Antecedents of user loyalty in platforms from the perspective of network effects

One of the main challenges of platform businesses is losing valuable customers and customer loyalty is one of the goals that platform businesses are looking for. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the antecedents of user loyalty in platforms from the perspective of network effects.

In terms of purpose, this research is applied, and in terms of research strategy, it is theme analysis. Data was collected through in-depth interviews. The characteristic of these people has been the use and preference of an internet taxi platform to carry out their activities. Data collection continued until the theoretical saturation stage and 19 in-depth interviews were conducted.

After the theoretical saturation and implementation of the interviews, the coding process was carried out and 250 raw codes were extracted, and finally, due to the plurality of semantically and conceptually similar codes, the codes were converted into 12 basic themes and 6 organizing themes. Organized themes include rewards to contributors, partnership with another platform or industry, platform infrastructure upgrade, positive feedback mechanism between demand and supply side, trust in demand side actors and aggressive competition of competitors and finally the final model was presented.