A literature review of electronic marketplace research:Themes, theories and an integrative framework

Shan Wang & Shi Zheng & Lida Xu & Dezheng Li &Huan Meng

Published online: 5 June 2008# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Abstract In this paper, we presented a literature review of thecurrent status of electronic marketplace (EM) research. Itconsists of 109 journal articles published in 19 journals thatare appropriate outlets for electronic commerce research. Theresults show that an increasing volume of EM research has beenconducted from diverse theoretical perspectives. Based oncontent analysis, we identified eight research themes, five typesof methodologies and six categories of background theorieswhich most EM researches were grounded in. By combiningresearch themes and the patterns of the background theories, anintegrative framework of EM was proposed to represent theparadigms of EM researches. The framework shows that EMphenomena can be addressed from three perspectives:information systems, inter-organizational/social structure and

strategic management perspectives. This framework suggests aparsimonious and cohesive way to explain key EM researchissues such as EM adoption, success and impact.

Keywords Electronic marketplace . Literature review .

Research theme . Integrative framework

1 Introduction

ElectronicMarketplaces (EMs) are becoming important playersin the internet economy because they promise to greatlyimprove market efficiency, reduce transaction cost and generatenew revenue. Garicano and Kaplan (2001) studied a used carEM, and concluded that the EM lowered car prices by 5% andtangible transaction cost by 80%. Moreover, due to themeasures taken by the EM to control transaction risk, the EMdid not increase adverse selection cost. The prosperity ofelectronic marketplaces is a worldwide phenomenon. InAmerica, B2C EMs such as ebay, and B2B EMs such asElemica, Agentrics and GHX in the chemical, retail andhealthcare industry, respectively, have gained significantmarket share in their respective industries. In China, Alibaba,the biggest B2B EMs in the world, has attracted 24 million1

corporate users. It also invests in Taobao, the biggest onlineB2C EM in China that connects 30 million registered users.Currently Taobao is experiencing a high speed growth periodat an annual rate of 110%. By investing in Taobao, Alibabaintends to bridge B2B and B2C EM. This means that acompany selling products in Taobao can enter Alibaba websiteto source their products directly from Taobao interface.

The growth of electronic marketplaces has also attractedinterests from many researchers in recent years. Researchers

Inf Syst Front (2008) 10:555–571DOI 10.1007/s10796-008-9115-2

S. Wang (*) : S. ZhengSchool of Business, Renmin University,Beijing 100872, Chinae-mail: wangs7@gmail.com

L. XuDepartment of Information Technology and Decision Science,Old Dominion University,Norfolk, VA 23529, USA

L. XuCollege of Economics and Management,Beijing Jiaotong University,Beijing 100044, China

L. XuSchool of Management,Xian Jiaotong University,Xian 710049, China

D. Li :H. MengSchool of International Business,Beijing Foreign Studies University,Beijing 100089, China 1 http://www.alibaba.com

studied EMs from different perspectives, such as pricingissues, the adoption of EMs, the value and impact of EMs,etc. Awide body of literature has emerged that sheds light onkey issues of EMs. However, the studies are scattered inmany journals, and there is a lack of systematic review ofEM literature. Some reviews about e-commerce werecompleted in recent years (Ngai and Wat 2002; Warehamet al. 2005; Shaw 1999). However, the concept and scopeof e-commerce still differ from those of EMs, so theliterature reviews of e-commerce researches can not fullyshed light on the specific characteristics and the currentstatus of EM researches. At the same time, a fewresearchers have reviewed certain aspects of EMs, such aselectronic market design (Anandalingam et al. 2005),corporate portals (Dias 2001), and auctions (Herschlagand Zwick 2001). However, these reviews did not present afull picture of the current EM research themes. Grieger(2003) did a standard literature review of electronicmarketplaces, but his review was more concerned with thestatus of EMs (such as EM definitions and classifications),than that of EM researches, and his major target was toinitiate researches of EMs from a supply chain managementperspective. A comprehensive review is needed in order toadvance researches in EM field and guide future research.

This paper sets out to provide a review of EM literature inorder to lend insight into our understanding of EMs. Througha comprehensive literature review, this paper tries to answerthe following questions: (1) what are the major researchthemes about EMs; (2) what research methodologies are used;(3) what theories are adopted and whether there are anypatterns or common characteristics of these theories. In thenext section, we introduced the methodology and process ofthis literature review, followed by our results, includingpatterns of EM research themes, methodologies, and theories.These results formed the answers to the above researchquestions. Finally, we developed an integrative framework bycombining the most significant theories and research themesobserved in the literature, to present the current state of EMresearch in a parsimonious and cohesive way.

2 Methodology

The first step of a literature review is to clearly define thevariables and set the boundary of the review (Webster andWatson 2002). This is not a trivial task, especially for thesubject of electronic marketplace, due to its multiple mean-ings and fuzzy boundary that are caused by “the profusion ofe-marketplace models” (Gengatharen and Standing 2005).The complaints about EM name “jargon jungle” can befound in many researches (Grieger 2003; Sculley and Woods2001; Hopkins and Kehoe 2006). Wang and Archer (2007)provided a comprehensive review of EM definitions and

classifications. Some researchers used the term “electronicmarkets” in a broad sense, to refer to all the electronicallyconnected buyers and sellers. These are decentralizedmarkets and sometimes equated with the entire Internet.Studying firm behaviors on the entire Internet are actuallythe focus of electronic commerce researches, for whichsystematic reviews have been done. We limited our scope tocentralized EMs and adopted the definition of Grieger(2003), that EM “usually brings buyers and supplierstogether (in a ‘virtual’ sense) in one central market spaceand implicitly involves trade financing organizations, logis-tics companies, taxation authorities and regulators”.

We took the traditional approach to systematicallysample the literature, and targeted high quality journals assources of article collection. The original plan of thisresearch was to conduct a cross disciplinary study andcompare EM researches from information systems (IS),economics and marketing literatures. We searched the topnine economics journals listed in Stigler’s paper (Stigleret al. 1995) and the top ten marketing journals in paper ofMort et al. (2004). However, only few relevant articles wereidentified, so we concluded that major EM researches werecompleted by IS researchers. Marketing and economicresearchers did not study EMs as central platforms, butfocused on the more decentralized electronic markets. Thisis counter-intuitive since many earliest researches aboutEMs are grounded in economics theories, such as transac-tion cost theory and agency theory (Malone et al. 1987,1989; Bakos 1991a; Gurbaxani and Whang 1991).

Finally we limited our literature search to the IS field. weanalyzed the top nine journals ranked by IS world2 and thetop ten e-commerce journals identified by Bharati andTarasewich (2002). We choose both highly ranked tradi-tional information systems(IS) and new ecommerce jour-nals, considering that EMs are new phenomena, but toptraditional IS journals are normally lagged at publishing thelatest but less mature research issues. This approachallowed us to include more EM articles in our sample.Then a keyword search was performed for each journal,including “electronic markets”, “electronic marketplaces”,“hubs”, “portals”, “electronic exchanges”, “electronicintermediaries” and “inter-organizational systems”, etc.Our strategy was to generate as much articles as possibleat the beginning, and then exclude some of them by humanscreening. Compared with Grieger’s research, we did notlimit our subjects to B2B EMs, since the researches of B2Cand B2B EMs have similar theoretical backgrounds, andeach research stream may reinforce each other. Onehundred eighty articles were identified through first roundsearch. Then after reading each article’s abstract, or the fullarticle when necessary, we excluded 71 articles whose

2 http://www.isworld.org/

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research subjects did not satisfy our definition of EMs. Thisresulted 109 articles for this study.

Content analysis was adopted to analyze the samplearticles, and Nvivo, a qualitative research software, wasused to support data analysis. Articles were imported toNvivo, and the notes were made in it directly whenreviewing the articles. The initial set of codes about thetypes of EMs, research themes and methodologies, weredeveloped by the main author, discussed among research-ers, and then revised. Two researchers coded the articles,and inter-coder agreement was calculated for each code. Weused the Kappa coefficient to measure inter-coder agree-ment, with a kappa coefficient greater than 0.7 suggested asacceptable (Neuendrof 2002; MacQueen et al. 1998).

Figure 1 lists the number of EM articles by year. Anincreasing trend of the number of articles confirms theescalated interest in EM researches. Interestingly, bycomparing the number of articles (Fig. 1) and that of EMson the internet (Fig. 2), we see the prosperity of EMsaround 2000 spurred interest among researchers, who thenembarked on this stream of research. However, weidentified only four articles in 2003, which sharplycontrasted to the year of 2002 and 2004. We checked oursample journals for the year 2003, and did not find anymistakes in the paper search.

The sample articles were classified according to whetherthey studied B2B, B2C or general e-markets that includedboth B2B and B2C EMs. Table 1 presents the codingresults and the kappa coefficient for each code. A majorityof the EMs studied are either B2B or EMs in a generalsense. This may imply that as separate entities, B2B EMshave attracted greater interest from researchers than B2CEMs. The small number of B2C EMs can also be caused byour definition of EMs, which limits the subjects to entitiesthat have central, virtual locations. In the B2C field,researchers are more concerned with issues such as pricingstrategies of online stores (Brynjolfsson and Smith 1999;Bailey 1998) or consumer behaviors on the entire internet(Degeratu et al. 2000; Mitra et al. 1999; Brynjolfsson andSmith 2000), than issues about individual B2C EMs.

3 Major themes in EM research

In this section, we reported the coding results for major EMresearch themes, followed by the methodologies adopted byresearchers in Section 4. Eight research themes wereidentified. They are: EM success, EM adoption, EM design,EM impact, EM and trust, EM and SMEs, intelligent agentsin EMs, and overview of EMs, as shown in Table 2 andexplained in the following.

3.1 EM success

Articles that studied success factors, reasons of failure,success strategies of EMs, or EM performance and itsantecedents were coded in this category. Exploring EMsuccess is the most interested topic for researchers. A widerange of factors/strategies are found contributing to thesuccess and failure of EMs, which can be grouped into fourcategories: market maker strategies, EM participation, EMcharacteristics and environmental factors (see Table 3), asexplained briefly in the following.

Market maker strategies are factors that can be manip-ulated by market makers, including choosing the rightgovernance structure, the right service provision strategies,building organizational capability that’s needed to run anEM, and strategically manipulating EM operation. Thegovernance structure, including ownership and partnership

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Fig. 2 The development and consolidation of B2B electronic market-places. Source: Deloitte & Touche, Pembroke Consulting and Booz,Allen and Hamilton (Day et al. 2003)

Table 1 Distribution of articles by EM subjects

EM subjects Number of articles (percentage) Kappa coefficient

B2B 53 (49) 0.733B2C 8 (7) 0.638Both 50 (46) 0.733

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structure, is the system by which business corporations aredirected and controlled. A good governance structure canallow an EM to lessen environmental uncertainty, gainaccess to key resources such as funds, expertise, andtechnologies, and achieve market liquidity quickly. Theliterature supports four opinions about the governancestructure of EMs. First, an ownership-product match isthe best suitable strategy for EMs. For example, Hopkinsand Kehoe (2006) suggested that ownership types (private,public or consortium owned EMs) were associated withdifferent product characteristics (commodities, bespoke anddurables). Second, a consortium type of ownership structureis the best suitable strategy for EMs. Laseter and Bodily(2004) surveyed 273 surviving e-marketplaces and showedthat consortium ownership structure had the desirableimpact of a positive relationship to revenues due to thetransaction volume of customers/owners. Other works(Fong et al. 1998; Gengatharen et al. 2005) also showedthat the wide involvement of stakeholders in the ownershipwas conducive for EM performance. Third, some types ofconsortia are considered better than others. Ordanini (2006)surveyed 45 EMs in Europe and found that EMs owned byestablished companies were more likely to succeed thanthose owned by financial intuitions and venture capitalists.This is because financial institutions can only provide monetarysupport, but established companies can bring industry exper-tise, liquidity as well as monetary support to EMs. Finally,although partnerships also offer an EM access to externalresources, researchers are controversial about the significanceof the role of partnerships. Lenz et al. (2002) surveyed 248EMs and found that partnering skills of EMs were critical forimproving their competitive position. Partnerships can helpEMs to build liquidity, and extend the scope of value chainand service scope (such as logistical and settlement services).However, based on evidence from case studies, Gengatharenand Standing (2005) suggested that strategic partnerships hadonly medium impact on EM performance.

Superior value that EMs offer to their customers isimportant to their success, and is realized through serviceprovision strategies of EM operators. EM operators canchoose the type of value offered to users, such as

aggregation or supply chain based benefits (Thoung2002); or the level of services such as information levelservice vs. transaction level service (Kollmann 2000).When choosing the type and level of services, an EMoperator should also consider the fit between value addedby EMs and value needed by users (O’Reilly and Finnegan2005), or the fit between service/functionalities and productcharacteristics. For example, Hopkins and Kehoe (2006)suggested that group A services such as auctions andelectronic catalogue fit commodities well, whereas supplychain services fit bespoke products better. The literaturealso suggests that a gradual expansion of service provisionis a suitable strategy. For example, Fong et al. (1998)suggested that market operators should provide basic, corefunctions initially. Laseter and Bodily (2004) suggested thatthe scope of the service was not necessarily wide. A broadservice provision lowers revenues rather than raising them,which suggests that focus is more important than oneanticipated. Bhargava and Choudhary (2004) suggested thatquality-differentiated versioning of EMs’ service relative toother information goods sellers was a profit maximizationstrategy for EM operators due to network effects of EMs.However, different voices exist. Gosain and Palmer (2004)found that transaction and relational benefits from advancedservices such as transactions and supply chain managementservice were found to impact EM performance positively,while the more basic information service has no suchimpact. Based on historical event analysis, Guo (2007)argued that there was an increasing trend for B2B EMs todevelop integration technologies for improving their func-tions. This implies that providing advanced supply chainmanagement service which is normally based on inter-organizational integration, is important for EMs to achievecompetitive advantage.

The internal capability of an EM operator is alsoimportant for the EM success. Two kinds of capabilities arefrequently mentioned in the literature. One is IT competenceof EM operators and the other is the amount of financialresources that they own. Some researchers found that thepoor system development and management skill of an EMcould lead to its failure. This is especially a problem ofgovernment subsidized EM project (Gengatharen andStanding 2005; Gengatharen et al. 2005; Lenz et al. 2002;Fisher and Craig 2005; Mitev 1999). Financial resourcessuch as funding support are also important to EM perfor-mance (Gengatharen and Standing 2005; Laseter and Bodily2004; Fisher and Craig 2005). EM operator can also improveEM performance through strategically manipulating itsoperation, such as being in the market early and leveragingearly mover advantage (Laseter and Bodily 2004; Gosainand Palmer 2004; Bakos 1991a), adapting business modelcontinually to environmental changes (Gengatharen et al.2005), etc.

Table 2 Distribution of articles by research themes

Research themes Number of articles(percentage)

Kappa coefficient

EM success 25 (22) 0.801EM impact 21 (18) 0.851EM adoption 15 (13) 0.857EM design 15 (13) 0.937Agents in EMs 8 (7) 0.791EM and SMEs 5 (4) 1EM and trust 6 (5) 0.741Overview 22 (19) 0.862

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Table 3 EM success and failure factors

Contributing factors Brief description References

Market maker strategiesGovernance Ownership structure (independent or

consortium based)Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Hopkins and Kehoe (2006);Laseter and Bodily (2004); Fong et al. (1998); Ordanini(2006); O’Reilly and Finnegan (2005)

Partnership (with service providers, tradeassociation or technology vendors)

Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Lenz et al. (2002)

Superior value Value propositions of EMs (the types andlevels of EM functionalities)

Hopkins and Kehoe (2006); Laseter and Bodily (2004); Fonget al. (1998); Thoung (2002); O’Reilly and Finnegan (2005);Bhargava and Choudhary (2004); Clasen and Mueller (2006);Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Gosain and Palmer (2004);Strader and Hendrickson (1999); Lee and Clark(1997)

The fit between product characteristics(such as commodities or customizedproducts) and functionalities of EMs

Arunkundram and Sundararajan (1998); Agrawal et al. (2005);Hopkins and Kehoe (2006); Clasen and Mueller (2006)

EM capability Competences (IS development and projectmanagement skills)

Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Gosain and Palmer (2004);Gengatharen et al. (2005); Lenz et al. (2002); Fisher and Craig(2005); Mitev (1999)

Financial resources Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Laseter and Bodily (2004);Fisher and Craig (2005)

Strategic manipulation Timing (early mover advantage) Laseter and Bodily (2004); Gosain and Palmer (2004);Bakos (1991a)

Adaptation of the business model continuallyto environmental changes

Laseter and Bodily (2004)

Creating switching cost for users Bakos (1991a); Agrawal et al. (2005)Good marketing plan Gengatharen and Standing (2005)

EM participationTop managementsupport

Top management support commitment Gengatharen and Standing (2005)

Capability E-readiness and computer literacy of users Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Strader and Shaw (1997);Strader and Hendrickson 1999

Financial resources Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Fong et al. (1998);Lenz et al. (2002)

Purchasing maturity, i.e. the level ofprofessionalism in purchasing

Huber et al. (2004)

User non-cooperation Channel conflict; lack of social interactionin EMs; system incompatibility; existinghierarchical trading relationships

Fisher and Craig (2005); Mitev (1999); Fong et al. (1998);Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Strader andShaw (1997); Driedonks et al. (2005); Strader andHendrickson (1999); Lee and Clark (1997); Huberet al. (2004)

EM characteristicsMarket liquidity Critical mass/liquidity, sometimes measured

by the size of EMsGengatharen and Standing (2005); Lenz et al. (2002); Clasenand Mueller (2006); Lee and Clark (1997); Arunkundramand Sundararajan (1998); Huber et al. (2004)

Trust mechanism Trust or risk control mechanisms Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Fong et al. (1998); Lenzet al. (2002); O’Reilly and Finnegan (2005); Strader andHendrickson (1999)

Environmental factorsIndustry structure Industry structure (fragmented or concentrated) Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Hopkins and Kehoe (2006);

Laseter and Bodily (2004); O’Reilly and Finnegan (2005);Clasen and Mueller (2006); Huber et al. (2004); Reimers (2003)

Disintermediation Huber et al. (2004)Government support Government support and sponsorships Gengatharen and Standing (2005); Fong et al. (1998)

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EM participation, EM characteristics and environmentalcharacteristics also contribute to the success or failure ofEMs. For example, user non-cooperation caused by variousreasons such as the conflict between online and traditionalchannels, and the lack of social interaction in onlinechannels, can lead to a lack of participation and marketliquidity of an EM (Fisher and Craig 2005; Mitev 1999;Fong et al. 1998; Gengatharen and Standing 2005).Environmental factors such as industry structure andgovernment support are also related to EM success.Although it is said that EM is more suitable for fragmentedindustry structure, Laseter’s survey of 273 emarkets(Laseter and Bodily 2004) showed that industry concentra-tion had limited impact on firm performance.

In sum, a wide range of factors contributing to the successand failure of EMs. By simply counting the number of articlesthat studied a specific factor in Table 3, EM governancestructure, service provision strategies, user non-cooperation,and industry structures are the most interested amongresearchers. Furthermore, the above examination of thesefactors showed that researchers were controversial about howthese factors affect EM performance.

3.2 EM adoption

Researches that specifically analyzed the adoption decisionof EM users were classified into “EM adoption” category.This stream of research is based on not only traditionaltechnology adoption theories, such as diffusion of innova-tion theory (Hadaya 2006; Driedonks et al. 2005) andtechnology acceptance model (Lau et al. 2001), but alsoother theories, such as social network theory (Galbreth et al.2005; Christiaanse and Rodon 2005) and transaction costtheory (Choudhury et al. 1998), to order to incorporatemore EM specific factors. All the factors that were foundpotentially affecting users’ EM adoption decisions weregrouped into three categories based on UTAUT modeldeveloped by Venkatesh et al. (2003). Venkatesh et al.compared the differences and similarities among the mostpopular eight adoption theories, and created a UnifiedTheory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). InUTAUT, four super-constructs preceding the adoption ofinformation systems are developed by summarizing 14 baseconstructs from eight adoption theories. The super-constructs are: performance expectancy, effort expectancy,institutional influence, and facilitating conditions. Perfor-mance expectancy is the degree to which an individualbelieves that using the system will help to improve jobperformance. Effort expectancy is the degree of easeassociated with the use of the system. Institutional influenceis the degree to which an individual perceives thatimportant others believe they should use the new system.Facilitating conditions refer to the degree to which an

individual believes that an organizational and technicalinfrastructure exists to support use of the system. Fulldetails of the UTAUT model and its base theories are givenin the original paper (Venkatesh et al. 2003).

We classified all the factors that affected user’s decisionof EM adoption based on UTAUT model, and found thatEM adoption was affected mostly by performance expec-tancy, intuitional influence and facilitating conditions(Table 4). The effort expectancy in UTAUT model is notstudied by researchers. This coincides with the conclusionof Wang et al. (2006) conclusion that firms’ EM adoptiondecision was less affected by effort expectancy of users. Asfor performance expectancy, researchers studied variousbenefits of EMs that potential EM users may value, such asaggregation and supply chain based benefits, reducedtransaction cost, and competitive advantage, etc. Theantecedents of EM benefits were also studied, at boththe network and transactional level. For example, on thenetwork level, based on network theory, Christiaanse andRodon (2005) argued that since an organization was part ofthe industry network, the structural properties of thenetwork and the organization’s position in the network,such as network density, structural equivalence and cen-trality, affected the organization’s perceived benefits ofjoining an industry portal. At the transactional level,Choudhury et al. (1998) draw on transaction cost theory,and proposed that products with low asset specificity weremore suitable for EMs, and thus organizations were morelikely to adopt an EM for purchasing products with lowasset specificity. Companies’ adoption decisions of EMs arealso affected by institutional influences from externalparties (Teo et al. 2003). Buyers and sellers have differentconsiderations in making EM adoption decisions, Rask andKragh (2004) found that buyers tended to be proactive andplanning-oriented, while suppliers were driven by externalforces. Facilitating conditions such as top managementsupport, the previous use of ecommerce and the complexityof e-market implementation are also found important tofirms’ adoption decision (Hadaya 2006; Driedonks et al.2005; Lau et al. 2001; Wang et al. 2006; Strader andHendrickson 1999; Yu 2007). However, the demand forfacilitating conditions depends on the effort required byEM participation. Adopting simple aggregation based EMsrequires less efforts from users than adopting EMssupporting supply chain functionalities where systemintegration is normally needed, so users may adopt suchsimple EMs even if facilitating conditions are not widelypresent.

3.3 EM design

Researches that designed specific protocols or tradingmechanisms for EMs in order to enable more efficient

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EMs were coded in this category. Fifteen such articles werefound. Except for two review articles (Al-Naeem et al.2004; Anandalingam et al. 2005), others normally fall intotwo design approaches. First, some researchers proposednew types of e-markets. This is especially the case for thefinancial industry. For example, a new fixed income EM(Gallaugher 2002) and an annuity EM (Hagendorff et al.2006) were proposed as responses to the challenges andopportunities brought by the development of informationtechnology to the traditional fixed income and annuitymarkets. By extending the scope of existing EMs to mobilecommerce, Wicke (1999) proposed a new type of marketthat’s called mobility exchange.

Second, some researchers studied how to improve thedesign of existing electronic markets. The improvementswere made from multiple perspectives, such as designingbetter pricing schemes (Yoo et al. 2002; Dasgupta et al.2005), privacy and security enhancing mechanisms (Padovanet al. 2002; Rohm and Pernul 2000; Kalvenes and Basu2006), improved match between buyers and sellers (Gerberet al. 2004; Noia et al. 2004; Wu and Kleindorfer 2005;

Gomber and Maurer 2004), and efficient message exchangeprotocols (Vaishnavi and William 2003).

3.4 EM impact

Both the potential and realized impacts of EMs on users werecoded in this category. The articles studying the realizedimpacts of EMs were normally empirically based, and thosestudying the potential impacts of EMs were conceptual anddescriptive in nature. These articles together, addressed theimpacts of EMs from the following perspectives:

1. The value and economic benefits of utilizing an EM,such as transaction cost and inventory cost reduction,extended customer base, increased sales, and networkbenefits (such as cash netting and transportation optimi-zation) (Christiaanse and Rodon 2005; Choudhuryet al. 1998; Christiaanse 2005; Bakos 1991b, 1997;Benjamin and Wigand 1995; Subramaniam and Shaw2002; Strader and Shaw 1997; Benslimane et al. 2005).The value of an EM depends on its service provision

Table 4 User adoption of EMs based on UTAUT model

Factors Explanation References

Perceived benefits Types of benefits Rask and Kragh (2004); Strader and Hendrickson (1999);Koch (2002); Thuong et al. (2004); Zhu (2002, 2004)• Attaining resources and reduce transaction cost

• Efficiency• Competitive advantage• Aggregation vs. supply chain benefits• Information transparency (negative effects of EMs)• Risk (negatively effects of EMs)• Learning and testingNetwork level antecedents of EM benefits Driedonks et al. (2005); Galbreth et al. (2005); Christiaanse

and Rodon (2005)• Network externality/critical mass• Industry network structure characteristicssuch as network density, centrality, and structuralequivalence

Transactional antecedents of EM benefits Choudhury et al. (1998); Wang et al. (2006); Thuonget al. (2004); Weber (2006)• Uncertainty

• Asset specificity• Product characteristics• Order type and user type

Institutional influence The influences from a company’s key customers,suppliers and other external groups

Hadaya (2006); Driedonks et al. (2005); Lau et al. (2001);Wang et al. (2006); Rask and Kragh (2004); Yu (2007)

Facilitating condition The factors internal to a company that may driveor delay the adoption of an EM, including

Hadaya (2006); Driedonks et al. (2005); Lau et al. (2001);Wang et al. (2006); Strader and Hendrickson (1999);Yu (2007)• Firm ability

• The complexity of sophisticated e-commerceimplementations

• Perceived behavior control• The present use of e-commerce• Top management support• The degree of workflow standardization,

documentation, and computerization

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strategies. For example, information, transaction andsupply chain based EMs offer different types of valueto users.

2. The impact of EM on competition, price and marketefficiency. Due to reduced search cost, EM can increasemarket efficiency, intensify competition and lowerproduct prices. However, increased market efficiencybenefits buyers more than sellers (Bakos 1991a, 1997),and sellers may not welcome EMs due to reducedproduct selling prices.

3. Dark side of EMs, such as easier collusion in EMs(Campbell et al. 2005) and information overload(Grover et al. 2006).

4. The structural impact of EMs, including the enhancedcentrality of large firms Christiaanse (2005), and theimpact of EM use on buyer–supplier relationships(more market or hierarchical type of relationships)(Malone et al. 1987; Benslimane et al. 2005; Ivang andSørensen 2005), and the impact of EMs on marketstructure (that’s, intermediation and disintermediationalong the industry value chain) (Lee and Clark 1996;Grover et al. 1999).

The different aspects of EM impacts are related. Structuralimpacts of EMs are normally based on the value and dark sideof EMs. For example, more market type of relationshipbetween buyers and sellers on EMs is a result of reducedsearch cost of finding trading partners. Some researchersargued for a multiple level view of EM impacts (Subramaniamand Shaw 2002; Benslimane et al. 2005). For example,Subramaniam and Shaw (2002) proposed a process model ofB2B EM impact, where EMs first produced intermediateeffects such as transaction cycle time, errors, and premiumbuy, which in turn impacted transaction cost, inventory andpricing. These intermediate effects then affect EM users’performance measures, such as satisfaction, process quality,and total procurement cost, etc.

3.5 EM and trust

Trust can contribute to the success, failure and adoption ofEMs, and is also an important aspect of EM design. Due toits importance, a separate category of articles that havestudied the trust and risk issues in EMs is assigned.Researchers have studied how to measure “trust” constructin EM (Verhagen et al. 2006), how EMs affect trust (Allenet al. 2000), what are the benefits of building trust online(Verhagen et al. 2006; Ba and Pavlou 2002; Schoder andHaenlein 2004), and how to enhance trust in EMs (Pavlouand Gefen 2004). The measurement of trust can be rolebased, including individual seller trust, trust in sellercommunity (Pavlou and Gefen 2004) and intermediarytrust (Verhagen et al. 2006; Ba and Pavlou 2002), or can be

classified as institutional, calculative or relational trust(Schoder and Haenlein 2004; Pavlou and Gefen 2004).The benefits of trust building in EMs are normally linked toprice premium for sellers and higher willingness of buyersto make purchase online. Saeed and Leitch (2003) was theonly researcher in our sample that identified the sourcingrisks in EMs. By integrating risk and control literature, thispaper proposes a risk-control framework that links sourcingrisk and corresponding control systems in the procurementcontext of the Internet-based electronic marketplaces. Themodel also proposes that effective control at the identifica-tion stage of the transaction process can reduce the need forcontrols in the later stages.

3.6 EM and SMEs

Small and medium sized companies (SMEs) demandspecial attention in B2B EMs. They were supposed tobenefit from EMs greatly if they were in fragmentedindustries (Saban and Rau 2005), but on the other hand ifthey were in concentrated industries, they suffered bothprofit and technology squeeze due to easier seller compar-ison by buyers in EMs and high technology investmentrequirements from large trading partners (Stockdale andStanding 2004). In our sample, researchers studied SMEissues, such as factors affecting the success or failure of theimplementation of government-supported EMs for SMEs(Gengatharen and Standing 2005; Gengatharen et al. 2005;Fisher and Craig 2005), strategies of SMEs in EMs (Sabanand Rau 2005) and the importance of an intermediary insupporting a virtual organization that consists of SMEs(Sherer and Adams 2001).

3.7 Intelligent agents in EMs

Intelligent agents can be delegated by buyers/sellers tosearch for trading partners and negotiate transactions on theinternet (Li and Wang 2007), and thus can be designed toreplace centralized EMs. However, agent technology canalso be used to enhance the functionalities of centralizedEMs. Articles that applied agent technology to the designof EMs were coded in the category of “Intelligent Agents inEMs”. This category can be fit into “EM design”, sinceintelligent agent technology is an important EM designtechnique. However, due to a research stream that wasemerging in this area, articles about intelligent agents werecoded separately. In most of our sample articles, intelligentagents were designed to represent either EM participantsor EM operator employees (called artificial employeesKaracapilidis and Moraïtis 2000), to support informationsharing, pricing and product customization online (Dasguptaet al. 2005; Iyer et al. 2005; Mandry et al. 2000).

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3.8 Overview of EMs

Most articles in this category are miscellaneous in nature.These articles normally lacked empirical base, and tendedto introduce EMs, address the business models (Timmers1998; Dai and Kauffman 2002; Segev et al. 1999; Guo andSun 2004), benefits and inhibitors (Bailey and Bakos1997), strategies and future trend of EMs (Wise andMorrison 2000) and evolution of EMs (Scharl andBrantweiner 1998; Ganesh et al. 2004; Tomak and Xia2002; Reimers 1996). These papers are general andfoundational in nature, normally appearing in the earlystage of EM development and trying to make sense of EMs.Several articles that were hard to be classified as otherthemes but with a research focus such as participatingfirms’ success strategies in EMs (Koo et al. 2004) andtrader behaviors (Oliven and Rietz 2004) were alsoclassified into this category.

4 The research methodologies

Five major EM research methodologies were identified andpresented by research themes (see Table 5). Quantitativeresearch refers to researches that use econometrics, statis-tical and survey methods to test predefined hypotheses(Creswell 1994). Qualitative research deals with textualdata, and normally includes case study, action research,ethnography, and grounded theory (Miles and Huberman1994). Both quantitative research and qualitative researchare empirical and based on data from the field. Labexperiment and software prototyping (Cao et al. 2006) isa type of research methods that test hypotheses throughcontrolled experiments and software simulation, or imple-menting proposed protocols utilizing relevant software andcomputer languages. Mathematical modeling refers toconstructing an abstract model that uses mathematicallanguage to describe the behavior of a system. Theresearches that are not in one of the above categories are

classified as descriptive research since they tend to bedescriptive and conceptual rather than being empiricallysupported. Quantitative research, mathematical modelingand experiments are normally considered more scientificthan descriptive and qualitative research.

Table 5 indicates that two biggest categories of researchmethodologies are “descriptive” (34 articles) and “qualita-tive” (31 articles) researches. This suggests that EM researchis not so scientific, either due to a reliance on subjectivequalitative research, or due to a lack of empirical base. Thedifficulty of gathering data in EM field is noted by manyauthors. This is due to the small population of EMs and itsparticipating companies since EMs are still new and notadopted by many companies. Some researchers have to relyon Alex, an internet traffic ranking system, to evaluate theperformance of EMs (Gosain and Palmer 2004; Clasen andMueller 2006). However, Alex ranking may not be accurate,since in order to increase their ranking in Alex, somewebsites manipulate their website contents. However, wenoticed that the researches in this field were increasinglyempirically based.

The research methodologies are also presented byresearch themes. Among various topics, “EM success”,“EM adoption”, “trust in EMs”, and “EMs and SMEs” aremore empirically based than others since more than half ofthe studies in each theme are either quantitative orqualitative. As for “EM impact” theme, it is worth notingthat most articles (7 articles) are descriptive in nature. Thispartly confirms our claim in Section 3 that most studiesaddressed the potential impact of EMs rather than realizedimpact.

5 The background theories and an integrativeframework of EMs

Due to EMs’ innovativeness and fast changing nature, nosingle theory can fully explain the phenomena of EMs. EMresearchers explored the issues of EMs from diverse

Table 5 Electronic marketplace research methodologies by theme

Research methodologies Themes Total

EMsuccess

EMadoption

EMdesign

EMimpact

EM andtrust

EM andSMEs

Intelligent agentsin EMs

Overview

Quantitative research 6 7 1 3 4 1 0 3 25Qualitative research 9 4 2 5 1 3 0 7 31Lab experiment and softwareprototyping

2 0 4 2 0 0 4 0 12

Mathematical modeling 3 2 3 4 0 0 2 1 15Descriptive research 5 2 5 7 1 1 2 11 34Total 25 15 15 21 6 5 8 22 117

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theoretical perspectives, each of which enhanced ourunderstanding about EMs. For example, some researchersapplied theories in supply chain management to the analysisof EMs, and suggested that EMs could support a portfolioof supply chain relationships (Grieger 2003; Grieger andKotzab 2002; Rudberg et al. 2002; Skjot-Larsen et al.2003). However, by applying social network theory to EMphenomena, Christiaanse (2005) argued that e-marketplaces

could provide benefits beyond supply chain coordinationwhich was dyadic in nature, through network optimizationsuch as transportation optimization and cash netting. So thisreview also targeted to identify theories that were adoptedby EM researches and to track their patterns.

Six categories of EM theories were identified (seeFig. 3). They are adoption theories, structural theories,economic theories, process models, strategic management

IS adoption theories

Structural theories

Strategic

management

theories

Process models

Economics theories

Systems design tools

B2B

adoption,

success and

strategies

1) Inter-organizational Relationships

(IOR); 2) Institutional Theory; 3)

Social Network Theory 4) Social

Exchange Theory 5) Transaction

Cost Theory 6) Agency Theory 7)

Resource Dependency Theory 8)

Relational Exchange Theory 9)

Stakeholder Theory 10) Industrial

Organization Economics 11)

Marketing Channel Theory

1) Microeconomics Theory; 2) Game

theory; 3) Public goods theory

1) Resource based view; 2) Porter’s

competitive strategy; 3) Competitive

Heterogeneity; 4) Push vs. Pull theory;

5) Strategic positioning theory

1) Stage theory; 2) Process-oriented

approach of IT measurement; 3) Model

of Exchange Processes; 4) Business

Process Re engineering (QFD)

1) eW3DT; 2) Intelligent agents

1) Diffusion of innovation; 2)

Technology acceptance model; 3)

Decomposed Version Theory of

Planned Behavior (DTPB); 4) Unified

Theory of Acceptance and Use of

Technology; 5) Ability / Motivation

Theory; 6) Task Technology Fit Theory

Fig. 3 Theories applied inelectronic marketplaceresearches

564 Inf Syst Front (2008) 10:555–571

theories and system design tools. We only analyzed thetheories that were explicitly mentioned in the samplearticles. Articles based on previous EM literature, whichin turn based on certain theories were not included. Most ofthe categories are easy to understand, except structuraltheories. Structural theories, such as institutional theory,dependency theory, and social network theory, mainly focuson the interaction and structure among organizations,including the justification, antecedents, the formationdynamics and consequences of certain inter-organizationalstructures. From an individual organization perspective,these theories deal with its institutional and industryenvironmental forces. Such theories are particularly rele-vant to EMs since EMs are new structures that are inter-organizational and networked in nature. Due to space limit,we can not explain each theory fully, but a supplementarymaterial explaining each theory and its applications in theEM literature is available from the authors upon request.

Based on patterns of theories and research themes, wedeveloped a theoretical framework to present the paradigmof major EM researches (Fig. 4). This combination ofbackground theories and EM research themes is reasonablefor the following reasons. First, the most interested researchthemes are EM adoption and use from a user perspective,EM success and design and the impact of EMs, so theframework should be built around these topics. Othercategories such as trust and intelligent agent are notexplicitly included in the framework, but can be treated asparts of “EM design”. All four issues can be viewed eitherstatically, or dynamically. The process models identified inthe Fig. 3, such as stage theory and exchange processtheory, are especially helpful for the study of the dynamicnature of EMs. Second, these four themes are related. EMadoption and participation are important for the success ofan EM, and a good design of trading mechanisms can helpan EM to attract more participants and achieve greater

success. The impact of an EM is the results of EMparticipation and use, and is also affected by its design.The perceived impact of an EM in turn affects a user’s EMadoption decision. So the issues of EM adoption, success,and impact, and the content of EM design also share manyantecedent variables such as ownership structures, trust,critical mass, the service provision strategies and value ofEMs. However, since so many variables (for example, seeTables 3 and 4 for EM success and adoption) affect EMsuccess, adoption, design and impact, it is hard toincorporate all variables in a framework. So in order tobuild a parsimonious framework of EM research, wedecided not to track individual variables but pattern oftheories which these variables are grounded in. Based onthe clusters of theories we have identified, we propose thatthe above issues of EMs can further be viewed from threeperspectives: an information systems perspective, an inter-organizational/social structure perspective and a strategicmanagement perspective. Each perspective can be justifiedbased on different set of theoretical backgrounds. The threeperspectives together explain the success and failure,adoption and use, and impact of EMs.

5.1 An information systems perspective

Electronic marketplaces are basically information systems.So the normal system development principles and tools arestill instructive for the successful development of EMs. Theproject management capability and technical skill are alsoimportant for an EM operator. This is especially true forEMs that are developed by the government who has lessexperience in system development. Through case studies oftwo government sponsored EMs for SMEs, Gengatharen etal. (2005) suggested that a staged approach to introduce EMfeatures was more acceptable by users and safer for EMoperators. Hopkins and Kehoe (2006) pointed out theimportance of identifying user needs in order to offer theright services. He introduced Quality Function Deployment(QFD), a system development methodology, to match userneeds with EM service provision.

The implication of the information systems perspectivefor EM adoption is that the traditional technology/innova-tion adoption theory can be adopted to study this issue, ashas been done by many researchers. For EM impact, theimplication is that many benefits of EMs are attributed tothe automating nature of EM information systems such asrouting orders between trading partners, and sharing acommon database. This results more timely informationsharing and reduced transaction processing cost. Many EMsintroduced tight integration between EM and users’ internalsystems and implemented complicated information systemssuch as collaborative planning, forecasting and replenish-ment (CPFR), and vendor managed inventory (Wang and

User perspective: Adoption/use Impact

EM perspective: Success/design

Static view Dynamic

Inter-organizational/ social structure

Strategic management perspective

Information systems perspective

Fig. 4 An integrative framework of electronic marketplaces

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Archer 2004; Alt and Cäsar 2002). These technologyarrangements help users to capture greater benefits fromthe use of EMs.

5.2 An inter-organizational/social structure perspective

EMs are not only information systems, but also meta-institutions and structures either among individual users (inB2C EMs) or across organizational boundaries (in B2BEMs). In fact, the formation of EMs is a process ofbreaking old institutions and intermediation structures andestablishing new institutions through online media. So forEM participants, the institutionalization and structuration ofEM systems, business processes and rules involve outsidestakeholders. Structural models in Fig. 3 that deals with theinteraction among individuals/organizations can shed lighton how to analyze EMs from inter-organizational structure/social interaction perspective. The implication for EMparticipants is that the opinion and readiness of otherindividuals/organizations are important for focal users’adoption decision. Their previous interaction patterns suchas the old way of doing business based on personalrelationships and trust also affect the focal users’ decisionto adopt EMs. For EM operators, the implication is thatonly if EMs handle all kinds of stakeholders and socialinfluences successfully, can the EM way of transacting andcollaborating be accepted by and institutionalized amongrelevant stakeholders. For example, based on stakeholdertheory and a social view of EMs, Driedonks et al. (2005)provided two reasons for the failure of AuctionsPlus, anEM in the Australian beef industry. First, the nature of thecattle producers’ social system and its characteristiccommunication channels caused the low rate of adoptionof AuctionsPlus. Second, AuctionPlus connected cattleproducers and meat processors, and bypassed the traditionalstock agents. This caused the resistance of traditional stockagents, who had substantial influence on cattle producers’adoption of EMs. However, other EMs such as CALM,successfully handled this problem by connecting stockagents with meat producers, and eliminating stock agents’fear of being disintermediated.

5.3 Strategic management perspective

A strategic management perspective is important for EMsto pursue competitive advantage. The strategic managementtheories in Fig. 3 can be instructive for analyzing EMs fromthis perspective. For example, the strategic positioning andstrategic fit theory implies that the fit between EM valueproposition, products and industry structure leads to greatersuccess of EMs (Gosain and Palmer 2004; Christiaanse andMarkus 2002a, b). From a resource based view (RBV), anEM should build its capacity through different ways,

including alliances. A few researchers analyzed the alliancestrategies of EMs. Park et al. (2004) found that marketingalliances generated significantly higher firm value thantechnology alliances did. White and Daniel (2003) sug-gested the strategic rationales for EMs to form marketplaceto marketplace alliances, including increasing the numberof buyers that participants have access to, broadening therange of services offered to users, and facilitating trans-actions among multiple tiers in a supply chain. However,the literature says nothing about what capability an EMshould have in order to successfully run an EM.

Not satisfied with RBV’s limited capacity to explain firmperformance difference, Hoopes et al. (2003) adopted theconcept “competitive heterogeneity” which broadens thetheoretical roots of RBV by incorporating other factorssuch as corporate ownership structure, to explain firmperformance differences. Through a study of 32 EMs,Ordanini (2006) verified that EMs with a governancestructure of established firms as stakeholders is more likelyto be successful since established firms can provide notonly monetary support, but also market and industryknowledge that is important for vertical EMs.

Although not mentioned explicitly in the literature,entrepreneurship theories are also relevant since mostEMs are start-up companies or initiative launched byseveral brick and mortar companies. For such EMs, enoughinitial funding, the ability to attract venture capital andsustained revenue are found important for their success.

When used to explain the success, adoption, design andimpact of EMs, the above three perspectives are notdisjointed but intertwining. For example, when designingan EMs, one should consider not only technical issues of ISsuch as usability, but also institutional/social factors such asusers’ existing transaction habits and the acceptance of newinstitutional rules (Brandtweiner and Scharl 1999). EMs’strategic positioning in the market and core capacitybuilding from a strategic management perspective alsoneed to be paid attention to.

6 Conclusions and future researches

This research reviewed the current status of EM researches.Eight research themes were identified through a compre-hensive review of 19 journals. They are: EM success, EMadoption, EM impact, EM design, trust, EM and SMEs,intelligent agents, and overview of EMs. Among them, EMsuccess, adoption, impact and design are the most interest-ed topics. The distribution of research methodologiesshowed that EM research appeared not to be very scientific,probably due to reliance on subjective qualitative research.However, EM researches are becoming more and moreempirically based in recent years. Finally an integrative

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framework was proposed. The framework suggests thatmost EM research issues can be explored from threeperspectives: an information systems perspective, an inter-organizational/social structure perspective and a strategicmanagement perspective. They in combination produce acomprehensive explanation of EM phenomena.

Although many researches about EMs appeared inrecently years, they are still not mature. Researchers donot agree with each other on many issues. For example, theliterature is controversial about how industry structure,ownership structure, the depth and width of serviceprovision affect EM performance. Many other issues arestill not fully explored, and demand attention from futureresearch. The following are some suggested directions forfuture researches.

1. Exploring the issues of EMs from more theoreticalperspectives. Different theories can bring differentinsights to EM research. The identified six clusters oftheories and the integrative framework may be helpfulfor researchers to identify relevant theories. Theoriessharing the similar characteristics as the identifiedcluster of theories can be potentially relevant to EMresearch. For example, ecology theory is similar to“structural models” in that it also concerns institutionalenvironmental forces and interaction among stake-holders (Scharl and Brantweiner 1998). By ecologytheory, businesses are not just members of certainindustries but parts of a particular business ecosystemthat incorporates a whole bundle of different industries.The driving force is not pure competition but co-evolution. The theory has the potential to be applied toexplain EM evolution since the development of an EMinvolves not only the focal industry but also industriesthat provide basic business infrastructure. Furthermore,some theories were mentioned in the literature, such asresource based view, but not fully exploited. Forexample, no researches answered the question “whatcapability should an EM has in order to achievecompetitive advantage”.

2. The utilization of a large pool of case studies. Throughour analysis, we found that most EM researches werequalitative case studies. This forms a pool of EM casesand offers the potential for future researchers to dometa-analysis of these cases.

3. More scientific researches. EM research field calls formore scientific researches. However, this effort couldbe dampened by the difficulty of collecting data, due to(1) the small number of EMs on the internet, (2) smallnumber of firms that participate in EMs, and (3) a lackof specific EM directories or yellow pages. So in thenear future case studies may still be a major form ofEM research methodology. To make research more

scientific, cases studies could also be quantitative innature. Electronic data collected either manually orautomatically, is a potential solution for researchers.For example, Dai and Kauffman (2002) summarizedthe emerging EM business models through a survey ofwebsites. Kollmann (2000) generated a sample of 50car sellers from 15 German EMs in order to study thepositioning strategy of EMs in a proposed competitivematrix. Gosain and Palmer (2004) used Alex rankingsof EMs as proxies of their performance. Althoughelectronic data might be easier to collect, its utilizationmight raise other issues such as ethics and validity. Soresearchers should be careful enough to ensure thevalidity of such data (Allen et al. 2006).

4. The impact of EMs. Although the impact of EMs is oneof the central concerns in EM research, but among 21researches that are coded as “EM Impact”, only eight ofthem are empirically based, either qualitative orquantitative in nature. So most researches focusing onthe impact of EMs are limited to their potential ortheoretical impacts. This may be due to the immaturenature of EMs. In the future, realized impact of EMs,especially the structural impact of EMs, should betracked and studied with the development of EMs. Onecan also explore the benefits and impacts of EMs thatremain unnoticed by researchers, such as the effect ofEM on forecasts of new product success (Gruca et al.2003).

5. The success factors of EMs. Many researches in theliterature focused on this issue, and many variableswere studied. However, a detailed examination inSection 3 shows that researchers are controversialabout how they affect EM performance. Future researchshould be conducted to resolve the contradicting resultsin this field.

6. EM alliance strategies. Forming alliances has been animportant strategy for EMs. However, only fewresearch papers studied EM alliances (Lenz et al.2002; Koch 2002; Park et al. 2004). Furthermore, inKoch’s (2002) study, the alliance was not considered asa success strategy of EMs, but as a concept that helpedto explain EM participation since the author viewedEMs and their participants from an alliance perspective.More researches need to be conducted to explore thevalue of alliances, and what kinds of alliances generatebiggest value for EMs.

7. EMs in specific industries. We found that EMs inagriculture, financial and transportation industries werethe most frequently studied EMs in our sample.Especially for financial markets, ten research paperswere found. These three industries are common in thatinformation transparency and timeliness are veryimportant, and EMs can help industry players to share

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information timely. But how about other industries withdifferent supply chain characteristics? Do they needdifferent types of EMs? For example, the constructionindustry is characterized by project oriented supplychain, and may need EMs to offer different function-alities (Schoop 2002). Since more and more B2B EMsalso support supply chain management, studying EM inspecific industries can also have important managerialimplications for EM operators.

In sum, the future research of EM should be conductedin a way that’s grounded in both theories and field data.Major topics of EMs, such as EM success and impact, needto be further studied and verified. Some research topics,such as EM alliance strategies and EMs in specificindustries, are under studied in this sample, and should bepaid attention to by interested researchers in the future.

Acknowledgements This research was generally supported by theChinese National Social Science Foundation (project no. 07CJY052).

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Shan Wang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Business atRenmin University. She received her Ph.D in MIS from McMasterUniversity. Her research interests include business to business electronicmarketplaces, supply chain management, the adoption and impacts ofecommerce. Her work has been published in several peer reviewedjournals, such as Supply Chain Management- An International Journal,Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, and ElectronicMarkets.

Shi Zheng is an assistant professor at the School of Business at RenminUniversity of China. His research interests include industry organiza-tion, agricultural market analysis, and electronic commerce. He holds a

Ph.D in Agricultural Economics from Purdue University, USA, a BA inEconomics from Renmin University of China, and an MS in ResourceEconomics fromUniversity of Delaware, USA. Currently he also servesas a strategy consultant to several well-known companies, includingHaoyue Group, the biggest beef producer in Asia.

Lida Xu is professor at the Department of Information Technology andDecision Sciences, Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA. He is aChangjiang Scholar (Endowed Lecture Professor) elected, endorsed anddesignated by the Ministry of Education of China and funded by the LiKa-Shing Foundation of Hong Kong. He is an elected Overseas Scholarof the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Xu has been serving as researchprofessor at the Institute of Computing Technology of Chinese Academyof Sciences and honorary chair of the Department of InformationManagement and E-Commerce at the School of Management, XianJiaotong University. Dr. Xu has over 150 refereed publications includingover 90 refereed journal publications. His research appears in journalssuch as IEEE Transactions, Decision Support Systems, InternationalJournal of Production Research, European Journal of OperationalResearch, Information Systems, among others. Dr. Xu has been aprincipal investigator or investigator for grants with NSF of US,Carnegie Foundation, National Science Foundation of China, Ministryof Education of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, K.C. WongFoundation of Hong Kong and high-tech industries. Dr. Xu serves asthe Editor-in-Chief of the three major publications on enterpriseinformation systems launched by the world’s premier publishersSpringer and Taylor & Francis. These three publications are: EnterpriseInformation Systems journal (Taylor & Francis), Advances in EnterpriseInformation Systems Series (Taylor & Francis), and IFIP EIS Series(Springer). He serves as the Chair of the Enterprise InformationSystems Technical Committee of IEEE Systems, Man and CyberneticsSociety and Chair of IFIP TC 8 WG8.9.

Dezheng Li is a Master student at the School of International Businessat Beijing Foreign Studies University. His research interest inculdeselectronic commerce and international business.

Huan Meng is an undergraduate student at the School of InternationalBusiness at Beijing Foreign Studies.

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