International Journal of Electronic Commerce最新文献

{"title":"How Uncertain Promotions Affect Inaction Inertia in an Online Retail Context","authors":"Shiu-li Huang, Yu-Min Zhao","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2226901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2226901","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT E-tailers often use different types of promotions to increase consumers’ willingness to buy. However, little research has been done to explore how to reduce inaction inertia caused by online promotions. Inaction inertia refers to the condition in which people who have missed a previously attractive opportunity are less likely to accept the current less attractive opportunity. This study explores how uncertainty, in combination with monetary and nonmonetary promotion types, impacts inaction inertia. The effect of the best possible outcome in an uncertain promotion is also examined. Two experiments are conducted in the context of online shopping to test the effects. The research findings can help e-tailers devise effective promotion strategies.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"385 - 405"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45243059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Online Retailer’s Randomized Pricing Strategy to Compete With an Offline Retailer","authors":"Jianghua Wu, Chenchen Zhao","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2184239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2184239","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Online businesses have become an important sector of the retail industry, generating fierce competition with traditional offline retailers. In light of the growing online retail channels, we have designed a randomized pricing strategy for the online retailer, as the offline retailer’s price remains unchanged over an infinite period. This study compares two competing retailers’ pricing strategies, profits, consumer surplus, and social welfare, in two different scenarios—one in which the online retailer will implement a randomized pricing strategy, and one in which it will not. Conventional wisdom holds that online retailers possess greater flexibility when it comes to offering online promotions that attract more consumers to buy online at lower prices, negatively impacting offline retailers’ profits. Our model suggests that the randomized pricing can also benefit offline retailers and social welfare, but not consumer surplus. We also discuss how consumers’ strategic behavior affects retailers’ pricing strategies and profits. It has been suggested that online retailers should not consider offline transaction costs when formulating promotion probabilities. Finally, we consider cases in which an offline retailer can adjust its strategy. A price-matching policy can help the offline retailer significantly increase profits, but can also benefit the online retailer when consumers are very patient and the utility discount factor is sufficiently small. An offline retailer can benefit from adding an online store only when the offline transaction costs are sufficiently high.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"210 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45869799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Brushing Game in Online Marketplaces","authors":"Yue Liu, Minghui Jiang, Hang Wu","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2184237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2184237","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We study a pervasive fraudulent strategy, called “brushing,” employed by retailers operating in e-commerce platforms: Retailers place fake orders of their own products to inflate sales and boost the visibility of their store links in search results. Using a duopolistic pricing game with heterogeneous consumer search behavior, we show that the retailer at a more prominent position in product listing enjoys greater profit as well as an advantage in future position allocation if the platform charges a per-sale commission fee and uses a sales-based ranking mechanism to display store-link positions. To fight for better visibility, retailers may employ brushing to boost their sales metrics. We characterize the equilibrium brushing behavior for the position competition game between the retailers. Under a sufficiently high commission rate, the game has a pure-strategy equilibrium and entails no-brushing outcome. Otherwise, retailers fully engage in brushing activity and the brushing equilibrium exists only in mixed strategies. Model extensions incorporating heterogeneities in wholesale cost and product quality show that retailers with cost and quality advantages are able to gain profit improvement at a less prominent position and thereby have less incentive to invest in brushing. Our results provide platform managers and retailers with economic insights to better understand the logic for brushing fraud and strategic decisions in online marketplaces.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"163 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46374011","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"Vladimir Zwass","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2184236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2184236","url":null,"abstract":"There are many faces of e-commerce fraud, all of them ugly. On second thought, with the arrival of “digital humans,” possibly as mimetic avatars playing on the target’s emotions, the faces can even be attractive—which is a part of the problem. The first article in this issue of IJEC deals with a fraud strategy enacted by dishonest online retailers and serving to inflate the actual sales volume in order to enhance the visibility of their firm by moving up its ranking and the listing position. Employing this fraud technique, called brushing, the retailer places fake orders to itself with the intent of being more readily found during a prospective customer’s search. The authors, Yue Liu, Minghui Jiang, and Hang Wu, build a game-theoretic model to show the economic outcomes of brushing in a competition between an honest and a brushing retailer on an e-commerce platform. The advantage of brushing hinges on the commission rate charged by the platform for a sale—and thus the fraudulent brushing strategy can be defeated. The authors' model surfaces the variety of contingencies and the level of platform-use charges that can help defeat brushing. Online reviews have brought forth a broad seam of research. These reviews are frequently a dialogue between the reviewing customer and the responding merchant. It has been long established that a skillful response to a service failure can serve the merchant well, even when confronting a significantly negative review. Yes, but do the responding merchants follow up on their promise of seeking redemption by action? Algorithms can determine from the future reviews whether the merchant’s response was made in good faith—or amounted to deception. Here, Xiaolin Li, Li Ma, Benjiang Lu, and Kexin Huang construct and exercise a novel indicator of consistency between a merchant’s words and deeds, as reflected in the follow-up reviews. The authors show both the obvious practical worth of such an index and the contribution to theory they make. Two subsequent articles in the issue address with formal modeling the always salient problem of pricing that underlies the market-making mechanisms. In the first article, Jianghua Wu and Chenchen Zhao focus on dynamic pricing, where online retailers have a seemingly incontrovertible advantage in the competition with the offline merchants. With randomized dynamic pricing, the consumers with a monetized higher valuation for the product would buy at a higher initial offering price, while others would wait for promotions. The authors present a pricing model comparing a set of outcomes for an online and offline retailers, or for an omni-channel retailer, in which the online sales feature a randomized pricing strategy. The results are directly applicable to the pricing strategies in dual-channel markets and push our knowledge forward. Co-creation of value by a firm and consumers is ever more exploited in the competitive marketplaces, where the companies are able to benefit from the explicit or ","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"161 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49290812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sincere or Falsehearted? Investigation of Online Reviews and Merchant Response","authors":"Xiaolin Li, Li Ma, Benjiang Lu, Kexin Huang","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2184238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2184238","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Academia and industry widely believe that merchants’ customized response is an indispensable tool for handling online reviews, particularly negative reviews caused by service failures. However, whether merchants actually fulfill the promises they make in their responses remains unclear. On the basis of the literature on online reviews and service recovery, this study utilizes a series of textual features of online reviews and merchant responses via text analysis, including review topics, review sentiments, and response pertinence, to construct a novel indicator. This indicator, the consistency between merchants’ words and deeds (hereafter referred to as CWD), can be used to infer the degree of merchant response fulfillment. In particular, this study first proposes two indicators, namely, response and action levels, and then measures their difference to evaluate the CWD level of merchants. CWD can reflect the effort exerted by merchants to achieve service recovery. This study significantly contributes to the literature on service recovery and online reviews. The research findings derived from this study can help urge merchants to provide consumers with improved products and services. They can also be applied to the online ranking system to enhance platform fairness and protect the long-term interests of consumers and other stakeholders.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"185 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46123015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Product Pricing and Design Strategy in Platform-Based Collaborative Innovation With Cognitive Bias","authors":"Siyuan Zhu, Shaofu Du, Tengfei Nie, Yangguang Zhu","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2184240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2184240","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Collaborative innovation, in which multiple companies try to incorporate content generated by consumers into new product development, is becoming increasingly popular. The fact that overconfidence usually increases with more data means that companies integrating large amounts of consumer-generated content in collaborative innovation have a strong tendency to be overconfident. We study the effects associated with overconfidence in collaborative innovation, where overconfidence is defined as a decision maker’s cognitive bias that leads to an overestimation of the precision of an uncertain event. In our collaborative innovation model, an online shopping platform collects and assimilates content (such as online reviews) generated by consumers to generate a product design and then sells that design to the manufacturer, after which the manufacturer produces a corresponding new product and sets a retail price. In this article, we mainly focus on how overconfidence impacts the product design strategy, pricing strategies, and decision makers’ equilibrium profit levels. We demonstrate that overconfidence can be a positive force for collaborative innovation and even lead to a win-win-win situation for the platform, manufacturer, and consumer. We show that overconfidence can make the platform change its product design strategy from aesthetic-oriented in the unbiased scenario to functionality-oriented in the biased scenario. Furthermore, we show that each of the two product design strategies has its own scope of application; neither is universally dominant.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"236 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46700509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cooperation Mode Selection and Information Sharing in a Fresh Produce Supply Chain With Freshness-Keeping Effort","authors":"B. Dan, Yu Tian, Xumei Zhang, Molin Liu, Songxuan Ma","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2023.2184241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2023.2184241","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article considers a fresh produce supply chain where the supplier provides freshness-keeping effort and the e-commerce platform owns private demand information. The supplier can choose to cooperate with the platform in reselling or agency selling mode, and the platform can choose whether to share information. Considering that demand is affected mainly by freshness and price, we model a multistage game and explore the supplier’s cooperation mode choice and the platform’s information sharing strategy. We reveal that the supplier should consider scale economics while investing in freshness-keeping resources. The platform should be cautious in setting the commission fee because she does not always benefit from the increased commission rate. We also show that the platform may benefit or suffer from information sharing, depending on the freshness sensitivity and the cooperation mode choice. As information sharing benefits responsive decision making, we reveal that the supplier may choose agency selling to induce information sharing even at a high commission rate. We also find that the interaction between cooperation mode selection and information sharing may lead to a win–win or lose–lose equilibrium strategy. Specifically, the supplier and the platform may achieve win–win cooperation under agency selling (reselling) at a low (high) commission rate. Then, to improve supply-chain performance, we design incentive contracts to motivate information sharing and adjust the cooperation mode choice. After the strategy adjustment, we find that the supplier may adopt a strategy of high quality with a low price under agency selling.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"270 - 294"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47721303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Introduction","authors":"Vladimir Zwass","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2022.2158593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2022.2158593","url":null,"abstract":"The collaboration between the human agency and algorithms takes various forms and is a subject of intensive research and development, leading largely toward the increasing replacement of the human decision making by algorithmic control. To what effect? Obviously, the question can be answered only in a more or less specific context, as contingencies abound. The authors of the opening article of this IJEC issue address the problem in the context of online advertising platforms. Such platforms are represented here by Google Ads, where the algorithmic decision making in ad allocation and pricing is progressively on the increase. In their survey-based research, the authors, Joni Salminen, Bernard J. Jansen, and Mekhail Mustak, find that this substitution is actually welcomed by the advertisers using the platform. The authors are able to identify three meaningful categories of human advertisers in their relationship with the platform automation. This categorization can be further generalized beyond the present setting, as the speed of decision making inexorably drives platforms toward the algorithmic approach. Big data analytics (BDA) have become common in addressing business problems at all levels of decision-making. Do they actually create value for the focal firms? The question is addressed empirically by Yuan Liu, Yuzhu Zheng, June Wei, and Yang Yang in the next work. The authors dichotomize BDA into two categories: Inside-out BDA focus on the internal organizational entities (e.g., products and processes), while the outside-in BDA bring in the data on the external entities (such as customers and suppliers). The authors base themselves theoretically in the knowledge-based view of the firm and perform a granular analysis of performance effects of the two different types of BDA on the firms with various levels of performance. This allows them to offer significantly novel results to the controversial question of the value-added of BDA. Online brand communities are an important means of co-creation of value by customers, binding the participants more tightly to a brand. Clearly, the more engaged customers (posters) play a greater role than the passive ones (known as lurkers). Yet the value of lurker participation is often unduly neglected. In their empirical research based a rich theoretical foundation, Sahar Mousavi and Stuart Roper show the differential value added by each type of community participants to the brand. The general message here is: Do not forget the lurkers! Based on their research, the authors offer actionable recommendations to the brands on the management of the relationships with the two types of value-generating participants of online brand communities. Two concluding articles present the results of formal modeling of online–offline supply chains under asymmetric information, characteristic of such ecosystems. Jianghua Wu, Yan Zong, and Xin Liu develop a model of cooperative advertising in a dual-channel supply chain consisting of ","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"1 - 2"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45987949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cooperative Advertising in Dual-Channel Supply Chain Under Asymmetric Demand Information","authors":"Jianghua Wu, Yan Zong, Xin Liu","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2022.2158597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2022.2158597","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study investigates cooperative advertising and retailers’ demand- information sharing in a dual-channel supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, where the manufacturer sells products through a traditional retail channel and a direct online channel. Owing to the spillover effect of advertising, the manufacturer pays local advertising expenditure at a certain ratio to pump sales in both channels. In this setting, we examine the influence of information sharing on the optimal advertising expenditure, pricing mechanism, and performance of the manufacturer and retailer. The results show that the manufacturer benefits from information sharing, whereas the retailer benefits when the retail channel accounts for a small market share. Moreover, the more significant spillover effect of advertising increases the probability that the retailer shares information voluntarily. This study contributes to the literature by simultaneously considering information asymmetry and manufacturers’ advertising participation rate in the cooperative advertising problem. We find that a supplementary effect exists between cooperative advertising and information sharing, which provides guidelines to companies. If manufacturers set a higher advertising participation rate, the probability of signing an information-sharing contract with retailers increases. Moreover, retailers’ information sharing can induce manufacturers to offer a higher participation rate.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"100 - 128"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42933324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Enhancing Relationships Through Online Brand Communities: Comparing Posters and Lurkers","authors":"Sahar Mousavi, S. Roper","doi":"10.1080/10864415.2022.2158596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10864415.2022.2158596","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study establishes the importance of considering both posters (interactive members) and lurkers (non-interactive members) for a clearer understanding of online brand communities. Based on organizational support theory and social identity theory, this study proposes a model a model that illustrates the impacts of perceived brand support in brands’ online communities upon members’ community identity and brand trust, leading to their positive behaviors toward the brand (i.e., purchase intention, resistance to negative information, and positive word of mouth) and how these effects differ between posters and lurkers. Using structural equation modeling, results reveal that in firm-hosted online brand communities, perceived brand support (i.e., recognizing contributions, encouraging interactions, and providing quality information) relates to members’ satisfaction by fulfilling their socioemotional needs (community identity) and increases their brand trust. Furthermore, multigroup analyses indicate significant differences in the paths to brand trust between posters and lurkers. Brand knowledge, providing quality information, and encouraging members to interact drive brand trust for lurkers. For posters, trust is driven by their sense of community identity and encouraging members to interact. This research advances the literature on online brand communities by shedding light on the scant knowledge of lurkers in online communities. It demonstrates how perceived support from brands can improve both posters’ and lurkers’ relationships with the community and the brand itself. The findings provide actionable managerial recommendations regarding how brands can manage their relationships with all members (both posters and lurkers) in their online communities.","PeriodicalId":13928,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Electronic Commerce","volume":"27 1","pages":"66 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44601326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}