Socio-Economic Review, 2021, Vol. 00, No. 0, 1–33 doi: 10.1093/ser/mwab014 Article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ser/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ser/mwab014/6224398 by guest on 13 April 2021 Article The platform economy matures: measuring pervasiveness and exploring power Martin Kenney1,*, Dafna Bearson2 and John Zysman3 1Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) and the Department of Human Ecology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA and 2BRIE and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1234, USA and 3BRIE, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, and the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1234, USA *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract Online platforms are pervasive and powerful in today’s economy. We explore the in- creased centrality of platforms in two ways. First, we measure the extent to which platforms are insinuating themselves into the economy. We accomplish this by ana- lyzing the presence of platforms as intermediating organizations across all US ser- vice industries at the six-digit North American Industry Classification System code level. Our results show that 70% of service industries, representing over 5.2 million establishments, are potentially affected by one or more platforms. Secondly, we un- dertake a detailed firm-level case study of the mega-platform, Amazon, which dem- onstrates the ways that the aforementioned macro-level data is expressed by a single platform firm. This case study shows that Amazon’s growth trajectory has resulted in it entering and transforming existing industries and sectors.