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Fabri, Lukas ; Meyer-Hollatz, Tim ; Wenninger, Simon:
You Never Share Alone : Quantifying Sharing Platforms' Evolution.
In:
Proceedings of the International Conference of Center for Business & Industrial Marketing (CBIM). -
Atlanta, USA
,
2022
Abstract
Driven by digitalization and technological development, digital platforms are becoming successful since they ease all parties involved to carry out transactions or make them possible in the first place. Platforms can mediate between providers and customers. For example, since the 1990s, or Vinted today, eBay brings providers of second-hand goods together via the Internet with countless more demanders than at flea markets, thus opening up new distribution opportunities. Further, driven by a seismic shift from an ownership society to a sharing society, sharing platforms (e.g., Airbnb, Blablacar) disruptively change the economy (Clauss et al., 2019) and allow people to rent, e.g., apartments as vacation accommodation easily. Despite these successful examples, only very few platforms can accumulate a large and loyal following of customers (Clauss et al., 2019) while the rest fails (Sussan & Acs, 2017), leading to monopolies and duopolies. Combined with platforms' complex and dynamic nature (Kim & Yoo, 2019), this increases the risk for platform owners and investors. Consequently, decision support for investment security and design decisions is necessary. However, this decision support is currently lacking, hindering managers from making rational decisions. Investors aiming to develop platforms need reliable information in order to be able to decide under uncertainty. Conversely, in cases of doubt, valuable investments and innovations remain unrealized due to a lack of investments. However, existing works examine primarily qualitative correlations of success factors for platforms in detail but neglect quantitative factors. Nevertheless, rational decision-makers need to know the expected values and the associated risk to make decisions under uncertainty. Thus, this work aims to develop a framework for building simulation models for sharing platforms to predict their success quantitatively and provide managers with an evaluation tool for informed decision-making. We, therefore, formulate the following research question:
How to build simulation models to predict the success of sharing platforms quantitatively?
To answer our research question, we follow the design science research (DSR) paradigm to develop a framework allowing managers and investors to estimate platforms’ success using simulations, both at initial platform creation and design decisions. We connect simulation knowledge with literature on qualitative and quantitative evaluation of platforms.