Industrial Marketing Management

 Call for Papers

Dark Side of Sharing Economy – Managing and sustaining B2B relationships on platforms

Deadline for submission: October 1, 2021

Link in Elsevier website

Business models on ‘sharing economy’ for accessing and reusing products to utilize the capacity lying idle, are increasingly becoming popular in the business-to-business (B2B) marketing literature and practice. Organizations such as Airbnb, in its B2B platform allows companies to book Airbnb listings for their employees to build a strong brand. The fast growth of the sharing economy is often attributed to reduced cost and enhanced accessibility in different literature. Whether it is the mobility service platform ecosystem framework or the food sharing, redistribution, and waste reduction model, the dominance of information technology in explaining the concept of sharing economy appears to be inevitable. Whereas the traditional marketing concepts such as value co-creation have often been researched in the business-to-consumer context, their usefulness in co-creating the B2B service ecosystem remains under-explored.

The objective of this special issue is to explore and examine the dark side of business-to-business marketing. The themes (indicative but not exhaustive) relating to the B2B marketing that the potential submissions are expected to have include, but are not limited to:

• Pseudo-sharing to value-sharing in the B2B context
• Trust deficit in sharing economy between partners in the value chain
• Managing service design, delivery and control in sharing economy
• Privacy concerns in the B2B marketing for sharing economy
• The gap between the shared platform content, access and the decision makers
• Unethical use of information access and analytics in B2B relationships
• Adverse impacts of Artificial Intelligence technologies (like chatbots) in B2B relationships
• Complexity in the information management for a B2B platform marketer
• Adverse impacts of social media marketing and service fulfillment
• Mismanagement of contracts and non-contractible deliverables among primary, secondary and tertiary partners
• Managing agency problems between partners in the value chain
• Managing tradeoffs between contractible and non-contractible outcomes
• Adverse impacts of relative bargaining power and transaction cost economics
• Managing adverse impacts of business models (markets, hierarchies, etc.)
• Managing adverse stakeholder experiences based on mining content shared in forums
• Managing dark business practices due to bargaining power differences between partners
• Adverse impacts of digital transformation of platform on partners (e.g. technostress)
• Adverse impacts of direct and indirect network effects in platforms

This special issue is intended to benefit employers, marketers, and academics by identifying the reasons behind the existence and providing suggestions to manage this grey area in the sharing economy literature.

Provisional timeline

• First article submission deadline: 1^st October, 2021
• First review deadline: 28^th Feb 2022
• Second submission deadline: 31^st May 2022
• Second review deadline: 31^st August 2022
• Final acceptance: 30^th November 2022
• Paper publication: 31^st December 2022

 

Guest Editors: NP Rana, Arpan Kar, Manish Gupta, Ilias Pappas, Thanos Papadopoulos

• Research