New forms of market intermediation matching economic and management perspectives

(eng) This dissertation addresses the topic of market intermediation and matchmaking platforms over the Internet. It consists of four essays that show that matching the management approach to mediating organizations with recent economic theoretical concepts may greatly enhance our understanding of the field. The first essay is about the specificity of market intermediaries in terms of value creation. It provides a critical review of the literature on this issue and suggests that the roles played by market intermediaries are important value drivers through which intermediaries succeed in creating value for customers, and thereby prevail over direct trade. The second essay explores the question of intermediaries’ organizational architecture. Our approach links the specific value creation mode of intermediaries to their boundary decisions. We argue that in this case the concept of network boundary is more helpful than the restrictive notion of vertical boundary. The third essay investigates the growth strategy of a matchmaking platform and demonstrates that the perceived value of the platform’s mediating service is dependent on the interaction between direct and indirect network externalities. This essay shows that network composition is at least as important as network size. The fourth essay highlights the competitive game that takes place between users of differentiated matchmaking platforms. It relies on the coopetition theory to characterize the affiliation motive to join infomediaries and more traditional marketplaces.