Towards Rail-Road Online Exchange Platforms in EU-Freight Transportation Markets: An Analysis of Matching Supply and Demand in Multimodal Services

Anuradha Jain, Rob van der Heijden, Vincent Marchau and Dirk Bruckmann
Additional contact information
Anuradha Jain: Institute of Management Research, Radboud University, 4125 Riehen, Switzerland
Rob van der Heijden: Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, 6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Vincent Marchau: Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, 6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Dirk Bruckmann: Faculty of Communication and Environment, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, 47475 Kamp-Lintfort, Germany

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 24, 1-28

Abstract: The European Union (EU) is confronted with too low a share of inland rail freight transport. The implementation of two-sided online exchanges for rail-road freight transport could increase this share. However, such exchanges focusing on the EU market are mainly designed for single modes of transport. Their matching of supply and demand for multimodal services, especially including rail, is still in its infancy. This paper applies a maturity growth framework to speed up the implementation of such multimodal online exchanges. The framework integrates insights from industrial organization theory, platform economy theory, and maturity growth theory. Online exchanges, summarized in a new taxonomy, are compared to study their practices on matching supply with demand on the exchange, especially for multimodal services. Data is collected from case studies, exchange websites and semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows the emergence of new market actors and business models, including digital freight forwarders. These offer a variety of transport mode solutions for EU inland and EU related global freight transport. Maturity in matching supply and demand appears to result from clear objectives to provide benefits to the exchange participants, notably by digitizing the data for transaction completion and providing real time support for operational issues. In this context of rising online exchanges, especially in road and global multimodal transport (air, ocean, and road), the competition to capture a fragmented freight market seems to steadily increase. A similar maturity analysis of exchanges could not be found.

Keywords: multimodal freight transport; online exchange platform; matching supply and demand; maturity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/10321/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/10321/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:24:p:10321-:d:459883

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().