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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2018 (Revised May 2018)

  JD: Envisioning the Future of Retail

  Feng Zhu and Shirley Sun

  Citation:

  Zhu, Feng, and Shirley Sun. "JD: Envisioning the Future of Retail." Harvard Business School Case 618-051, April 2018. (Revised May 2018.)  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

  Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace

  Grace Gu and Feng Zhu

  As an intermediary improves trust between two sides of its market to facilitate matching and transactions, it faces an increased risk of disintermediation: with sufficient trust, the two sides may circumvent the intermediary to avoid the intermediary’s fees. We investigate the relationship between increased trust and disintermediation by leveraging a randomized control trial on a major online freelance marketplace. Our results show that enhanced trust increases the chance for high-quality freelancers to be hired. When the trust level is sufficiently high, however, it also increases disintermediation, which offsets the revenue gains from the increase in the hiring of high-quality freelancers. We also identify heterogeneity across clients and freelancers in their tendencies to disintermediate.

  Keywords: disintermediation; intermediaries; trust; online marketplace;

  Citation:

  Gu, Grace, and Feng Zhu. "Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-103, May 2018.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised March 2018)

  ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (A)

  Feng Zhu, Weiru Chen and Shirley Sun

  ZBJ.com (ZBJ), an online platform that connects knowledge workers to small and medium-sized enterprises, is China’s largest outsourcing platform. Founded by Mingyue Zhu in 2006, ZBJ had grown into a unicorn with 4,000 employees and a daily transaction volume of RMB15 million by 2017. During the company’s 11-year history, ZBJ had launched ten transformation campaigns to overcome various challenges by changing its products, operations, and business model. For example, it encountered winner-takes-all competition, disintermediation (when service providers and clients took transactions off the platform to avoid the platform’s 20% commission fees), the rise of fake transactions, member management issues, and difficulties in delivering satisfactory services to large enterprises. Zhu must decide how to use the next campaign to address challenges that had emerged since the last campaign and how ZBJ should expand globally.

  Keywords: outsourcing; disintermediation; Two-Sided Platforms; Information Technology; Problems and Challenges; Global Strategy; Information Technology Industry; China;

  Citation:

  Zhu, Feng, Weiru Chen, and Shirley Sun. "ZBJ: Building a Global Outsourcing Platform for Knowledge Workers (A)." Harvard Business School Case 618-044, January 2018. (Revised March 2018.)  View Details

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