Institutional nature of digital platforms

The article considers the grounds of digital platforms as an institution, and the existing approaches to their analysis. Despite lack of the conceptions of the institutional nature of digital platforms, their common ground is transaction cost savings. However, digital platforms not only reduce transaction costs, but also change the structure of business processes and the architecture of the transactions themselves. Digitalization processes and the active development of digital platforms give rise to new types of costs - the costs of resistance to digitalization and the costs of digital resistance. Digital platforms have unique potential and tools for constructing social reality and institutional designing not only economic, but also all social processes. Actually, platforms represent a new form of institutionalization of socio-economic relations. At the micro level the determining factor is the analysis of the institutions’ impact on the interactions of individuals within individual platform solutions, where conforming to certain rules of behavior on the platform will form the core of future scientific problems.