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This research paper aims to provide conceptual clarity for marketplaces within the lateral exchange market framework. The advances in digital technologies have been critical to the growth of new marketplaces and forms of exchange. While there are many different names and manifestations of these marketplaces, the common thread is they all require digital platform intermediation. These marketplaces are referred to by a variety of names and characteristics, and a clear consensus has yet to be achieved.

This research uses a conceptual approach rooted in the marketing literature.

This study differentiates and defines the sharing economy, collaborative consumption and access-based consumption, as well as introduces the concept of liquid ownership – all under the LEM framework. Defining characteristics for each marketplace are noted to present a consistent classification of the focal concepts for the advancement of research and theory.

As the number and types of lateral exchange marketplaces continue to grow, researchers need to have a clear delineation of the concepts. This research seeks to provide clarity on the disparate literature streams and introduces the concept of liquid ownership to allow for the advancement of research and theory surrounding these forms of consumption.

Understanding existing marketplaces is vital for online platforms as they develop new offerings and differentiate themselves in the marketplace. Additionally, opportunities for traditional businesses abound as they pursue new market opportunities and adapt to changing technologies. Thus, research questions concerning consumers and platform managers are presented.

This research contributes conceptual clarity on elements commonly associated with the sharing economy while expanding it to include elements found in LEMs. The concept of liquid ownership is also presented to reflect the evolving consumption landscape. Research opportunities and questions are provided to guide future scholarly work.

This paper aims to focus on collaborative consumption, that is, the peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange of goods and services facilitated by online platforms. Anchored in the access paradigm, collaborative consumption (e.g. accommodation rental and ridesharing services) differs from commercial services offered by firms (e.g. business-to-customer [B2C] carsharing). The aim of this study is to examine the nuanced styles of collaborative consumption in relation to market-mediated access practices and socially mediated sharing practices.

Following the general research trend on mobility services, the context of long-distance ridesharing is chosen. Data collection was conducted using participant observation as peer service provider, 11 ethnographic interviews of consumers and a netnographic study of digital artifacts.

Using practice theory, ten ridesharing activities were identified. These activities and the nuances in the procedures, understandings and engagements in the ridesharing practice led to the distinction of three styles of collaborative consumption: communal collaborative consumption, which is when participants seek pro-social relationships in belonging to a community; consumerist collaborative consumption, performed by participants who seek status and convenience in the access lifestyle; and opportunistic collaborative consumption, when participants seek to achieve monetary gain or personal benefits from abusive activities.

By taking a phenomenological approach on collaborative consumption, this study adds to the understanding of the sharing economy as embedded in both a utilitarian/commercial economic system and a non-market/communal social system. The three styles of collaborative consumption propose a framework for future studies differentiating P2P exchanges from other practices (i.e. B2C access-based services and sharing).

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of LEM participation on moral identity. Lateral exchange markets (LEMs) enable ordinary people to monetize idle personal resources such as cars, homes, gadgets and skills. Despite its champions portraying actors in these exchange as moral citizens of society, recent findings suggest that egoistic motives drive participation. A salient moral identity motivates behaviors that show social sensitivity to others and enable cooperative actions. Given that platform-providing firms rely on users’ cooperative behaviors to facilitate lateral exchange, understanding factors that affect moral identity can have important implications for the success of such business models.

In this research, the authors move away from the ideological discourse behind actors’ motivations, to provide a pragmatic explanation of how participation erodes moral identity. The authors apply a social cognitive framework to examine how the environment in LEMs impacts behaviors and personal factors in a recursive fashion.

Across two studies, findings reveal that prolonged participation in lateral exchange diminishes the centrality of moral identity to the working self-concept. Moreover, the results show that keeping puritan peers moral has positive business outcomes. This research also discerns a boundary condition that determines when peers remain consistent with their moral compasses. Specifically, when engagement is perceived as effortful, the behavior becomes an informative input in the inference of one’s moral disposition reinforcing moral identity.

Marketers can use this research to design business models in ways that mitigate the decay of moral identity.

In the context of Saudi Arabia, this chapter investigates how clustering promotes knowledge sharing and transfer in an emerging, government-directed industry cluster. It is determined that lateral actors play a key facilitating role, and formal and informal mechanisms and interpersonal links among actors support that cluster knowledge exchange. Limited social capital strength and depth and a lack of trust that prevents knowledge sharing are partially explained by the cluster's limited vertical and horizontal actors.

This paper aims to examine different types of sharing platforms based on risk perceptions of product/service providers and users, and to illustrate appropriate platform regulation preferences.

A survey was used (N = 540) to collect data on platform participants’ risk perceptions and regulation preferences in the Chinese (N = 263) and the US markets (N = 277). Cluster analysis and multiple correspondence analysis were used to categorise platforms and match their regulation preferences with the risk characteristics.

The results show that i) four types of sharing platforms are categorised in terms of the risk perceived by the supply and demand side, and ii) four types of regulation preferences are clustered, drawing on the power and trust elements proposed from the slippery slope framework. Furthermore, coercive power regulation is favoured by participants of platforms with high supply risk and low demand risk, legitimate power regulation is preferred by actors of platforms with low supply risk and high demand risk, reason-based trust regulation is preferred by actors of platforms with high supply and demand risk, and implicit trust regulation is favoured by participants of platforms with low supply and demand risk.

This paper develops an empirical typology of platforms based on risk perceptions of providers and users, and advances our understanding about lateral exchange markets from a consumer perspective.

This paper provides implications for platforms to regulate transactions through two mechanisms – the power of platforms and trust in platform participants.

Regulating by power ensures transaction security while regulating by trust enhances transaction efficiency, so it is important to configure the power and trust elements in platform regulation in an appropriate manner. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first attempts at addressing platform regulation and shows how consumers’ risk perception of platforms can lead to important implications for theory and practice in marketing and better regulation of platform transactions.

This paper aims to analyse how a multinational organisation uses technocratic and socio-ideological controls to manage tensions arising when integrating its international subsidiaries.

Through interviews and company documentation, the authors analyse how a global German family business firm integrates its international subsidiaries into the corporate context.

The findings suggest that technocratic and socio-ideological controls in combination help the firm manage three tensions – vertical vs lateral relations, standardisation vs differentiation of practices and centralisation vs decentralisation of decision-making – arising in the course of internationalisation. These results have important analytical implications for the understanding of how a high level of compliance to technocratic control initiatives is achieved. Prior work has, in the main, focussed on the resistance to technocratic controls without paying much attention to compliance. Specifically, the authors show how managers can use socio-ideological control to achieve a high level of compliance among employees when implementing technocratic controls.

The results suggest that managers in multinational firms need to pay careful attention to the tensions that are created when they internationalise and to apply a combination of technocratic and socio-ideological controls to manage these tensions.

There is limited knowledge of how managers use socio-ideological control to enact a particular form of experience for their employees and to create a highly valued sense of purpose. The findings suggest that these controls, in combination with technocratic ones, serve important roles when organisations expand internationally.

The purpose of this study is to examine what employee agency entails for psychological contract theory. The paper aims to explore how employee agency manifests itself, how it is reflected in employees' perceptions of their psychological contract obligations, and what it implies for psychological contract theory.

The study draws on a qualitative interview study of employees from the mobile phone content production industry in Finland. The analysis is based on 15 semi‐structured employee interviews, which were supported by a discussion of the interviewees' weekly agendas.

This study reveals that employee agency manifests itself as self‐actualisation, action, influence and creativity, all of which have implications for employees' psychological contracts. Employees emerge as active parties to the psychological contract, consciously modifying and constructing it instead of simply reacting to employer behaviour, as is assumed in current research.

This study contributes to psychological contract theory by providing one of the few empirical attempts to demonstrate how employees actively manage the exchange relationship captured by the psychological contract. It highlights the importance of acknowledging employee agency in future psychological contract research.

This paper illuminates the distinction between individual and organizational actors in business-to-business markets as well as the coexistence of formal and informal mechanisms of coordination in multinational corporations. The main questions addressed include the following. (1) What factors influence the occurrence of personal contacts of foreign subsidiary managers in industrial multinational corporations? (2) How such personal contacts enable coordination in industrial markets and within multinational firms? The theoretical context of the paper is based on: (1) the interaction approach to industrial markets, (2) the network approach to industrial markets, and (3) the process approach to multinational management. The unit of analysis is the foreign subsidiary manager as the focal actor of a contact network. The paper is empirically focused on Portuguese sales subsidiaries of Finnish multinational corporations, which are managed by either a parent country national (Finnish), a host country national (Portuguese) or a third country national. The paper suggests eight scenarios of individual dependence and uncertainty, which are determined by individual, organizational, and/or market factors. Such scenarios are, in turn, thought to require personal contacts with specific functions. The paper suggests eight interpersonal roles of foreign subsidiary managers, by which the functions of their personal contacts enable inter-firm coordination in industrial markets. In addition, the paper suggests eight propositions on how the functions of their personal contacts enable centralization, formalization, socialization and horizontal communication in multinational corporations.

This article examines the impact of population age structure on the real exchange rate. Data on a panel of 22 OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) countries over 1980–2015 period are used to estimate the empirical model. Using fixed effect model the paper finds that different age cohorts have a significant influence on the real exchange rates in the sample countries. The results are mostly consistent with the theoretical framework discussed in the paper and also with the findings of previous studies in this area. These results have important policy implications given the fact that the population is ageing in almost all the OECD economies these days.

This study aims to explore how firms can design their government affairs (GAs) units in ways that improve their ability to monitor and influence legislative developments in their firms’ corporate political environments.

This conceptual work is informed by existing research into organizational design, brought to life with illustrative examples of firms’ political actions derived from interviews conducted with practitioners in the field.

In line with organizational design thinking, the authors find that high-performing GA units need to be designed and built using a blend of mutually reinforcing organizational mechanisms. GA units should be staffed by autonomous managers with mixed skills-sets. Moreover, they should not be constrained by formal rules, but instead given autonomy and support to create lateral relations with other business units.

This study provides a “recipe” that managers can follow to create opportunities for the exchange of political information within their firms and enable and motivate GAs practitioners to monitor and influence political developments more effectively.

This research exposes important, organizational antecedents of firms’ political strategies, which have not been systematically explored in the existing literature.