Strategic 'Morphing' and the Survivability of E-commerce Firms

Over the past year, the shakeout in the electronic commerce marketplace has redirected the attention of entrepreneurs and investors from the funding hype surrounding Internet startups to the traditional bottom line of business: firm profitability. To improve profits and achieve strategic sustainability in a rapidly changing competitive environment, many DotComs have been repackaging themselves by targeting new markets, expanding into the offline world, forming alliances, licensing software, and adjusting their core offerings to focus on the most profitable products and customers (Chircu and Kauffman, 2000). This research develops an evolutionary game theory-motivated framework (Ba et al., 2000; Smith, 1992; Weibull, 1997) that helps academic researchers and industry practitioners to understand the “strategic morphing” of DotComs (Miller, 2001). Our framework applies an analogy from the theory of bio-diversity and genetic survivability in population ecology to different species in ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: Robert J. Kauffman, Bin Wang, Tim Miller
• Keywords: Biometrics, Electronic Commerce Marketplace, Game Theory-motivated Framework, HICSS 2002, Hype Surrounding Internet