Analysis of B2B e-marketplaces: an operations perspective

Authored by Siddhartha Bhattacharyya, Yifeng Zhang

Date Published: 2010-06

DOI: 10.1007/s10257-008-0096-y

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: Swarm

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Flow charts Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

The phenomenon of business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces has triggered a lot of interest among researchers in recent years. Most of these studies focus on price competition or cost reduction. Few studies, however, have examined the impact of e-marketplaces on the participants' supply chain operations, including inventory management and order fulfillment. This study aims to fill such a gap. Employing agent-based simulations, we find that supply network agents tend to keep more inventories and backlog/lose fewer orders in the e-marketplace than in traditional supply chains. And this effect is profounder for the upstream agents, i.e., distributors and manufacturers than for downstream agents, i.e., retailers. Managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

Tags

Agent-based modeling Supply Chain Management B2B e-marketplace Supplier selection strategy