An Electronic Clearance Marketplace Leveraging Collaborations in Supplier and Buyer Communities: A Design Science Research Study

Abstract

Effective clearance of unused service capacity is an issue of importance for managers and practitioners in consumer service industries. Taking a design science research approach, this research-in-progress paper proposes an innovative electronic clearance marketplace (clearance e-marketplace) based on novel design principles, namely, shared bundle purchasing and shared customer pooling, which arguably leads to more effective results than traditional clearance methods. We explain the design and implementation of this Information System (IS) artifact and develop hypotheses arguing that consumer service providers' use of this proposed clearance e-marketplace in clearing their unused service capacity would lead to improved performance gains on new customer acquisition and percentage sales compared to their traditional self-managed clearance campaigns. Furthermore, we explain the details of an empirical study to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed clearance e-marketplace in achieving the said performance gains.