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...

Entrepreneurs in electronic markets move in industries where a strong corporate brand can deliver competitive advantage through differentiation. It not only facilitates increased attention. Despite ever-increasing followers and me-too products, it enables a company to build a positive image on behalf of the relevant target groups – be they consumers/customers, shareholders, employees, or indust...

Enterprises face stiff competition and the pressure to improve efficiency and productivity. Since the cost of production could be reduced in the last years, further reductions can be obtained e.g. by spreading production processes over organizational boundaries to use the key competencies of the involved organizations. This shift increases the number of external links and transactions of enterp...

Newcomers to electronic markets are forced to accumulate customers as rapidly as possible. One strategy to fulfil this aim is so called viral marketing, which seems an appropriate term for describing the pattern in which Internet companies spread by making use of customer referrals. The aim of this article is to describe and explain common features of viral marketing strategies and to outline c...

Electronic markets are not just evolving they are designed. As such providing electronic trading venues is an entrepreneurial activity. The institutional approach followed here introduces a market operator as an economic player. As the entrepreneur charges fees for his service of operating an electronic market, the transaction cost savings incurred by information technology are essentially full...

will compete. On the contrary, their integration would resu!t in a big monopoly. Similarly, electronic markets would emerge in several places simultaneously and initially be unwilling to merge. Only as competitive pressure inceases they would integrate horizontally, probably forming a national market. Thus, I agree with Schmid that electronic markets are (or better, can be) open systems technol...

In many industries agent-intermediated markets are inefficient because information about latent demand and supply never gets to market. We demonstrate how information technology in the form of an agent-intermediated electronic market (EM) alleviates this problem by enhancing the agent-as-market-maker using the international freight transportation industry as an example. We find that an EM incre...

The electronic markets hypothesis holds that information technology use influences the dismantling of vertical firm boundaries because of reductions in the cost of transactions between firms. Anecdotal evidence of merger and alliance activity for information goods producing firms seems to be at odds with these predictions of an IT-driven rise in vertical market coordination structures. An inter...