Market ranking of successful digital business models

Abstract

The transition from industrial to service economy resulted in a wider adoption of asset-light strategies and technology-enabled business models. In the last ten years, digital companies have ascended to the top of the most valuable firms lists. Various aspects of digital business models have been exhaustively discussed in management literature, but their economic dimension remains under-researched.
We analyze how strategy and business model add value and propose using historical volatility of valuation multiples for ranking companies by the degree of investors’ understanding of a firm’s strategy and business model in addition to ratings of companies by market capitalization. This ranking, in our view, is particularly helpful in analyzing business models of digital companies where most of the value is in intangible assets and economic goodwill. We also propose a way of expanding this research topic in the future.