Anmerkungen:
In: Conference: Discussion Paper At: School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2002
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments September 2002 erstellt
Beschreibung:
In this paper, we raise the issue of the appropriate unit of analysis for e-commerce studies. Once it is acknowledged that the unit of analysis in e-commerce studies should comprise more than one firm, the question is, which organizations should be included, i.e. how to bound the unit? We discuss the e-commerce literature with regard to the implicit or explicit unit of analysis adopted there and then extend the literature review to include other concepts from industrial organization and economic sociology. In total, fourteen concepts are discussed and none is found to be sufficiently broad while at the same time also being amenable to bounding. We introduce a new approach based on the notion of the industry life cycle. The main proposition of our concept is that the unit of analysis should be defined differently for each life cycle stage. We also indicate how this could be done theoretically and empirically. There are, however, several open issues of this approach which need to be addressed by future research