Value Webs: Cases, Features and Success Factors

Abstract

The new information infrastructure redefines the roles and relationships between buyer, seller, and middleman, allowing new ways of accessing and tapping information and price arrangements. Most importantly information about a product or service may be separated from the product or service itself. The chapter scrutinizes how companies are using these opportunities to establish networked retail businesses and generate customer value in innovative ways. We have tried to reconstruct a widespread interorganizational arrangement for product and service retailing on the Web, its antecedents, its challenges and its economic logic.