Digital Platforms Governance Challenges and the Regulation of AI: From Micro to Macro, a seminar by Professor Annabelle Gawer (University of Surrey)

Digital Platforms Governance Challenges and the Regulation of AI: From Micro to Macro

By Professor Annabelle Gawer from the University of Surrey

Abstract

In this seminar, Professor Annabelle Gawer, Professor of Digital Economy and Director of the Centre of Digital Economy (CoDE) at the University of Surrey Business School, will present two papers that address both micro and macro aspects of the challenges of governing digital platforms.

Paper 1: “Inconsistent platform governance and social contagion of misconduct in digital ecosystems: A complementors perspective”. This study investigates how complementors’ experiences of platform governance impact their compliance behaviour in digital ecosystems. In an inductive qualitative study of Amazon Marketplace, we find that Amazon sellers engage in behaviours ranging from full compliance to repeated infringement. Sellers also report experiencing sustained discrepancies between the platform’s declared practices, which ostensibly support sellers’ interests, and its undeclared practices, which appear not to. Additionally, we find evidence that the sellers’ experience of this inconsistent platform governance can trigger social contagion of misconduct. We develop a process model that elucidates the mechanisms of this social contagion: when complementors observe the platform to be an unreliable enforcer of its own rules and notice that cheating complementors seem to go unpunished and prosper, it erodes their trust in the platform, which leads some of them to legitimize misconduct as a defense against unfair competition under what they perceive to be the indifferent eye of the platform authority. In our discussion, we develop three contributions: (1) We theorise the observed inconsistent platform governance and suggest that it may be an endemic feature of platform behaviour caused by tensions between the platform’s conflicting objectives. (2) We enrich the platform strategy literature by expanding our understanding of how complementors experience platform power. (3) We clarify how the study validates and extends theories of social contagion. We conclude with a discussion of the study’s limitations, avenues for future research, and policy implications.

Paper 2: “The Political Economy and Geopolitics of AI Regulation”. This paper offers a conceptualization of the political economy and geopolitics of AI regulation and argues that AI regulation reflects domestic political economy and geopolitics. Rather than cataloguing legal updates or debating abstract principles, we identify the underlying forces and strategic dimensions shaping how regulation is designed, contested, and enacted globally. By clarifying the key actors, motivations, and institutional logics at play, we aim to provide executives, policymakers, and technologists with a more actionable lens through which to engage this evolving—and increasingly consequential—terrain. We urge layered, sector-embedded governance that will allow AI to revitalize economies while checking corporate concentration, aligning suppliers with adopters, and keeping markets contestable.

About the speaker

Professor Annabelle Gawer is one of the world’s leading experts on the business strategy of digital platforms and ecosystems. Her expertise includes digital strategy and business models, digital platforms, and connected ecosystem strategy. She was the UK’s most-cited female academic in business and economics in 2025, 2023, and 2022 as a multi-year recipient of the Clarivate Highly-Cited Researcher Award.

A Fellow of the prestigious British Academy, Professor Gawer is a Chaired Professor of Digital Economy and the Director of the Centre of Digital Economy at the University of Surrey. She is also a Visiting Professor at IMD in Lausanne, where she teaches in the Building Digital Ecosystems program and contributes to research projects alongside IMD colleagues.

The recipient of the 2024 Theory-to-Practice Strategy Award at the Vienna Strategy Summit and the author of 4 books and over 60 academic articles, Annabelle Gawer is a pioneering management scholar, adviser to multinational companies, and an internationally renowned expert for policymakers in Europe, the UK, and the US.

Her leading-edge research on digital platforms and ecosystems has impacted academia, government, and business. She has worked closely with many international companies in an advisory capacity, supporting C-Suite executives in shaping their digital strategy and building successful, digitally connected ecosystems.

She has held faculty positions at INSEAD and Imperial College London and visiting faculty positions at Harvard Business School, University of St Gallen, London Business School, and Oxford University, where she has taught and directed executive education programs. She is frequently invited to serve as a keynote speaker at high-level conferences worldwide.

Professor Gawer has advised the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as a Digital Expert to the CMA’s new Digital Markets Unit (2023-2025), which aims to set rules of conduct to limit the abuses of power of Big Tech platforms. Previously, she served as an expert in the European Commission’s Observatory of the Online Platform Economy Expert Group (2018-2021). She has authored an important report for the European Parliament on the economic and societal effects of online platforms. She advises the UK House of Lords, the UK Government, and the OECD on the regulation of online platforms.

Her latest book in English, The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power (2019), was co-authored with M. Cusumano (MIT) and D. Yoffie (Harvard Business School) and translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and French. The French updated version is titled “Plateformes: Le Business Model qui Domine le Monde” (Dunod, 2022).

Annabelle Gawer first studied math and engineering in France, then moved to the US to study industrial engineering and engineering management at Stanford University, worked for a few years in telecoms in France, and then pursued a doctorate at MIT before embarking on an academic career as a business school professor and management scholar. She holds French and British citizenship.