Economics and Electronic Commerce: Survey and Directions for Research

TLDR

Electronic commerce research will expand across multiple business‑school disciplines, fostering greater interdisciplinary communication. The article reviews electronic commerce from an economic perspective, proposes a new framework, and charts future research directions to stimulate interdisciplinary business‑school inquiry. The authors review the literature, construct a conceptual framework, and assess the state of knowledge on electronic commerce phenomena.

Abstract

This article reviews the growing body of research on electronic commerce from the perspective of economic analysis. It begins by constructing a new framework for understanding electronic commerce research, then identifies the range of applicable theory and current research in the context of the new conceptual model. It goes on to assess the state-of-the-art of knowledge about electronic commerce phenomena in terms of the levels of analysis here proposed. And finally,it charts the directions along which useful work in this area might be developed. This survey and framework are intended to induce researchers in the field of information systems, the authors' reference discipline, and other areas in schools of business and management to recognize that research on electronic commerce is business-school research, broadly defined. As such, developments in this research area in the next several years will occur across multiple business-school disciplines, and there will be a growing impetus for greater interdisciplinary communication and interaction.