HOW AND WHY DO DIGITAL MARKET PLATFORM HOSTS EXERCISE CONTROL OVER SELLERS?

The rapid penetration of end-user applications, high speed internet connectivity and smart mobile devices has given rise to new business models which encompass a wider user base (de Reuver, Sørensen, & Basole, 2018). One model, the Digital Market, acts as a 'MatchMaker' between sellers and consumers. Though a sales transaction takes place between an individual consumer and a seller, the digital market platform plays a pivotal role in the end-to-end transaction. For both sellers (supply side) and consumers (demand side), affiliation with, and trust in the platform is vitally important (Evans & Schmalensee, 2016). A trustworthy digital market platform host exercises control over participating sellers. In this context, the control process is incomplete and complex; it involves governing multiple groups of fragmented participants outside the host firm's boundaries and loosely connected to the platform with multi-homing tendencies (Ghazawneh & Henfridsson, 2013; Tiwana & Konsynski, 2010). Since most sellers and consumers are associated with multiple channels, few sellers are completely committed to any one digital market platform. The study described here investigates Digital Market platform hosts' control over sellers, through the lens of Organizational Control Theory. A vibrant stream of prior research addressed control in supervisor-subordinate or principal-agent relationships (Cram, Brohman, & Gallupe, 2016; Kirsch, 1996, 1997, 2002; Mao & Zhang, 2008; Remits & Wiener, 2012; Wiener, Mähring, Remus, Saunders, & Cram, 2019). Findings from prior studies in other contexts may not fully apply in the context of Digital Markets, because in this context some independent sellers have as much power and other highly effective sellers may even have more power than their platform hosts (Halckenhaeusser, Foerderer, & Heinzl, 2020). While prior organizational control