Carla Bonina

Digital platforms contribute significantly to sustainable development yet pose specific risks to developing countries. Using a World Bank global database of antitrust actions complemented by secondary data, we empirically analyze developing countries' regulatory responses to threats to competition and innovation associated with digital platforms. We ask: (1) Which types of anticompetitive agreements and abuse of dominance practices were associated with various platform types? (2) For mergers, which salient characteristics of the acquiring platform drove the antitrust investigations, and what actions were taken by the enforcement authorities? We find that two types of platforms (transaction and hybrid) give rise to distinct competitive concerns and elicit different responses from enforcement authorities. We then discuss our findings in the broader context of policy responses from developing countries to challenges related to digital platforms. We offer recommendations for policymakers and suggest avenues for future research. 2

Abstract Digital technologies have a recognised potential to build more efficient, credible, and innovative public institutions in Latin America. Despite progress, digital transformation in Latin American governments remains limited. In this work, we explore a peculiar yet largely understudied opportunity in the region: pursuing digital government transformation as a collaborative process between the government and civil society organisations. To do so, we draw from information systems research on digital government and platforms for development, complemented with governance theory from political science and conduct an interpretive in‐depth case study of an urban reporting platform in Montevideo called ‘Por Mi Barrio’. The study reveals three mutually reinforced orders of governance in the trajectory of the project and explain how the collaboration unfolded over time: (i) a technical decision to use open platform architectures; (ii) the negotiation of formal and informal rules to make the project thrive and (iii) a shared, long‐term ideology around the value of open technologies and technical sovereignty grounded in years of political history. Using a contextual explanation approach, our study helps to improve our understanding on the governance of collaborative digital government platforms in Latin America, with specific contributions to practice.

Digital platforms hold a central position in today's world economy and are said to offer a great potential for the economies and societies in the global South. Yet, to date, the scholarly literature on digital platforms has largely concentrated on business while their developmental implications remain understudied. In part, this is because digital platforms are a challenging research object due to their lack of conceptual definition, their spread across different regions and industries, and their intertwined nature with institutions, actors and digital technologies. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate in information systems and ICT4D research to understand what digital platforms mean for development. To do so, we first define what digital platforms are and differentiate between transaction and innovation platforms, and explain their key characteristics in terms of purpose, research foundations, material properties and business models. We add the socio-technical context digital platforms operate and the linkages to developmental outcomes. We then conduct an extensive review to explore what current areas, developmental goals, tensions and issues emerge in the literature on platforms and development and identify relevant gaps in our knowledge. Based on our findings, we elaborate on six research questions to advance the studies on digital platforms for development as follows: on indigenous innovation, digital platforms and institutions, on exacerbation of inequalities, on alternative forms of value, on the dark side of platforms and on the applicability of the platform typology for development. 2

The information systems literature has studied digital innovation extensively and focused primarily on its commercial related objectives. Yet, digital social innovations seek to solve social problems, while implementing commercially viable approaches. Drawing from the social entrepreneurship literature and using computational social science methods, we identify the peculiar utilitarian (commercial) and collectivistic (social) identity orientations that shape digital social innovation (DSI). We use a sample of 292 DSI initiatives from Latin America and find that DSIs present both utilitarian and collectivist identity orientation. We also find that the collectivistic identity orientation tends to be more salient in less developed contexts. This allows us to discuss implications for the research on digital social innovation and to open up a discussion on the role of context and possible tensions that may emerge in combining both identity orientations.