Compliance Strategies in Emerging Digital Markets: A Comparative Qualitative Analysis of Platform Regulatory Strategies

Abstract

Introduction: As rapid platform innovation collides with legal frameworks, digital market regulation in emerging economies creates strategic tension. Accordingly, for digital platforms, this endeavor explores the way in which country of origin influences regulatory response, architecture conditions regulatory exposure, and how these two attributes interact within a single institutional environment. Method: Through exploratory qualitative multi-case design, the study compares the compliance strategies of Trendyol, a foreign-backed hybrid platform and Sahibinden.com, a domestic broker operating without foreign investment. Each firm’s regulatory trajectory is analyzed and reconstructed using the documentary record of the Turkish Competition Authority. Results or Findings: The results indicate that although the regime drives both firms toward eventual accommodation, their responses differ. Firm origin shapes the range of non-market tools available, with Trendyol drawing on a broader set of statutory mechanisms than Sahibinden.com. Platform architecture shapes where compliance cost is absorbed. Trendyol shifts its concessions into peripheral activity through structural separation, whereas Sahibinden.com internalizes them within its core data asset. Discussion or Conclusion: This article develops a model of segmented compliance in which regulatory adaptation is distributed across distinct layers of platform organization. The model shows that the regulatory regime fixes the outer bounds of response, firm origin shapes the depth of the repertoire deployed within those bounds, and platform architecture determines the organizational location at which compliance costs are absorbed. The model contributes to the institution-based view, non-market strategy, and research on multi-sided markets.