Two cases one result: marketplaces become strategic mediators

The last 10 years have witnessed the emergence of electronic marketplaces as players that leverage new technologies to facilitate B2B internet-mediated collaborative business. Nowadays these players are augmenting their services from simple intermediation to include new inter-organizational relationships. The interest of this paper is to investigate the evolution of the role of e-marketplaces in response to the demands of the market participants. We carried out a longitudinal comparative field study of two e-marketplaces providing complex business services. Through the study of services evolving over time in the two cases we show that, as marketplaces support increasingly complex business processes, the market participants begin to demand the privilege of exclusive access to the technology rather than access to the entire market. The participants see the marketplace as an exclusive club, the belonging to which provides a strategic advantage. The technology brought forth by the marketplace participates in shaping the strategic demands of the participants which in turn request the marketplace to redesign its own strategy. Profiting from this unintended demand, the e-marketplace assumes the paradoxical role of strategic mediator: an agent who upholds and heightens the fences of the transactions instead of leveling them. The results have implication in shaping how we see the role of technology as strategic or commoditized