Electronic Markets on sustainability
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EDITORIAL
Electronic Markets on sustainability Rainer Alt 1 Published online: 6 December 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
What could be a more appropriate topic for the final issue of Electronic Markets’ (EM) 30th anniversary volume than sustainability? Although the journal itself has steadily grown over three decades and published numerous articles on various aspects of sustainability, this issue now includes the first special theme section on sustainability. The number of articles on the topic may be explained with the fascinating nature of sustainability: on the one hand sustainability is an inherently positive goal and it is hard to imagine who could be against something being sustainable. On the other hand the term is applied with various contextual interpretations. This is summarized spot on in the United Nations agenda for sustainable development, which aims to make the world a better place (UN 2015) and mentions the dimensions of the triple bottom line (TBL), whereas sustainability has economic, ecologic and social facets (profits, planet, people). This suggests that measures of sustainability are inherently linked with the attempt to at least maintain a specific state in one or all three dimensions and also comprises the endeavor to improve on them. Continuity and advancement or the desire to exceed “business as usual” attitudes (Lazlo and Lazlo 2011) are thus at the heart of sustainability. To complement the preface of the guest editors of the special issue, the following aims to shed light on the relationship between sustainability and the field of electronic markets.
Electronic market perspectives on sustainability Due to the broad nature of sustainability, several articles in EM are related to questions of sustainability. A simple search of EM articles included in Springer Link since 2009 using the key word “sustainability” yielded 52 hits. After removing six * Rainer Alt [email protected] 1
Information Systems Institute, Leipzig University, Grimmaische Str. 12, 04109 Leipzig, Germany
prefaces that referenced to articles that were already included in the search and after removing seven articles which did not elaborate on or only included sustainability in the reference section as well as a backward search yielding two articles on the term stability, a set of 41 articles remained. They point at several relationships between the terms “electronic market” and “sustainability”, which lead to five clusters or perspectives (see Table 1). The first perspective relates to the economic dimension of electronic markets. From a phenomenological macroeconomic view electronic markets may be seen as digital infrastructures where buyers and sellers interact as well as a competitive form of how allocation (or coordination) among buyers and sellers occurs. Electronic markets in this sense emerged in the 1970s and were sustainable since they enjoyed an impressive diffusion. Their evolution was driven by the reduction of economic transactions costs and culminated in the “move-to-the-market” hypothesis, which predicts
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