Non-monetary costs and the interdependence of players in B2B multi-sided markets : a study into the adoption of a dematerialization platform

This paper explores the case of a dematerialisation platform for B2B transactions between construction industry firms and public contracting authorities. Different qualitative materials, including 28 semi-structured interviews, were gathered over a two-year period. Our findings highlight two main contributions to the existing literature on two-sided markets (or more generally multi-sided market). First, this paper reveals new boundary conditions within which the pricing policy of a platform provider loses its ability to coordinate and stimulate users' adoption behaviors. Under these specific circumstances, inter-organizational collaboration in the selection of a unique platform emerges as a key condition to produce cross-network externalities, and therefore as a major source of technological change in the area of a radical process innovation. Second, we show that the gains stemming from the adoption of a dematerialisation platform follow a non-linear path. Specifically, an increase in the volume of new users in one side of the market first reduces the utility of the platform for the other side of the market. Indeed, it causes the contracting parties to duplicate some transactions while incurring reorganization costs. As the number of users increases, the adoption path reaches a tipping point above which using a dematerialisation platform creates gains compared with using and exchanging paper documents.