Electronic markets: Theory and evidence from 20 years of research

Twenty years ago the Communications of the ACM published "Electronic markets and electronic hierarchies" by Tom Malone, JoAnne Yates, and Bob Benjamin. It has become the most cited article in the Information Systems field with 424 citations in the ISI Web of Science index and 1,472 in Google Scholar. The paper articulated the electronic markets hypothesis (EMH), which predicted that IT cost-capability improvements would drive organizations away from vertically integrated structures and would lead to unbiased online markets with many suppliers. The panel will examine the contributions of the EMH to IT-focused organizational studies. Panelists will debate the EMH as a theory in relation to others for explaining electronic market phenomena. Empirical data and its fit with the EMH will also be debated. Are research developments in electronic markets consistent with the 1987 forecasts? We will conclude on the issue of how an enhanced and more powerful theory of electronic markets might be developed in the coming years.