The Impact of Electronic Markets on B2B-Relationships

Abstract. Although most of the predicted consequences of the internet-revolution in the 90s did not become reality, the internet has lead to sustainable changes in the organization of most industries. In particular, this is true for business-to-business (B2B) relations between firm. An obvious ‘proof’ for this is the rising number of socalled electronic markets—especially for B2B transactions—since several years. This paper should help to give a better understanding of the organizational impacts of electronic markets in the context of B2B relations. Therefore we use the incomplete contract framework to build a simple model of a repeated game. It will be shown that the existence of an (alternative) electronic market could influence the willingness to cooperate between the upand the downstream firm in a B2B-relationship. In our special case, the willingness to cooperate by the buyer will decline.