Dynamics of platform-based markets

Platform-based markets are prevalent in today's economy. Understanding the driver of platform success is of critical importance for platform providers. In this dissertation, I first develop a dynamic model to characterize conditions under which different factors drive the success of a platform, and then use the theoretical framework to analyze market-level data from the video game industry. I find that game players' marginal utility decreases rapidly with additional games after the number of games reaches a certain point, and quality is more influential than indirect network effects in driving the success of video game consoles. I also use individual-level data from Chinese Wikipedia to examine contributors' incentives to contribute. I take advantage of China's block of Chinese Wikipedia in mainland China in 2005 as a natural experiment to establish the causal relationship between contributors' incentives to contribute and the number of the beneficiaries of their contributions. I find that while on average contributors' incentives to contribute drop significantly after the block, the contribution levels of those contributors with small collaboration networks do not decrease after t