Opportunities for Electronic Intermediation and Intramediation

The technological developments in the areas of information and communicationtechnology have generated worldwide business opportunities for firms which carry out coordinationtasks as a service for other enterprises. To begin with, several implications of this development for the fundamental shaping of economic activities and the structure of markets willbriefly be discussed. Built upon that, the present contribution will develop a segmentation for theopportunities and the potential for electronic intermediation and intramediation, which will becomethe basis of assessment for the opportunities provided by both business models. This segmentationis based on the type of dependencies to be coordinated (pooled, sequential, or reciprocal),as well as on the scope of the performed coordination. The main result is the fact that firstintermediaries should concentrate on less complicated coordination tasks (pooled and sequentialdependencies) due to their limited capabilities. Intramediaries should concentrate on the more demandingand complex market segments (reciprocal and sequential dependencies), since their businessmodel seems less suitable and therefore bears less potential for performing simpler coordinationtasks.