Wal-mart At It’s (Amazon) Prime
Networks can be seen in our every day lives. Whether it be thinking about our friends on Facebook or thinking about nodes and edges in a computer science point of view. However let’s consider the Triadic Balance on companies, more specifically, Amazon and Wal-mart.
The battle between Wal-mart and Amazon has gone for years now. With the emergence of Amazon in the late 2000s and early 2010s, more and more people turned to electronic shopping rather than going to an actual store to buy products. Why? Prices are significantly cheaper and is less time consuming than the traditional shopping. The rise of popularity with Amazon has caused many companies to join Amazon to increase their business revenue and get their name onto the market. However with this, many big chain companies like K-Mart have started going out of business due to decrease of networks with those companies.
Wal-mart, being also a big company that was hit with the Amazon “fever”, wanted to appeal to the consumers with cheap prices as well and companies were intrigued with Wal-mart once again. So much in fact that many companies started to leave Amazon for Wal-mart. Recently (in Aug 30th), Wal-mart was able to acquire Jet, the e-commerce that was battling Amazon for a while. Even though this seemed like a huge hit to Amazon (since Wal-mart is looking to incorporate a similar style for commerce like Amazon and Jet would be a what they were looking for), Amazon keeps it’s head high and continues with business.
To visualize Amazon, Wal-mart, and Jet in terms of Networks, we have the edge of Wal-Mart and Jet to be positive, while the edge of Amazon and Wal-mart and the edge of Amazon and Jet to be negative. Based on the Triadic Balance Property, this is balanced since Wal-mart and Jet agreed to hate on Amazon. This is crucial since it demonstrates market competition with networks and the connections between one company and another.
To read more about the article I used, visit (source): http://www.retaildive.com/news/why-amazon-isnt-losing-sleep-over-the-wal-martjet-deal/424751/