Pinar Ozcan

The Market that Never Was: Clashing Frames and Failed Coalitions in Mobile Payments

In this paper, we focus on a key, but understudied process that affects the development of a new market: the interfirm negotiation process through which the interested parties agree on a business model to exchange resources in order to create the new product or service. We observed this process in the case of an emerging market around mobile payment services for over 40 months between 2006 and 2009. The results that emerge from our data illustrate that when several of the negotiating parties come from dominant positions in their distinctive markets, the development of the new market may come to a complete halt despite the readiness of the technology and proven consumer interest. We also show that when such deadlocks occur, the commercialization of the product may stop at the global level, but continue locally in places where the interdependency problem can be solved. By observing various countries, we describe three local pathways to commercialization: intrafirm coalitions, M&A, and the mediation of a trusted third party.

The API Economy and Digital Transformation in Financial Services: The Case of Open Banking

In this paper we seek to do two things. Firstly, by exploring the fundamental properties and various applications of open application programming interfaces (APIs) mentioned in extant literature, we articulate what are the relevant theories that give rise to the new organisational structures and platform business models we observe in the digital age. Understanding such phenomena will help us anticipate, and in some ways predict, the implications of public APIs’ adoption in the financial services sector. The second part of our paper exposes some of our findings around the key challenges and opportunities that open APIs pose for the banking sector in the UK and the EU following the introduction of the Open Banking Working Group (OBWG) and Second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) regulatory frameworks. Our insights were produced from extensive field research and interviews with key industry experts between July 2016 and February 2017. Our use of theory helps us translate these findings and provide recommendations for financial institutions, FinTech startups, technology companies, and regulators. We hope to help them prepare for some of the key changes and issues that the financial sector may be facing in the next few years as the use of open APIs becomes more ‘mainstream’.

Social Movements, Political Battles, and New Market Emergence in Pay Television

This paper documents the development of pay TV in the United States. We show that when the first version of pay TV, over-the-air pay TV, came to the market, a social movement started by movie theatres and TV broadcasters to protect free TV blocked the emerging market. Later on, however, another technology with a similar business model, pay cable TV, became successful. A closer look into the factors leading to this success shows that regulatory voids, the ambiguity of the public interest frame, and the influence over public opinion can create windows of opportunity for a technology to emerge despite strong opposition from incumbent firms. We argue that in highly regulated industries, technology dominance can arise from windows of opportunity emerging amidst political battles.

What Networks do to Firms and What Firms do to Networks: Evolution of Alliance Portfolios in Networked Markets

This study explores the question of how alliance portfolios change over time. In the setting of the U.S. wireless gaming market, I collected real-time and longitudinal data on entrepreneurial game publishers over two and a half years. This process revealed that alliance portfolios of firms can grow or deteriorate rapidly through virtuous or vicious cycles, depending on their starting position in a networked market. Those firms in a virtuous cycle have the additional advantage that they can use resource-dependence strategies to fuel the virtuous cycle. Finally, I find that changes in a firms alliance portfolio occur simultaneously with other firm-level changes, such as physical growth, new rounds of financing, public offering and game coverage. The findings have potential contributions to literature at the firm, portfolio, and network levels. Overall, the picture provided is one that advocates multi-level and longitudinal analysis for the understanding of firm, portfolio, and network-level outcomes deriving from firm-level interactions and portfolio strategies.