Marketplace Platforms: Towards a New Taxonomy

Zeamari, Ilyass [UCL]

This article addresses two important gaps in the digital platform literature. First, it addresses the lack of a shared conceptualization of digital platforms. Following a literature review, we identified three perspectives explicitly discussed in the literature to define digital platforms. In addition, we discovered an implicit perspective that, although not directly addressed, emerged in the literature. With the help of these perspectives, their scopes, and definition examples, researchers and practitioners can enhance their communication and improve the comparability of future studies. The second gap this paper addresses is the lack of criteria that distinguish e-commerce entities. This paper proposes an e-commerce taxonomy based on both the literature and an empirical sample. This taxonomy offers an overview of the distinctive characteristics expressed by these entities such as “network effects”, “type of network effects”, “information availability for the seller” and “information availability for buyers”. Our taxonomy contributes to the theoretical and empirical understanding of e-commerce entities by providing a structured framework that can be used to study and compare different e-commerce entities systematically.