Platform Affinity and the Geography of Platform Success

This article investigates how standardized platform rules interact with regional and national contexts to shape digital labour outcomes in Southeastern Europe. Using a multilevel analysis of Etsy shops across eleven countries, the study develops the concept of platform affinity to explain why shop performance varies across space. The results show that education and digital skills are conditional assets, activated only where labour-market time pressures and institutional infrastructures permit their use. Capital-city regions consistently exhibit a penalty due to congestion and scarcity of discretionary time, while non-capital regions with moderate economic activity and higher educational resources see stronger returns. At the national level, institutional infrastructures such as payment systems, VAT regimes, and postal reliability generate persistent baseline shifts, structuring opportunity across borders. These findings reinforce the territorialization of algorithmic governance and highlight the uneven geographies of platform success.

Corporate governance · Payment · Reliability (semiconductor) · Scarcity · Structuring · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Digital Platforms and Economics · Sharing Economy and Platforms