Coordination or Coercion? Quasi-Vertical Control Instruments over Pickup- Point Agents in Platform Marketplaces

Ymer. 2026. Vol. 25. No. 09. P. 374–400.

Starostin A.

Platform marketplaces deliver goods through independent pickup-point agents who remain legally autonomous yet are steered by non-ownership, quasi-vertical control instruments. This study asks when such instruments provoke open protest (voice) and when agents instead withdraw quietly (exit). Twenty-one instrument applications by Russian marketplaces (Ozon, Wildberries, Yandex Market) are assembled, sampled across a financial-informational-spatial typology and three levels of agent lock-in (“gravity”). Seventeen of them are calibrated against documented anchors and analysed with fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. One configuration is consistently associated with voice. The configuration survives the removal of each platform’s cases in turn, and both contested codings of its pivotal case reproduce it. No configuration reaches consistency for exit at this sample size. This is an unambiguous null, reported as such rather than forced. A mechanism is developed for why unobservability tilts the response toward voice. An opaque rule withholds the parameters an agent would need to price exit while supplying a legible grievance, so protest becomes the cheaper available response. Gravity enters neither configuration and is read as segmenting exposure to instruments, not as conditioning the response to them.

Keywords: multi-sided platforms, platform governance, fuzzy-set QCA, quasi-vertical control, pickup-point networks