Chasing data in the Intermediation Era: Economy and Security at stakes

Abstract: Intermediation is the action to match two types ofactors (users, clients, services, etc.) in a world withincomplete information, where the matching wouldhave been dicult without intermediaries. We showthe increasing role of on-line intermediation platformsin the economy, and their growing responsibility forensuring global security of people and society. Our contribution is twofold. At a theoretical level, we better dene algorithmic intermediation by establishing a hierarchy of intermediation actors, based on their degree of abstraction from specic services.Then, surveying data from web analytics tools such as Alexa.com, we show that there are only few important intermediation platforms, headquartered in few countries. These results underline the strategic importance of intermediation actors in terms of security and that the more abstract they are, the more in uence they reach.

 

Keywords: Big data, economics, intermediation