In digital platforms, value is co-created by the platform sponsor and an ecosystem of autonomous complementors (Jacobides et al., 2018; Kretschmer et al., 2021). The value cocreation process begins with the platform sponsor, as the initiator of the ecosystem, choosing the product and market space to compete and choosing which parts of the value creation process to perform while opening the rest to the complementors. The platform literature in the technology and strategy streams has documented that such a choice encompasses the technology (Boudreau,
2017; Gawer, 2014) and governance (Chen et al., 2021; Gawer, 2020) elements and shapes the value creation process. However, we do not fully understand how the scope choice impacts the complementors’ performance and their decisions to participate and contribute to value creation within the ecosystem. Since platform sponsors can only indirectly influence the complementors, understanding how scope choices can impact the complementors is vital. This project examines this issue by studying the complementors’ decisions in response to platform scope changes.