Industry-specific, or vertical, e-business standards are an important infrastructure facilitating information sharing among organizations within a specific industry sector. In many industries, voluntary vertical standard consortia have been organized to develop and promote the standards. This dissertation identifies unique economic features of vertical e-business standards, which help to explain the popularity of consortium-based standardization mechanism. A game theoretical model is developed to examine the endogenous formation of standard consortia, and the independence of the development stage and adoption stage of consortium-based e-business standardization. Finally, I propose a model to investigate firms' incentives to participation in standard consortia and collaboratively develop e-business standards. The model is empirically validated on a dataset of 237 firms from seven VSCs in service industries.
展开▼
