Special Section: Globalization and Electronic Commerce

The demand of market globalization has raised the challenge of semantic interoperation in and between traditional and electronic fragmented markets and driven the development of integration technology. This paper argues that by comparing the cost advantages of technical integration and internationalization in production and distribution, semantic integration technology will lead to an overall shift toward global specialization and global collaboration. In this shift, three important effects in terms of semantic integration effect, market-tomarket collaboration effect and production specialization effect, brought by the increasing use of integration technology, will change the behaviour, role adoption and competition strategy of global market participants. The analytical framework for predicting this shift explains the historical changes and the emergence of global markets. The analysis has several important implications for firms to make correct corporate strategies of how to adopt roles to participate in competitive global markets by optimizing resource allocation and developing niche markets.