Without the big corporate middlemen, consumers can pay less and renewable power plants can get paid more.
PayPal makes its money by acting as a trusted middleman between consumers and online merchants.
Another line of thought suggests that the motion sensing technology will be used to create a 'full' Apple TV; a product that moves beyond Apple's current TV device, which mainly works as a middleman between consumers' televisions and their streaming media.
As to its business model, it's a bit similar to TaskRabbit, in that they're the middleman between consumers and providers.
To do this, Returnly is capitalizing on patterns in online return behavior by taking the role of middleman — helping consumers avoid the dreaded holdover period between the time a good is returned and the time a refund is received.
Through its marketplace model — where it is both a middleman between consumers and sellers, and the seller itself of different goods and services — Amazon wants to be wherever people want to spend money.
Whether cutting out the middleman is consumer-friendly is a matter of debate.
But Ms. Arnold, Professor Schondelmeyer and a 2007 Congressional study of Medicare said the rebates often accrue to the middlemen, not consumers, and higher manufacturer prices lead to higher retail prices.
Loan originators, either mortgage brokers who act as middlemen between consumers and lenders, or mortgage bankers, who can also fund the loans themselves, get paid only if the transactions go through -- which gives them an incentive to make the loan payments as alluring as possible to the borrower.
One wonders whether, over time, some type of middle ground solution where media companies are involved in the process as well as middlemen and consumers could be the optimal solution.
