Exploratory and Empirical Analysis of E-Marketplaces for Truck Transportation Services Procurement

In the late 1990s, early 2000s, academic literature considered electronic marketplaces as a game changer in truck transportation services procurement. Early enthusiasm was followed by skepticism regarding e-marketplaces' usefulness and the popularity of e-marketplaces appeared to wane both in industry and in academic literature. However, recent sources argue that almost half of the freight currently transported by truck in the USA is subject to transactions conducted in e-marketplaces. This dissertation intends to fill a gap in the academic literature by showing that truck transportation e-marketplaces necessitate renewed dedicated research efforts, by exploring the strategies implemented by e-marketplaces in this specific industry and by linking these strategies to marketplaces' performance. First, transportation and non-transportation e-marketplaces are compared in chapter 2 with regard to their usage of mechanisms designed to generate trust among users. Results show that truck transportation e-marketplaces use these trust mechanisms differently than non-transportation e-marketplaces, which supports a call for research on e-marketplaces in the specific context of truck transportation services procurement. In chapter 3, a database inventorying the usage of 141 features by 208 e-marketplaces is then created to initiate the empirical exploration of these specific e-marketplaces. Thanks to that database, a new typology (a way of classifying objects based on several simultaneous classification criteria) is developed in chapter 4 that identifies three main truck transportation e-marketplace strategies (two with sub-divided into two sub-strategies). The typology provides a state of industry and puts in perspective the specificity of truck transportation e-marketplaces with regard to their structure along 11 dimensions known to the general e-marketplace literature. Finally, the link between e-marketplace strategies and performance is investigated in chapter 5. Performance is measured with three traffic metrics: number of unique visitors per day, number of page views per day, and website ranking. Results show that third-party-owned e-marketplaces that provide auction mechanisms with a fairly high level of user decision and transaction support are more successful than other e-marketplaces. This dissertation provides a picture of existing e-marketplaces for the procurement of truck transportation services, challenges components of existing theories and provides ground for further research.