The Role of Actors in Platform Ecosystems: A Systematic Literature Review and Comparison Across Platform Types

The information systems literature has acknowledged the importance of external actors for the success of platform ecosystems. Thus far, these actors have either been studied on a particular platform type or have been generalized across multiple platform types. We see opportunities in scrutinizing the varying roles that actors play on platforms of different types. For instance, actors who develop third-party applications are hardly comparable to actors that sell physical goods on an electronic marketplace. We conducted a systematic literature review and compared actors and their activities across different platform types. Specifically, we analyzed 68 scientific studies and distilled five platform types: social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, sharing platforms, crowdsourcing platforms, and software platforms. Next, we analyzed the actors that engage on those platforms and found that each platform type is associated with a specific set of actors: e-commerce platforms involve sellers and buyers, sharing platforms involve lenders and borrowers, crowdsourcing platforms involve workers and crowdsourcers and software platforms involve application developers and users. On social media platforms, actors occupy a double role as prosumers. Additionally, we investigated the interactions between these actor types and found that same-side interactions are especially prevalent among application developers who share knowledge with one another. The main contribution of our study is a comparative overview on platform types, actors and activities.