What drives the success of online platforms for industrial symbiosis? An agent-based model

This paper aims to investigate which factors affect companies’ choice of subscription to an online platform designed to support the creation of industrial symbiosis (IS) relationships, and the effectiveness of such platform from the economic and environmental perspectives. The analyzed platform finds optimal symbiotic partners by pursuing an economic objective and proposes the fair sharing of the additional costs of IS, enabling subscribers to avoid search and negotiation costs at the expense of a subscription fee. An agent-based model is developed where the companies’ choice of subscription is dependent on potential savings in transaction costs, future expectations, and past experience. The main results highlight that (1) it is possible to attract subscribers with moderate fees by enhancing trust in the platform's usage widespread; (2) trust ensures hedging from waste demand and supply fluctuations; (3) the number of subscribers has a greater impact on the economic rather than on the environmental performance of the system.