Much of the early research in electronic markets suggested that the proliferation of ecommerce would ultimately threaten the presence of intermediaries in electronic value chains. However, a careful analysis of the structure and functions of electronic marketplaces indicates that intermediaries provide many value-adding functions that cannot be easily substituted or ‘internalised’ through direc...

We examine the relative and complementary effectiveness of trust-building strategies in online environments. While prior research has examined various antecedents to trust, we investigated two trust-building mechanisms more in depth: Web site trust and vendor reputation. We tried to understand the relative effectiveness of these two important mechanisms to provide online businesses with a clear...

European businesses today are showing a significant interest in the concept of business process redesign, not in the least because its advocates promise a dramatic decrease in costs and a similar increase in sales. Since information and communication technology seem to play enabling roles, one can expect electronic markets to be significantly contributing to the effects of business process rede...

Previous research indicated that the performance of interorganizational processes in electronic markets and hierarchies is influenced by eight factors: stakeholders, competition, information technology, market network (re)design, risk, process (re)design, information, and trust. This paper focuses on the inter-organizational processes related to the settlement (clearing) of cross border Euro pa...

Improved consumer addressability in electronic markets allows vendors to send focused promotional messages to specific customers, facilitating a targeted advertising approach that we call “narrowcasting”. We characterize a rational consumer’s market participation decision and identify a narrowcasting firm’s optimal targeting decision when buyers face nontrivial search costs. In the special case...

Electronic intermediaries enable and support electronic markets with their services. This paper provides a framework based on industrial dynamics theory, for the analysis of the influence of electronic intermediaries on the performance of markets. We define five market performance indicators based on the analysis of 10 well-described cases from the literature on electronic markets that were set...

With the advent of the Internet, we have seen existing markets transform and new ones emerge. In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of this phenomenon by developing a unified theory about the role that IT plays in affecting market information, transparency and market structure. In particular, we introduce a new theoretical framework which uncovers the process and the forces that, to...

Negotiation can be regarded as playing a game with certain rules. If the rules change, the game has to be played differently. Compared to traditional markets, electronic markets can have fundamentally different characteristics such as cost structure or the level of transparency. These differences have already stimulated the tremendous success of one breed of electronic market negotiations: auct...

Several authors have argued that because modern computing and communications technologies reduce buyer search costs and other market inefficiencies, there should be intense price competition between sellers in electronic markets. This paper examines this prediction using data on the airline ticket offerings of online travel agents (OTA). We find that different OTAs offer tickets with substantia...

legal actions remains sufficiently predictable. Such predictions on legal conflicts have to be shared among economic actors to stabilize mutual expectations of behavior. This stability then helps to reduce legal risks. Predictability is not necessarily related to precise legal knowledge. It is sufficient to know when legal specialists have to get involved. Economic actors prepare for such situa...