Economics and Electronic Commerce: Survey and Research Directions

This article reviews developments in the growing body of research on electronic commerce from the perspective of economic analysis. Our goals are fourfold. First, we construct a new framework for understanding electronic commerce research. Second, we identify the range of applicable theory and current research in the context of the new conceptual model. Third, we offer an assessment of the state-ofthe-art of knowledge about electronic commerce phenomena in terms of the levels of analysis that we propose. And, fourth, we chart the directions along which some of the most useful work in this area might be developed. Our survey and framework are intended to provide the stimulus for researchers from IS, our reference discipline, and other fields in schools of business and management to recognize that research on electronic commerce in business school research, broadly defined. As such, one can expect to see developments in this research area in the next several years occur across business school multiple disciplines, as well as a growing impetus to increase interdisciplinary communication and interaction. _____________________________________________________________________________________