Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues...

E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in...

In recent years, online retailers (e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that...

While millions of products are sold on its retail platform, Amazon.com itself stocks and sells only a small fraction of them. Most of these products are sold by third-party sellers, who pay Amazon a fee for each unit sold. Empirical evidence clearly suggests that Amazon tends to sell high-demand...