Developing Multi-Sided Markets in Dynamic Electronic Commerce Ecosystems - Towards a Taxonomy of Digital Marketplaces

Abstract

Multi-sided markets (MSMs) have proven to be a successful business model in the dynamic electronic commerce environment. There exists a variety of MSMs differing in their provided features and services for their participants. Existing taxonomies often focus on value creation and business-to-business transactions. We apply Nickerson et al.’s taxonomy development approach. We especially incorporated aspects of orchestrating the distinct market sides and governance dimensions. The developed taxonomy for MSMs consists of 21 dimensions and 99 characteristics in total. We have applied our taxonomy to 44 MSMs and identified asymmetries between the market sides concerning Monetization, Network Effect Amplifiers and Provided Services. We emphasize that the taxonomy is not only an artifact for classifying the current situation of an MSM but can also be used by MSM owners to derive directions for the future development. We illustrated how these developments can be conducted by examples for five dimensions of our taxonomy.