Abstract

Digital platforms have become the dominant architecture for delivering goods and services. Major firms have incorporated platform-based strategies to leverage network effects and modular innovation. Platform growth depends on diverse offerings, which requires collaboration between platform owners and complementors (third-party developers or service providers). Prior work has examined either economic coordination mechanisms (e.g., pricing and revenue sharing) or organizational governance structures (e.g., decision rights and contractual control), yet their joint effects on platform diversity remain unexplored. Some argue that tighter owner control expands diversity by reducing opportunism, while others warn it stifles partner innovation. Moreover, platform market power is an essential factor in this relationship, yet its impact has received little attention. To address these gaps, we adopt an integrative framework that maps collaboration from loosely coupled partnerships to full integration and incorporates market power as a moderating factor. We examine our model in the streaming industry using regression analysis on data from 188 platforms and 11,461 content–platform pairs drawn from Watchmode and TMDB, capturing production partnerships, availability patterns, and genre metadata. We find that collaboration increases the breadth of diversity (genre novelty) but reduces structural diversity (runtime novelty), and these effects are attenuated on platforms with greater market power. We contribute a unified theoretical lens for bridging economic and organizational perspectives, introduce a novel genre-novelty metric that captures both range and rarity, and offer practical guidance on governance and collaboration strategies to optimize platform performance.