Amateurs Crowds & Professional Entrepreneurs as Platform Complementors

I would like to acknowledge helpful comments from seminar participants at Copenhagen Business School, Harvard University, London School of Economics, IESE, the NBER Summer Institute, New York University, University College London, University of Southern California, University of Michigan, Warwick University, the International Industrial Organization Conference. The paper was also influenced by helpful comments from Carliss Baldwin, Dan Elfenbein, Shane Greenstein, Brent Hickman, Nicola Lacetera, Karim Lakhani, Gwen Lee, Hong Luo, Jenny Kuan, Justin Johnson, Alan MacCormack, Dylan Minor, Ramana Nanda, Imke Reimers, Chris Stanton, Steve Tadelis, Thales Teixeira, Neil Thompson, Eric von Hippel, and Joel Waldfogel. This work also benefitted from collaboration in related topics with Lars Bo Jeppesen (CBS) and Milan Miric (USC). Excellent research assistance was provided by Richard Paulsen and Gourishankar Seal. Executives at Priori Data contributed proprietary data to this study. I acknowledge research funding from Harvard Business School Northeastern University for this study. All errors are my own. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.