Managing Market Thickness in Online Business-to-Business Markets
A B2B platform can raise revenue substantially just by managing the timing of listings and the information it reveals about market thickness, without changing overall supply or demand.
Summary
Bimpikis, Elmaghraby, Moon and Zhang study a liquidation-auction marketplace and find that consolidating auction end times onto specific weekdays raised platform revenue by 7.3%, largely by drawing in more bidder participation, while a recommendation system revealing real-time market thickness generated further gains by reducing cannibalization among substitutable listings. Their structural model captures the resulting trade-off between
Editor's opinion
Narrow platform-operations mechanism paper (B2B auction timing), not a firm-strategy lever.
Key concepts
Marketplace design · Auction timing · Market thickness