Yuki Inoue

Platform competition has long been expected to converge on a single winner. Yet platforms whose transactions are fulfilled through physical movement and completed within a local market-food delivery, ride-hailing, and spot-work matching, which we call location-bound platforms-depart from this prediction: independent platforms persist alongside the leaders, market leadership changes hands, and within-city duopolies endure. More fundamentally, the same firm's competitive position differs across local markets. This integrative review asks why competitive advantage in location-bound platforms differs across local markets, and under what conditions local advantage aggregates into firm-level rents and persists. Bridging management research, which has the firm's perspective but lacks spatial mechanisms, and economics, which has the spatial mechanisms but lacks the perspective of competitive advantage, we lower the unit of analysis from the firm to the local market and organize the mechanisms into three layers: spatial market structure, the appropriability structure of competitive resources, and competitive dynamics. Their integration yields two baseline propositions and six propositions. The central proposition is that local advantage aggregates into firm-level rents to the degree that local resources are inimitable by rivals and the routines that form them are replicable within the firm across local markets-combining the inter-firm question of the resource-based view with the intra-firm question of replication research, which prior work has not linked. Even aggregated advantage can be eroded under user multihoming through continued defensive expenditure and the decoupling of market position from profitability. We close with a research agenda and identify the Japanese market as a setting for discriminating competing predictions.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify that explainer function as a key marketing factor in the generation of experience in the context of consumption and synchronous explanatory behavior within the interactive market. This study empirically analyzes the relationship between explainer expertise and the acquisition of customer loyalty, with customer engagement as a moderating variable. This study focuses on the eSports market in Twitch. In this study, explainer is defined as "eSports Casters" that provide play-by-play and color commentary. This study utilized 381 archived stream recordings from the official Japanese channel of VALORANT. In addition, independent variable is defined as "Caster's expertise", dependent variable as "the increase in the number of channel followers", and moderating variable as "Customer Engagement". Analytical method is multiple regression analysis using the ordinary least squares method. Consequently, the following two points were clarified. First, there is a significant positive correlation between expertise and the acquisition of customer loyalty. Second, the relationship is moderated by customer engagement; specifically, the positive association is more pronounced among highly involved consumers. In conclusion, this paper empirically demonstrates that explainer characteristics positively relate to customer loyalty and function as a factor of experience in the interactive market.

User-generated content on digital platforms often receives social endorsements, such as likes, shares, and positive review. These social endorsements play a crucial role in the sustainable growth of platform ecosystems by promoting content diffusion and functioning as quality signals. Drawing on resonance theory, this study examines how category match between complementary content and core content along with creator experience, relates to social endorsement rates. Using empirical data on game mods from Nexus Mods, we find an inverted-U relationship between category match and social endorsement rates. Furthermore, within-category experience moderates this inverted-U relationship. Creators with extensive within-category experience achieve the highest social endorsement rates at moderate levels of category match. This study extends resonance theory to platform research and explains the formation mechanism of social endorsements for complementary contents from a resonance perspective.

This study examines how ventures with high distinctiveness overcome the trade-off between distinctiveness and legitimacy posited by Optimal Distinctiveness Theory to achieve superior performance. While existing theories offer limited explanations for this phenomenon, this study introduces the concept of adequacy, defined as "fulfilling the market's implicit requirements," and examines its role. Analyzing 8,562 projects on Japanese crowdfunding platform CAMPFIRE via negative binomial regression models, we find that in business categories with high uncertainty of utility, adequacy strengthens the positive correlation between distinctiveness and business performance. These results suggest that adequacy complements legitimacy diminished by high distinctiveness, thereby enabling the simultaneous achievement of both high distinctiveness and superior performance. This study extends Optimal Distinctiveness Theory by introducing the concept of adequacy, thereby advancing our theoretical understanding of how distinctiveness influences performance. Furthermore, our research reveals that adequacy-the fulfillment of the market's implicit requirements-is a critical success factor for innovative ventures.

With the rapid expansion of online shopping, website design has become a critical factor influencing user experience and consumer satisfaction. This study examines the relationship between visual marketing elements embedded in e-commerce web page design and consumer satisfaction by analyzing 1500 product pages across five major categories (furniture, small items, food, home appliances, and clothing) on the Japanese platform Rakuten. The analysis reveals that in the furniture category, a higher proportion of images featuring visible faces and video explanations demonstrated positive correlations with consumer satisfaction. For food products, text color diversity demonstrated positive correlations with consumer satisfaction. In the home appliance category, text color and video explanations showed positive correlations with satisfaction, while the number of human images and video music showed negative correlations. For accessory products, images positioned at the website periphery, the number of human images, and video music showed negative correlations with consumer satisfaction. In the apparel category, text color and the number of human images demonstrated negative correlations with consumer satisfaction. However, in the analysis of the entire sample, no significant correlations were observed between visual marketing elements and consumer satisfaction. These findings suggest that visual marketing strategies should be tailored to specific product categories, which may contribute to improving consumer satisfaction with e-commerce platforms.

Complementors are the source of complementary goods. Increased participation by complementors fosters innovation in complementary goods, contributing to the sustainability of the ecosystem. This study examines how complementors’ experiential knowledge and their engagement with the community as an external knowledge source are correlated with the degree of innovation in complementary goods. A multiple regression analysis was conducted using data from the game mod platform Nexus Mods. Prior evidence indicates an inverted U-shaped relationship between experiential knowledge and the degree of innovation. It is suggested that when experiential knowledge accumulation exceeds an optimal level, further accumulation may lead to a decline in the degree of innovation. This study reveals that when complementors possess a high level of experiential knowledge, the positive relationship between their engagement with the community and the degree of innovation in complementary goods is strengthened. Complementors with abundant experience, who actively engage with the community as an external knowledge source, are more likely to drive innovation. Consequently, they play a crucial role in supporting the sustainable development of the ecosystem.

Anime has become a global phenomenon due to its diverse cultural representations, relatable characters, and unique storytelling. However, there is limited research on the relationship between character personality and popularity. The aim of this study is to understand the relevance of the characters’ personalities to the audience’s evaluation of various characters. This study analyzed the correlation between the MBTI personality evaluations of characters in anime and their popularity, based on the data of the personality of each animation character reviewed by audiences. In this study, 885 characters from 200 anime aimed at a male audience were selected as a sample for research. The results showed that personality traits such as introversion, intuition, and thinking had an impact on the popularity of female characters but not male characters. The overall results were influenced by the larger sample size of female characters. By addressing this question, the study can contribute to the design of a character’s personality and overall success in anime.

Previous studies have examined changes in software sales using the network effect theory framework based on hardware sales. This study aims to examine the effects of a software series’ length on software sales. We also investigate the moderating effects of how a platform’s life cycle influences the series’ sales. We adopted the double-jeopardy theory and brand loyalty discussions for both products and corporations. To test our hypotheses, we analysed 11,863 video game software samples in the Japanese market, addressing the following research questions: How does the length of a software series influence sales in terms of both the product and the corporate brand? How is the influence of the software series’ length on sales moderated by the stage of the platform’s lifecycle? Our findings show that a longer software series led to higher software sales for both the specific series as well as other software released simultaneously by the company. Moreover, we found that the positive relationship between the video game series’ length and sales of all the firm’s software was stronger when the platform had matured. By examining firm behaviours, such as software series releases and their effects, we confirmed that software series’ length is a core factor stimulating its sales and that of other series produced by a company. We also examined the impact of a platform’s lifecycle on video game sales. Our study contributes to the field by extending the literature on the effect of brand loyalty and the double-jeopardy theory.