indicate that both two DC dimensions (i.e., sensing and reconfiguring) significantly mediate the relationship of SNR-performance. Moreover, platform monitoring positively moderates the relationship of SNR and sensing as well as SNR and reconfiguring.

With these findings, this study advances SNR and digital platform research and provides insights into how to transform SNR into superior performance through DC.

Agrifood platforms are now part of consumption habits. They have emerged in various forms, and we need to describe this diversity to understand better how platforms manage their relationships with farmers. We aim to understand the governance forms of agrifood platforms and consider whether they comply with the principles of transaction cost economics (TCE).

Based on a survey of 103 French platform managers, a two-step cluster analysis and ordered logit regressions were applied to test hypotheses derived from the theory.

The results enable us to propose a refined typology of eight governance forms for the farmer-platform relationship. These different forms can be classified according to a continuum ranging from “market to hierarchy”, conforming to TCE principles. We define a gradient describing how the platforms manage their relations with the farmers through contractual and relational control. We show that specific assets, behavioural uncertainty, and membership in a platform network are associated with more integrated governance forms.

The article describes the different forms of platform governance and their relevance to market conditions. This clarification is necessary for farmers to elect the more suitable platform and for platform managers to create a new business or improve its efficiency.

This article is the first to offer a detailed typology of agrifood platform governance. It highlights these governance characteristics and their relationship with transaction attributes.