Platform Leaders is all about building bridges: between entrepreneurs, policymakers, practitioners, investors – and academics whose work can actually help others to make better decisions. In that context, Platform Leaders is awarding a unique Academic Prize: to spotlight rigorous research that is both intellectually robust and directly useful to practitioners.

Announcing the 2025 Platform Leaders Academic Prize

At the 10th edition of Platform Leaders, held at Digital Catapult in London on 18 November 2025, the jury of practitioners awarded the 2025 Academic Prize to Dr Manav Raj, Assistant Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for his paper:

“More is (sometimes) merrier: Heterogeneity in demand spillovers and competition on a digital platform”, Strategic Management Journal, 2024

The jury selected the winner from a shortlist of three finalist papers selected in collaboration with the Platform Papers editorial board. A key assessment criterion for the jury was practical relevance for platform leaders and practitioners.

 

More Is Sometimes Merrier: how the idea for the paper emerged

In his remarks at Platform Leaders, Dr Raj explained that the project grew out of his own experience as a consumer. Like many of us, he now discovers and enjoys creative content mainly through digital interfaces such as Spotify, Netflix or the Kindle store.

Using these platforms, he noticed something that didn’t quite fit with the standard story of head-to-head competition:

• For each creator on a platform, similar peers clearly compete for attention.
• At the same time, having more similar creators on the platform makes it more attractive overall, drawing more users into the market.

A simple personal observation crystallised the idea: “When my favourite artists released music on Spotify, that new music would often draw me to the platform, but I’d find myself sticking around to listen to other songs by other similar artists.”

This raised the central question behind the paper: does the presence – or activity – of a close peer on a platform always hurt you through substitution, or can it help you by expanding the overall market and sending you spillover demand?

 

The research question: can “competitors” actually be allies?

Digital platforms bring together complementors (e.g. artists, app developers, restaurants, authors) and end-users. These complementors often look like straightforward competitors: they fight for attention, clicks, streams or bookings. But platforms also create positive demand spillovers: when one complementor attracts users to the platform, some of that extra demand can “spill over” to others nearby.

An illustrated video produced by Launchworks & Co for Platform Leaders brings this story to life, highlighting how superstar releases can expand the pie and create positive spillovers for lesser-known artists when platform architecture and recommendations line up correctly.

Raj’s work asks a strategically crucial question: When are relationships between complementors on a platform primarily competitive, and when are they actually complementary?

To answer this, he combines theory on agglomeration (how firms benefit from “co-location” in offline markets) with evidence from a large-scale empirical setting: Spotify.

 

The setting: 10,000 artists on Spotify

The study uses detailed daily data on nearly 10,000 of the top artists on Spotify from 2016 to 2019. For each artist, Raj tracks:

• Performance metrics (streams, listeners, popularity)
• Release dates for albums, singles and other content
• “Related artists” links in Spotify’s “Fans also like” recommendations – a built-in measure of who is a close peer on the platform.

Dr Raj then examines what happens to a focal artist’s streaming performance after a related artist releases a new album. If peers are purely competitive, you’d expect substitution: the focal artist’s streams should fall.

Instead, he finds that on average, artists see an increase in streaming when a highly similar peer releases an album – a sign that demand spillovers can outweigh pure competitive effects.

 

Three conditions for “more is merrier”

These spillovers are not uniform. Sometimes more rival content helps; sometimes it hurts. Raj shows that whether “more is merrier” depends on three conditions:

1. Demand expansion – does the peer draw more people onto the platform?
   • When the peer is a high-performing artist, their album launch brings a surge of users to Spotify. That larger audience then spills over to related artists.
2. Platform-mediated proximity – does the platform actually connect users from the peer to you?
   • Spotify’s recommendation systems – “Fans also like”, related artists lists, playlists – determine how attention flows between artists. When the platform routes listeners from the superstar to the focal artist, spillovers are much larger.
3. Consumer learning – does the focal artist benefit from discovery?
   • Lower-performing or newer artists gain more from exposure: they are less familiar, so extra attention leads to more genuine discovery and learning by users.

Put together, demand spillovers are largest when a popular peer launches, the platform routes attention from that peer to you, and you’re relatively unknown, so new listeners have something to learn about you.

 

The jury behind the 2025 Academic Prize

The 2025 Platform Leaders Academic Prize was awarded by a practitioner jury, reflecting the prize’s focus on real-world impact. The 2025 jury members were:

• Limvirak Chea, Co-founder and CEO of Fixter
• Sandrine Zhang Ferron, Founder and CEO of Vinterior
• Laure Claire Reillier, Co-author of Platform Strategy and Co-founder & COO of Launchworks & Co
• Sameer Singh, Partner at Speedinvest VC
• Benoît Reillier, Co-author of Platform Strategy and Co-founder & CEO of Launchworks & Co

In his acceptance speech, Raj emphasised how meaningful it was that a group of practitioners saw his project as a genuine bridge between research and practice. “It’s [] very gratifying […] to hear that there may be some findings that are practically useful.”

 

Why this matters for platform leaders and complementors

Although the study is based on Spotify and the music industry, the mechanisms it uncovers are highly relevant for many variety-seeking, low-marginal-cost platforms – from streaming and app stores (including gaming platforms) to marketplaces, crowdfunding platforms and B2B ecosystems.

Some key implications:

1. For complementors: your “rival” can expand your market.
   Launching or positioning near a superstar can be a smart strategy on platforms where users like variety and search costs are low, because you can ride the wave of attention spillovers rather than only fearing substitution.
2. For platform orchestrators: recommendation design is key to growing the pie.
   By tuning recommendation and search tools, platform organisers effectively decide how much spillover reaches whom – and therefore who thrives. Platforms that channel some of the superstar-driven demand towards smaller or niche complementors can improve ecosystem health and diversity while still serving users well.
3. For policymakers: platforms can positively reshape competition.
   The findings suggest that digital platforms don’t just intensify competition; they reconfigure it, changing the balance between rivalry and complementarity among firms. Understanding these spillovers is essential for debates on platform power, discoverability and value distribution in digital markets.

 

About the Platform Leaders Academic Prize

The Platform Leaders Academic Prize is part of a broader effort by Platform Leaders and Launchworks & Co to translate cutting-edge research into actionable insight. Research papers were pre-selected with the help of Platform Papers, before our practitioner jury chose the winner following a “healthy debate”. The three finalist papers were:

• When Uber Eats its Own Business (and Competitors’ too) – diversification & resource oscillation by H. David Chung, Maggie Zhou and Christine Choi
• More is (Sometimes) Merrier – demand spillovers on digital platforms by Manav Raj
• Ban Targeted Advertising? – privacy trade-offs and app innovation by Dr. Tobias Kircher and Jens Forderer

By recognising More is (sometimes) merrier, the 2025 jury highlights a message that matters for anyone building platforms today:

On platforms, your closest competitor may also be your most valuable ally – if the platform architecture, recommendations and timing are set up to make “more” truly merrier.

Congratulations again to all finalists and to the prize winner, Dr. Manav Raj, for his remarkable work and winning the 2025 Platform Leaders Academic Prize! 🎉