Before last year's dot‐com meltdown, one of the most hyped areas was large industry‐based business‐to‐business (B2B) marketplaces. Most of these have either failed or are struggling. Instead, the growth today is in less ambitious online auctions where individual firms, increasingly having to focus on costs, seek suppliers of the products or services they need. FreeMarkets, growing fast though still unprofitable, is the leader in this growing field. This case discusses the problems and potential not only for FreeMarkets itself but also for the buying and selling companies which use it.
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Anderson et al. (2001) studied this question.
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