Electronic marketplaces

We are now witnessing the earliest, experimental stage of electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) development. Most firms are focusing on exchanges with fixed auction rules applied to relatively simple goods and services. Many exchanges will fail due to bad timing or inappropriate choices in business details or technical implementations, but the winners will play a huge role in the worldwide economy as they focus decision-making and improve market efficiencies. How will e-marketplaces evolve? They will almost certainly expand to support ever more complicated scenarios. Even today, multi-round auctions, requests for proposals and negotiations are the norm for expensive procurements; technological advances will permit their use for larger numbers of smaller deals. Processes will be increasingly automated, using sophisticated analysis techniques and large-scale computation. As participants get closer to reaching a deal, they will reveal more information and make further decisions, and new facilities will enable intelligent agents to participate in discovery and transactions. E-marketplaces will also expand to support involvement by skilled specialists who need to share relevant data and to plan and negotiate flexibly. In time, e-marketplaces will include richer collaboration and information management facilities, and will grow to combine the capabilities usually associated with portals and content sites with those of advanced exchanges.