Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(119,311)
- Faculty Publications (113)
- March 2019 (Revised January 2020)
- Teaching Note
Ant Financial (A), (B), and (C)
By: Feng Zhu, Krishna G. Palepu, Kerry Herman and Susie Ma
- Article
Friends or Foes? Examining Platform Owners' Entry into Complementors' Spaces
By: Feng Zhu
As platform owners continue to expand their ecosystems, many of them have started to provide consumers with their own complementary applications. These moves position the platform owners as direct competitors to their complementors. This paper surveys empirical studies... View Details
- January–February 2019
- Article
Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don't
By: Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti
In the digital economy, scale is no guarantee of continued success. After all, the same factors that help an online platform expand quickly—such as the low cost of adding new customers—work for challengers too. What, then, allows platforms to fight off rivals and grow... View Details
- October 2018
- Article
Competing with Complementors: An Empirical Look at Amazon.com
By: Feng Zhu and Qihong Liu
Platform owners sometimes enter complementors' product spaces to compete against them directly. Prior studies have offered two possible explanations for such entries: platform owners may target the most successful complementors so as to appropriate value from their... View Details
- September 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Apple Pay and Mobile Payments in Australia (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Susan Athey and David Lane
In summer 2016, four of Australia’s top five banks petitioned regulators for permission to bargain collectively with Apple over the terms under which they would support its digital wallet, Apple Pay. They argued that doing so would force concessions from Apple that... View Details
- September 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Supplement
Apple Pay and Mobile Payments in Australia (B)
By: Feng Zhu, Susan Athey and David Lane
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Do Experts or Crowd-Based Models Produce More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia
By: Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu
Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details
- April 2018 (Revised November 2019)
- Case
JD: Envisioning the Future of Retail (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Shirley Sun
JD, China’s second largest e-commerce company by gross merchandise volume (GMV) after Alibaba, had expanded rapidly from 2012 to 2016. When the company celebrated its 13th birthday in 2017, Richard Liu, its founder, deliberated on the company’s growth strategies. The... View Details
- March 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Supplement
ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (B)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen and Shirley Sun
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
- February 2018
- Supplement
Ant Financial (B)
By: Feng Zhu, Ying Zhang, Krishna G. Palepu and Anthony K. Woo
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
- February 2018 (Revised January 2020)
- Supplement
Ant Financial (C)
By: Feng Zhu, Ying Zhang, Krishna G. Palepu and Anthony K. Woo
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
- January 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen and Shirley Sun
ZBJ.com (ZBJ), an online platform that connects knowledge workers to small- and medium-sized enterprises, is China’s largest outsourcing platform. Founded by Mingyue Zhu in 2006, ZBJ had grown into a unicorn with 4,000 employees and a daily transaction volume of RMB15... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Threat of Platform-Owner Entry and Complementor Responses: Evidence from the Mobile App Market
By: Feng Zhu
We examine how app developers on the Android mobile platform adjust their innovation efforts (rate and direction) and value-capture strategies in response to Google’s entry threat and actual entry into their markets. We find that, after Google’s entry threat increases,... View Details
- Article
Repositioning and Cost-Cutting: The Impact of Competition on Platform Strategies
By: Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu
Organizational structures are increasingly complex. In particular, more firms today operate as multi-sided platforms. In this paper, we study how platform firms use repositioning and cost-cutting in response to competition, elucidate external and internal factors that... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Korea Telecom: Building a GiGAtopia (A)
By: Shane Greenstein, Feng Zhu and Kerry Herman
Korea Telecom (KT) has committed $4 billion in investments and R&D to build a GiGAtopia, essentially ushering in the next generation of mobile (5G) and wired infrastructure. CEO Dr. Chang-Gyu Hwang, and his team are considering which areas to prioritize in terms of new... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
edaixi (eWash): Digital Transformation of Laundry Services (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen, Chuang Chen and Ciwu Lin
Founded in 2013 as a laundry service featuring online ordering for home pickup and delivery, China’s edaixi (eWash) illustrated the online-to-offline (O2O) business model. As yet unclear in 2016 was the optimal way to organize third-party laundry service providers,... View Details
- April 2017 (Revised February 2020)
- Supplement
edaixi (eWash): Digital Transformation of Laundry Services (B)
By: Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen, Chuang Chen and Ciwu Lin
Founded in 2013 as a laundry service featuring online ordering for home pickup and delivery, China’s edaixi (eWash) illustrated the online-to-offline (O2O) business model. As yet unclear in 2016 was the optimal way to organize third-party laundry service providers,... View Details
- March 2017 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Ant Financial (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Ying Zhang, Krishna G. Palepu, Anthony K. Woo and Nancy Hua Dai
Headquartered in Hangzhou (China), Ant Financial has grown into a fintech “Unicorn.” The fintech empire that the company established spanned verticals such as mobile and online payment (Alipay), money market fund (Yu’e Bao), wealth management (Ant Fortune),... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace, and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Supplement
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (B)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details