“More is (sometimes) Merrier”: The 2025 Platform Leaders Academic Prize winner

Like digital platforms themselves, Platform Leaders is a gathering place for complementary participants. And across sectors, this community of diverse stakeholders has a common aim: to foster dialogue, learning, debate and growth.

“Platform Leaders was set up to bring together people from different worlds and who didn’t always speak the same language – academics, practitioners, policy makers – yet together they were shaping the future of digital platforms,” recounts Benoit Reillier, co-founder and CEO of Launchworks & Co.

These efforts to bridge worlds continue this year with the awarding of the 2025 Platform Leaders Academic Prize to recognise academic research that can meaningfully inform platform business strategy. “One of the key criteria is the relevance and impact of the research in the real world for practitioners,” Benoit notes. Together with the editorial team at Platform Papers, the jury chose a shortlist of three candidates for the prize.

Rewarding research with real-world relevance

This year, the practitioner jury awarded the prize to Dr Manav Raj, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for his work on competitive dynamics between complementors on digital platforms. Raj’s recent paper, “More is (sometimes) merrier: Heterogeneity in demand spillovers and competition on a digital platform” (Strategic Management Journal, 2024), uses data from Spotify to test traditional competition models.

“Platforms introduced a dynamic that complicates our traditional notion of similar peers acting as competitors,” explains Raj. “For each complementor on a platform, other similar peers could mean greater competitive pressure as they compete for attention. However, we all know that the more complementors on the platform, the more attractive the platform is and the more consumers then come to the market.”

Raj’s research was inspired by his personal experience as a consumer. While he noticed that certain musical artists would initially draw him to use Spotify, he would then discover and listen to other artists. These artists would in turn receive the demand ‘spillover’, which runs contrary to notions of on-platform competition as zero-sum and adversarial.

Therefore, the paper is centrally concerned with the question:

When are relationships between complementors competitive versus complementary?

Rethinking competition on platforms

Raj’s study uses data on close to 10,000 of the top artists on Spotify from 2016 to 2019, looking at:

• Performance metrics – streams, listeners, popularity
• Release dates for albums, singles, etc.
• Recommendations for related artists in Spotify’s “Fans also like” feature, which Raj used as an indicator of close peers on the platform

An illustrated video, produced by Launchworks & Co for Platform Leaders, recaps Raj’s research and its main concepts and findings.

Raj analysed how an artist’s streaming performance changes when a closely related peer releases a new album. Under a purely competitive logic, this should divert attention, leading the focal artist’s streams to decline. Instead, the evidence shows the opposite: on average, artists experience a lift in streaming following a release by a highly similar peer, indicating that demand spillovers can more than offset straightforward competitive pressure.

The role of platform architecture in ‘growing the pie’

A critical insight from Raj’s work is that outcomes are not solely determined by who is on the platform, but by how the platform connects them. “The architecture and recommendations that [platforms] put in place play a huge role in determining the nature of complementary competition,” says Raj. Interface design, matching systems and ranking algorithms determine whether users move laterally between similar complementors or remain locked onto a single superstar.

“The architecture and recommendations that [platforms] put in place play a huge role in determining the nature of complementary competition.” – Manav Raj, associate professor of management, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Raj’s research also has practical takeaways for ecosystem growth. If complementors believe that new entrants only dilute their prospects, resistance and distrust can follow. But when platforms credibly demonstrate shared upside, participation becomes easier to sustain. “It can also be helpful to communicate this idea of a ‘growing pie’ or ‘rising tide’ when recruiting complementors to the platform to try and allay some of the fears about competition,” Raj notes.

Why “more is (sometimes) merrier” beyond music or media

Of his research, Raj says, “It was interesting to imagine whether these relationships that we often think of as competitive could transform into something different.” Although the empirical setting of Raj’s research is creative platforms, the underlying mechanisms apply far more broadly. App stores, marketplaces, SaaS ecosystems, gaming platforms and even B2B exchanges all rely on recommendations, discoverability and variety-seeking user behaviour.

Across these contexts, platforms do not simply intensify competition, but also reconfigure it. For platform leaders, this reimagining can influence key decisions, such as about onboarding, positioning and ecosystem design.

About the Platform Leaders Academic Prize

The Platform Leaders Academic Prize is an initiative by Platform Leaders and Launchworks & Co to glean practical insights from leading academic research. Papers were first shortlisted with the support of Platform Papers before a “healthy debate” and the jury’s final selection.

This year’s jury of practitioners comprised: Limvirak Chea, co-founder and CEO of Fixter; Sandrine Zhang Ferron, founder and CEO of Vinterior; Laure Claire Reillier, co-author of Platform Strategy and co-founder & COO of Launchworks & Co; Sameer Singh, partner at Speedinvest VC; and Benoit Reillier, co-author of Platform Strategy and co-founder & CEO of Launchworks & Co.

Join the conversation at Platform Leaders

The announcement of the 2025 Platform Leaders Academic Prize took place at the Platform Leaders hybrid event, held online and at Digital Catapult in London on 18 November 2025. The prize reflects Platform Leaders’ commitment to building dialogue between research and practice. Convening practitioners, academics and policymakers, the community is a space for all to learn from both academic evidence and practical experience.

Explore more insights and videos at the Platform Leaders website, and sign up to receive the latest news and be part of shaping the future of digital platforms together. You can watch the full event by playing the video below.