The social structure of local communities has a powerful influence on whether businesses take a stand on controversial and societal issues, finds a new award-winning study, now published in Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ).

Former PhD student at UCL School of Management, Joe Ploog, has won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Strategic Management Division at the Academy of Management’s Annual Meeting in Copenhagen.

This year saw the inaugural summit of The European Digital Platform Research Network, EU-DPRN, at Bocconi University. Platform competition expert, UCL School of Management’s Joost Rietveld was one of the four organisers of the event which bought together leaders in the field and showcased new and exciting research emerging in this space.

UCL School of Management Assistant Professor Joost Rietveld discusses his research project, "Market Orchestrators: The Effects of Certification on Platforms and their Complementors" on the podcast "Talking about Platforms".

Writing for The Strategic Management Society, Joost Rietveld shares his latest research with co-author Joe Ploog: "On Top of The Game? The Double-Edged Sword of Incorporating Social Features into Freemium Products". The paper examines the freemium vs paid models and why even though some of the most popular digital products originated from a freemium model, there are only a small group of freemium superstars.

A study by Joost Rietveld examining the video games market, indicates that a good business model can capture value and improve how consumers perceive an organisation’s products and better enable heterogeneous consumers to act on their willingness-to-pay.

The interest in platform competition continues to grow rapidly. The rise of the internet dramatically increasing both the scale and scope of platform competition leading most business media outlets to describe the current economic landscape as a “platform economy”. In a recent paper published in the Journal of Management, UCL School of Management’s Joost Rietveld and co-author provide a systematic and interdisciplinary review of the academic literature on platform competition.