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Disintermediation, Reintermediation, or Cybermediation? The Future of Intermediaries in Electronic Marketplaces

Early researchers seemed to agree on the prediction that decreased transaction costs in electronic marketplaces would lead to the reduction, or even extinction, of traditional intermediaries from electronic value chains. Despite some validity in these claims, a careful examination of the way that electronic commerce restructures traditional market functions reveals three equally plausible scenarios for the future. Traditional intermediaries will either be driven out of the market (disintermediation) or be forced to differentiate and re-emerge in the electronic marketplace (reintermediation), while wholly new markets for intermediaries will also be created (cybermediation). In this paper, we use a model of market functioning to establish areas where each of these three scenarios are expected to dominate. 1. Disintermediation in Electronic Markets: An Historical Perspective Advances in Information Technology are widely acknowledged as causing fundamental changes in organisational and market structures (Malone et al 1987). The advent of Inter-Organisational Information Systems (Johnson and Vitale 1988) and the Internet have resulted in previously unthinkable ways and methods of conducting business, for example Electronic Commerce and the evolution of electronic marketplaces (Rockart and Scott-Morton 1991). Such advances contribute to a continuous transformation of organisational value chains and value systems (Porter 1985). As these advances extend beyond the sphere of organisations to include individual consumers, industrial dynamics provide an unprecedented opportunity for producers of products and services to bypass the traditional market intermediaries (for example, wholesalers and retailers) and interact directly with the final consumer. Early research in electronic markets tended to suggest that this move towards direct interaction between producers and consumers will lead to the gradual elimination of intermediaries from the value system (Malone et al 1987) (Figure 1). The term ‘disintermediation’ has been offered to describe the alleged move towards shorter value chains in electronic marketplaces.