To pay or not to pay : the dilemmas of an emerging business ecosystem - the case of mobile payments

Abstract

In the modern digital age, with mobile technology at the heart of new and vibrant digital ecosystems, mobile payments draw extensive attention from researchers and practitioners. A mobile payment ecosystem can be described through the three general characteristics of a business ecosystem (symbiosis, platform, and coevolution), together with a mobile payment technology platform, and all the actors coevolving reciprocally with each other. Due to the complex issues of a mobile payment ecosystem, a narrow view focusing only on a few components of mobile payment is unlikely to provide a sufficient understanding. To that end, a more comprehensive analysis from multiple perspectives is required to gain insights that can form the basis for building viable mobile payment ecosystems. The main research objective of this thesis is to describe and explain the core and the extended network of the mobile payment ecosystem and to offer guidelines to actors in a mobile payment ecosystem in order to strengthen their positions in the mobile payment ecosystem. In order to do so, first, a literature review is carried out, followed by the studies discussing the core actors (different mobile payment providers and merchants), combing qualitative and quantitative methods. On one hand, mobile payment providers are investigated from business models and resources perspective, by considering dynamic changes in the ecosystem. On the other hand, merchants are examined from a business ecosystem perspective to study their adoption behaviour. The main theoretical contribution lies in obtaining a new perspective on existing theories (i.e., business ecosystem theory, platform theory, resource based view, resource dependency theory, contingency theory, configuration theory and business modelling) in light of what we can achieve by integrating them into a general framework. More specifically, first, the StReS model offers a novel general approach for integrating different theories to understand organizational behaviour in a business ecosystem. Second, the analytical framework modelling merchants' acceptance is a novel framework integrating different theories to explain an organization’s adoption of a technology. Third, the approach to link business models to an actor’s position in a business ecosystem provides a novel method to identify the critical design issues of business models that can help to strengthen the core actors in the mobile payment ecosystem. The main practical contribution lies in offering guidelines to actors, especially mobile payment platform providers, to strengthen their positions in the mobile payment ecosystem.