Electronic Marketplaces and Resource Exchanges

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we examined e-commerce, its impact on service chains and the different strategies that can be adopted in online revenue management. An enabler underlying these emerging areas are several new technologies with the most fundamental one being that of electronic marketplaces. This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art of electronic marketplaces with a focus on the future e-supply chain for both products and services and emerging agentbasedmarketplaces. It also presents frameworks for new concepts such as service resource exchanges which can underpin intra-organisational and inter-organisational service chain management.Agent technologies seem to be well suited to this domain by providing a distributed environment, are network centric, semi-autonomous and collaborative and can communicate with each other to achieve better optimisation with little human intervention.