Time and Date: 8 June, 2023 at 10.00-11.30
Venue: Score, Frescativägen 14A, Stockholm University

Marketplaces – Organized physical and digital trade

Patrik Aspers, Matias Dewey, Judith Nyfeler, Rena Schwarting

Abstract
This text argues that a marketplace is an organized place for trade. The marketplace can be physical or virtual. There is a large body of research on physical marketplaces, but also a burgeoning literature on digital trade and ecosystem. Existing research in the different fields offers many insights, but lacks systematization and theoretical conceptualization. This review-based article covers physical marketplaces from well before the birth of Christ to contemporary digital marketplaces. The notion of organized marketplaces is apt for analysing past and contemporary sites of trading, but analytically and empirically underused in the existing literature on physical and digital trading. The organizational approach to marketplaces offers tools to make decisions on how to organize marketplaces, but it also points to the limitation of formal institutions and direct managerial operations. It is suggested that additional insights can be gained by qualitative comparative analyses of several types of both physical and digital marketplaces.