How do platform governance actions affect complementors’ responses? We theorize that since complementors (e.g., app developers) in platform ecosystems confront inference uncertainty, they ascribe moral motives to platform governance actions that shape their subsequent responses. Moral motives could be negative or positive, depending on whether the action is interpreted as ad-hoc favoritism (favoring one complementor over another), extractive opportunism (advancing platform providers’ rent-seeking at the expense of complementors), or mutual commitment (providers’ committing to the platform ecosystem, while also inducing complementors to commit). Evidence for these arguments comes from Salesforce’s platform ecosystem. We quantitatively examine complementors’ meaning-making of, and responses to, platform governance actions such as selective promotion (ad-hoc favoritism), vertical integration (extractive opportunism), and corporate venture capital investment (mutual commitment). We qualitatively unpack why complementors interpret and view corporate venture capital investment as a middle-ground governance action.
