Abstract
Companies such as Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, Oyo and Uber which we refer to as Digital Marketplaces are globally emerging across different business sectors. These marketplaces connect buyers and sellers and the marketplace owners act as central trustworthy authority to provide trade assurances. However, such a trust model could be problematic. Without any alternatives, rapidly growing users of the marketplace, both buyers and sellers are forced to trust the marketplace owner to satisfy their needs. Regulating users, control over digital transactions, exercising autonomy are other issues to name (but) a few indicating that marketplace owners are transparently replacing governments. In our view, Digital Marketplaces should be democratic as the markets in the real-world and control must be given back to the users since they are the contributors in the growth of these marketplaces. This paper presents a new way of Open Digital Marketplaces that model real-world buyer and seller interactions. Proposed solution involves users of marketplace as partakers in a digital transaction for connecting buyers and seller with trade assurances by leveraging their personal connections. Trust is made localized and the supply chain becomes subjective to the user as in the real-world. Switching the role of marketplace owner with the users, eliminates the need for trusting the marketplace owner as a central authority as well as diminishes autonomy and authority of the marketplace owner over the digital transactions. Users, with whose efforts trade is made digitally successful, are rewarded with an incentive, a type of shareholding in the digital transaction, as per the electronic contracts digitally signed by participants before executing the transaction. Disputes or violations of contract are resolved by an automated system, can also be escalated to an independent body or to a local court for a decision. Feedback received from the experiment based on the implementation of the proposed solution suggested ease of doing business by small businesses as well as increase in revenue. It also creates new opportunities for users to earn revenue share in digital transactions, instead of only the marketplace owners, in the emerging gig economy.
Highlights
Digital technologies should complement physical processes to create new opportunities for the citizens
Building upon the real-world approaches, the objective of this paper is to propose an alternative that may be built upon current Digital Marketplace solution which is open and not controlled by marketplace owner
Many small businesses are not able to compete with the marketplace owners and are either losing the business or are closing down
Summary
Digital technologies should complement physical processes to create new opportunities for the citizens In this regard, World Wide Web, for example, transformed the way people consume information. Its creator has been reflecting on how the original idea of web has deviated to being dysfunctional [1] He argues that such an approach is only working well for few companies which are growing at a massive scale but at an expense of human rights and democracy. People who use these platforms are not the real beneficiaries when they should be and earning a fair share for their contributions in the growth of organizations. Contract for web is one alternative to give power back to the people as it will add transparency and build confidence among people
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