Identifying and Explaining International and National Businesses' Strategic Choices in Iranian Platform Markets

In the last two decades, digital platform markets have changed the global e-commerce landscape, and in Iran, the investment of international and domestic venture capitalists has led to the formation of these emerging markets. The purpose of this study is to respond to the need of new platforms that have not yet entered the market, to provide a local model of choices and strategic factors derived from field studies at the national level to address the challenges of this entry and deepening their knowledge in this area to be helpful for them. In the present study, by examining two successful cases, one of which (SNAPP) was established with foreign investment and the other (Tapsi) with domestic investment, and a failed platform (Carpino) with domestic investment, in online taxi platform market, in two stages, first with a multiple-case study strategy and through the tools of interviewing senior and middle managers and collecting related archival reports, data was collected and then with The use of contextual analysis was analyzed. In the second stage, by collecting data through a questionnaire from experts active in this field and then using the method of interpretive structural modeling, a model of causal relationships between these strategic factors was presented. The results show that 8 themes are considered as strategic choices in entering the platform markets, which include new platform development strategy, entry timing strategy, entry order strategy, software strategy, business strategy, chicken and egg dilemma strategy, funding strategy and pricing strategy.