Tobias Kölbel

Background & Motivation

Matchmaker-Platforms and their orchestrators such as Amazon, Uber or Airbnb are the talk of the town. They focus primarily on digital businesses by offering services that connect consumers and producers, dominating their respective markets. Recently, however, these platforms have increasingly been confronted with scandals involving data leaks, rating manipulations, personal pricing or other types of trust abuse.

Aim of the thesis

The aim of your thesis is to develop a taxonomy that shows how platform orchestrators can abuse their market power and what impact this might have on platform users. Your work should be based on a systematic literature review, upon which you develop the taxonomy. Subsequently, you should evaluate your taxonomy based on case studies or qualitative interviews and adapt if necessary.

Formalities

This thesis will be written at IISM in corporation with the Bosch Economy of Things Project. This thesis is NOT an external thesis. You are free to write your thesis in German or English. Please apply with a short letter of motivation (approx. ½ page), your CV and a current overview of your grades. You can start working on the project immediately.