Abstract Strategy research has long linked sustained competitive advantage to barriers to imitation. We highlight network effects as an alternative mechanism and adopt a geotemporal perspective to theorize how firms sustain advantage as it unfolds over time in international markets. Our study examines this question through the performance persistence of social platforms, focusing on how institutional and demand-side conditions shape the sustainability of platforms’ competitive advantages. We propose that intellectual property rights protection may restrict the degree of freedom in information dissemination, dampening the role of network effects in sustaining superior performance, whilst demand heterogeneity may enhance the value of sizable network membership for information consumption. Evidence from a cross-country dataset of platforms supports these predictions. These findings enrich our understanding of how geographic variations shape the endurance of a platform’s competitive advantage over time, offering implications for both global strategy and platform governance.
Yang et al. (2026) studied this question.