Platform ecosystems as rent networks: Integrating market, infrastructural and nonmarket dimensions

Platform ecosystems operate simultaneously across infrastructural, market and nonmarket domains, yet scholarship has typically examined these dimensions in isolation, limiting analysis of how platform power operates across them. The Rent Networks Model addresses this gap by treating these as interdependent dimensions. Integrating transaction cost economics with Lukes’ three-dimensional conception of power, the model shows efficiency and power are not competing explanations but co-constituted processes: the same organizational arrangements that reduce coordination costs also concentrate control. Building on Baron's rent chain, the model extends its logic to platform contexts where infrastructural, market and nonmarket processes operate concurrently rather than sequentially. The model structures analysis of platform ecosystems through a three-circle topology spanning infrastructural, market and nonmarket domains. The topology makes visible the interdependencies among actors across the three circles: platforms, market participants and the sociopolitical environment. This visibility enables analysis of how structural position shapes strategic possibilities and how actions in one domain interact with mechanisms in others. Two cases illustrate the model's application: Australia's News Media Bargaining Code , where regulatory intervention produced selective payments to publishers while leaving algorithmic control over discovery intact; and Epic Games v. Apple , where sustained litigation constrained Apple's commission structure while leaving its control over iOS distribution intact. Across these different cases, specific mechanisms changed while platforms retained their intermediary position within the ecosystem. The framework's primary contribution is analytical: it connects disputes that disciplinary boundaries would otherwise keep apart and surfaces patterns in platform power that examination within any single domain would miss.