 What drives the success of online platforms for industrial symbiosis? An agent-based modelMelissa Mollica, Luca Fraccascia and Alberto Nastasi Ecological Economics, 2025, vol. 230, issue C Abstract: This paper aims to investigate which factors affect companies’ choice of subscription to an online platform designed to support the creation of industrial symbiosis (IS) relationships, and the effectiveness of such platform from the economic and environmental perspectives. The analyzed platform finds optimal symbiotic partners by pursuing an economic objective and proposes the fair sharing of the additional costs of IS, enabling subscribers to avoid search and negotiation costs at the expense of a subscription fee. An agent-based model is developed where the companies’ choice of subscription is dependent on potential savings in transaction costs, future expectations, and past experience. The main results highlight that (1) it is possible to attract subscribers with moderate fees by enhancing trust in the platform’s usage widespread; (2) trust ensures hedging from waste demand and supply fluctuations; (3) the number of subscribers has a greater impact on the economic rather than on the environmental performance of the system. Keywords: Industrial symbiosis; Circular economy; Agent based model; Online platform (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:230:y:2025:i:c:s0921800924003999 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108502 Access Statistics for this article Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier |
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