Seeking Competitive Advantage Through Platform-Enabled Resources: The Case of Food Delivery Platforms

Abstract

As digital platforms become increasingly ubiquitous, firms in a wide array of industries face the decision of whether to join them and how to compete within them. The information systems field is in a unique position to theorize and investigate how platform participants can use broadly available digital platform resources in order to achieve, and possibly sustain, competitive advantage. We empirically investigate the theoretical proposition that restaurants joining the food delivery digital platform can compete by leveraging a specific emergent capability we call platform-fulfillment capability. Our results indicate that differentiation and competitive advantage are possible, even though all platform participants have access to the same digital platform resources. This result has important implications for the evaluation of digital platform strategies by organizations that are increasingly dependent on the use of digital technology.