Re-examining market structures: Resource-Advantage theory and the market offering ecosystem perspective

Understanding market structure is central to firms’ success. It helps organizations understand competition and in turn develop strategies to improve performance. The market structure literature is traditionally driven by three schools of thoughts, supply-side competition, demand-side competition, and target market-based competition. However, researchers are developing more intricate models of market structures, which are inspired by the ecosystem concept and are supported by network analysis techniques. In this article, we present new insights regarding market structures based on an ecosystem metaphor approach. In particular, we propose that a market structure can be classified using six ecosystem-based relationships (mutualism, commensalism, neutralism, amensalism, parasitism, and competition), which are based on how the sales of a market offering affects the sales of other offerings in the same ecosystem. Based on these relationships, we examine these relationships in detail and provide proposals for future research.