Philipp Hukal

Wessel, Michael; José Schmidt-Kessen, Maria & Hukal, Philipp (2024)

Regulating short-term rental platforms: the effects of local regulatory responses on Airbnb’s operations in Europe

Industrial and Corporate Change Doi: 10.1093/icc/dtad075

Many digital platforms offer services that affect real-world socio-economic processes. One example is the impact of short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb or Wimdu on cities and neighborhoods. Because these platforms often operate in a regulatory void characterized by absent, unclear, or poorly enforced laws and regulations, local governments in affected cities have begun experimenting with a variety of instruments to regulate the operations of short-term rental platforms. In this paper, we report how such locally implemented regulatory responses have affected Airbnb’s operations across 13 European cities over the period from 2015 to 2019. Using a difference-in-difference specification with synthetic controls, we assess the impact of different regulatory responses by disaggregating them into motivations, actions, targets, and outcomes. We find that the effectiveness of regulatory responses differs by type of regulation (restricting or clarifying), type of host (professional or private), as well as the enforcement (with or without the cooperation of the platform operator). Through this work, we add to the ongoing debate on the regulation of digital platforms by presenting both empirical evidence as well as an analytical framework.

Ens, Nicola; Hukal, Philipp & Jensen, Tina Belgind (2023)

Dynamics of control on digital platforms

Information Systems Journal Doi: 10.1111/isj.12429 - Full text in research archive

Digital platforms are supraorganizational entities that use digital technology to facilitate interactions between diverse actors, leading to novel forms of organisation and accompanying forms of control. The current Information Systems (IS) literature, however, struggles to describe control on digital platforms in a way that does justice to the dynamic character of the phenomenon. Taking this as an opportunity, we follow the enactment of control over time and across parties in a hybrid ethnographic study of the social commerce platform Poshmark. Specifically, we conceptualise the dynamics of control as changes in the means of control—formal or informal—and the sources of control—operator or participants—over time. Tracking these conceptual dimensions, we identify the distinct ways control has changed on Poshmark. Synthesising these findings into four dynamics of control, we show that control on digital platforms is rarely static due to aggregate effects arising from the operator and from participant interactions with each other through the digital features deployed on the platform. Based on these insights, our study contributes to the IS literature on control by broadening the conception of control on digital platforms. The theoretical and practical insights generated in this paper thereby lay the foundation for the systematic study of the dynamics of control that are unique to platform environments.

Hukal, Philipp; Henfridsson, Ola, Shaikh, Maha & Parker, Geoffrey (2020)

Platform Signaling for Generating Platform Content

MIS Quarterly Doi: 10.25300/MISQ/2020/15190

Hukal, Philipp; Kanat, Irfan & Ozalp, Hakan (2022)

Different Strategy Playbooks for Digital Platform Complementors

[Article in business/trade/industry journal]. MIS Quarterly Executive Doi: 10.17705/2msqe.00056