Responsible Platforms: Aiming for Social Value Rather than Scale

The platform economy has failed in creating a fairer marketplace The digital revolution has brought fundamental changes to market exchange dynamics, transforming how, where and what we consume.One of the most significant transformations has been the advent of the platform business model.Amazon has become the dominant player in e-commerce with unmatched variety, competitive prices and convenience for consumers, while driving local retailers out of the market and creating precarious jobs.Platforms have also enabled the sharing economy.Its rise was accompanied by high hopes: easy market access, flexibility and better utilization of resources as well as economic, social and environmental benefits for society as a whole.Sharing platforms were expected to account for the interests of multiple stakeholders and were therefore anticipated to push capitalism toward a more prosocial future.Yet, while flagship platforms such as Amazon, Airbnb and Uber have indeed fundamentally changed how goods and services are provisioned and consumed, they have exacerbated materialism instead: more pay inequality, gig jobs without benefits, destabilized neighborhoods, more emissions and waste, bypassing of regulation and data privacy issues. Responsible platform models promoting social value have emergedIn response to the growth and the concentration of power of profit-maximizing platforms, other models seeking more participation, cooperation and multi-stakeholder inclusion have emerged.Their marketing strategies follow a long-term orientation toward resilient and sustainable solutions.The goals of such responsible platforms range from fairer working conditions and fairer distribution of profits and wealth to the revitalization of local economies, as well as to waste and emission reduction.We focus on platform cooperatives and social entrepreneur-led platforms as promoters of more responsible platform strategies attempting to mitigate one or several problems of mainstream platforms.While their approaches are often promising, they face many challenges and operate on the margins rather than in the center of the platform/sharing economy.