Time: 13:30-14:30 on Tuesday, Mar.25, 2025

Location: Room 105, Lidasan Building

Zoom Meeting: 378107202; Password: 722722

Topic: The Cross-platform Impact of Open API: An Empirical Study of Online Healthcare Platforms

Speaker: Bo XU, Associate Professor, Information Management and Business Intelligence, Fudan SoM

Abstract: Digital platforms adopt application programming interfaces (APIs) as strategy for growth and competition. By granting access to resources to third-party platforms or applications through opening API, a platform may attract more users to gain a competitive advantage. This paper investigates the effects of an online platform’s adoption of an open API strategy on a competing platform using data from two healthcare platforms. The results indicate that a platform’s open API has a negative cross-platform effect on physicians’ consultations with competing platform. This negative effect is stronger for physicians multihoming on the adopting and competing platform than for physicians single-homing on the competing platform; however, the difference is less significant for physicians with higher job titles and from higher-ranked hospitals. Additionally, a platform’s adoption of an open API promotes multihoming onto the platform by physicians with many consultations on the competing platform. This study makes theoretical and practical contributions to platform competition and strategy.