TY - JOUR A1 - Pousttchi, Key A1 - Gleiß, Alexander T1 - Surrounded by middlemen - how multi-sided platforms change the insurance industry JF - Electron Markets N2 - Multi-sided platforms (MSP) strongly affect markets and play a crucial part within the digital and networked economy. Although empirical evidence indicates their occurrence in many industries, research has not investigated the game-changing impact of MSP on traditional markets to a sufficient extent. More specifically, we have little knowledge of how MSP affect value creation and customer interaction in entire markets, exploiting the potential of digital technologies to offer new value propositions. Our paper addresses this research gap and provides an initial systematic approach to analyze the impact of MSP on the insurance industry. For this purpose, we analyze the state of the art in research and practice in order to develop a reference model of the value network for the insurance industry. On this basis, we conduct a case-study analysis to discover and analyze roles which are occupied or even newly created by MSP. As a final step, we categorize MSP with regard to their relation to traditional insurance companies, resulting in a classification scheme with four MSP standard types: Competition, Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration. KW - Multi-sided platforms KW - Insurance industry KW - Value network KW - Digitalization KW - Customer ownership Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-019-00363-w SN - 1019-6781 SN - 1422-8890 VL - 29 IS - 4 SP - 609 EP - 629 PB - Springer CY - Heidelberg ER -