Electronic Commerce Research最新文献

Rural tourism plays an important role in advancing the rural economy but faces unexpected risks and challenges such as the deterioration of operational performance. Information and communications technologies (ICT) – such as digital payment platforms, online booking systems, social media marketing, and virtual reality tours – become pervasive in the tourism industry during the current digital era. However, little empirical evidence has been presented about how such technologies impact rural tourism and if rural tourism resilience gets enhanced with the support of ICT in China. This study addresses this research gap by analyzing a sample of 20,716 rural tourism operators from the Third National Agricultural Census of 2016 in Beijing, which is a major urban center in China with a substantial market for rural tourism products and services. With the aid of a treatment effect model (TEM), the research results show that ICT can be an effective way to promote the rural tourism industry through mitigating business difficulties and risks and therefore to enhance the resilience of rural tourism. Our study shows that ICT plays an important and positive role in promoting tourism sales externally and enhancing management internally. The heterogeneity of the operator’s organization type and human capital also makes a difference. The sample data robustly show that ICT can effectively alleviate “scale discrimination” and support “low education level bias”, which is conducive to small-scaled business households and has also increased the resilience of those operators who are at a disadvantaged position in the industry.

Collaboration and value co-creation are important drivers of the continuous growth of e-commerce, which is expected to reach US $6.4 trillion in 2024 despite current global crises. Only a few transaction platforms currently dominate e-commerce (eg., Amazon, Walmart), but other participants are likely to join these platforms’ ecosystems. Third-party developers can provide extensions to these ecosystems to enhance the platforms’ functionality, but third-party developers’ role in e-commerce ecosystems’ success and generativity remains underexamined in academia. The present study scrutinizes the efficacy of boundary resources in attracting and managing third-party developers in e-commerce ecosystems. This investigation is predicated upon qualitative data gathered through interviews with 14 domain experts. The insights derived from these interviews have culminated in the formulation of seven design principles. These design principles are envisaged to serve as a guiding framework for owners of innovation and transaction platforms within the e-commerce sphere, facilitating the strategic deployment of boundary resources. It is anticipated that collaboration, value creation, and the overall generative capacity as well as the success of e-commerce ecosystems shall be considerably enhanced.

In the era of invasive social media and advanced artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis has become a vital tool for e-commerce and businesses to grasp user needs and monitor brand perception. This is particularly relevant in the film industry, where understanding the determinants of a movie’s pre-release performance is crucial for producers and investors. Traditional methods often rely on complex algorithms that lack transparency in elucidating the relationship between key risk factors and movie outcomes. This study addresses this gap by employing an explainable analytics framework to investigate the impact of various social media post characteristics on movie performance before its release. Initially, an exploratory data analysis was undertaken to identify significant risk factors associated with movie failures. Subsequently, the study segmented the analysis into three risk categories—low, moderate, and high risk—and applied conventional machine learning models to forecast the likelihood of failure within each category. The culmination of this research involved the application of a SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) model, which provided insightful interpretations of how different risk factors contribute to the potential success or failure of movies. By integrating SHAP for interpretability, this research offers novel insights into the predictive dynamics of movie performance, paving the way for informed decision-making in the film industry.

This paper explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice assistants (VAs) in the context of online shopping, with a specific focus on Indian consumers. Through a quantitative research approach, data were collected with an online survey of 150 Indian participants based on constructs and measurement tools, which are meticulously defined, ensuring the reliability and validity of the results. The study (1) explores previous research to understand the use of AI-powered VAs in online shopping and their varied antecedents/dimensions; (2) analyses the influence of consumer trust on intention to use, satisfaction, and emotional attachment among individuals who use AI-powered VAs in online shopping; (3) develops a framework that reflects the antecedents of AI-powered VAs in online shopping and the outcome as brand loyalty, while taking consumer trust as the mediator for users’ intention to use AI-powered VAs, customer satisfaction, and emotional attachment in their journey towards brand loyalty; (4) studies how Alexa, an AI-powered VA, influences the consumer journey when shopping online in India and ultimately affects the brand loyalty of Indian consumers.

An increasing number of rewarded crowdfunding platforms recommend that fundraisers post multimodal data to improve data diversity and attract investors’ attention. Fundraisers’ speech contains both textual modality (text) and acoustic modality (voice) data. This study aims to explore how linguistic style of the speech text and acoustic features of the speech voice influence the crowdfunding campaign performance from the perspective of emotional contagion. An econometric model to investigate the effects of emotional cues from fundraisers’ speech on rewarded crowdfunding performance is constructed, and an empirical analysis with 21,996 projects data in Kickstarter is conducted. The findings demonstrate that both acoustic emotional cues (voice pitch, intensity and speech rate) and textual emotional cues (intimate and perceptual language) have significant effect on the financing performance. Among them, voice pitch, speech rate, intimate language and perceptual language have significant positive effect on the financing performance, while voice intensity is negatively related to financing performance. The number of comments positively moderates the relationship between emotional cues in speech and project financing performance. Research also finds that the acoustic and textual emotional features in speech have different effects on the success rate of project financing under different types of projects. This investigation provides both theoretical implications for the literature of crowdfunding and practical implications for fundraisers.

Incorporating fluency theory into a user experience design framework, this study utilises design considerations, drawing on complementary angles of the two theoretical domains, as a foundation with the ultimate goal of creating beneficial mobile payment experiences. An exploratory approach is deployed through semi-structured interviews to provide insights into experience design considerations utilising sensory elements and risk perception, a combination which has thus far received little attention. Research participants consist of senior managers that work for companies that create, facilitate, or accept mobile payment apps or processes. A conceptual framework is proposed with design as a starting point, including aesthetics and the need for a simplified experience, along with sensory elements that replicate familiar visual, audio, and haptic stimuli. These lead to a more usable experience that is perceived as easy to use through a frictionless experience. Usefulness is increased as exposure increases, and new app or process features can be added once prior features become familiar through repeated use. Key trade-offs include a simplified experience versus feature-rich experience, and frictionless experiences versus security risks, with key practical suggestions on how these can be approached.

With the advent of reform and an open economic policy, the tourism domain has undergone accelerated growth paralleled by an enhancement in people’s standard of living. The diversity in tourism offerings corresponds to the evolving preferences of consumers, and the tourism industry has transformed into a foundational component supporting the national economy. The expansion of tourism can exert a significant influence on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of an entire region, subsequently fostering the development of the regional economy, population, and cultural aspects. The economic status and influence of tourism in society can be seen. Today, consumers have focused on pursuing tourism brands. This study aims to examine the influence of multimedia technology on branding within the tourism industry and its implications for driving growth. Data was collected from 520 participants who are Chinese tourists, and through SPSS software the data was analyzed. The validity of the constructs is measured by a Convergent validity test, hypothesis testing is employed to understand the complex relationships between the variables. The experimental results showed that the number of visitors to tourism brand websites increased four times since they were spread by Multimedia Technology (MT), which changed from 119 to 500; the website click-through rate also nearly doubled over the same period, and even the highest website click-through rate was 98.87%. This showed that the user’s interest in tourism brands also increased exponentially. The novelty of the study focuses on multimedia technology and its implications for branding and development. By merging quantitative data analysis with qualitative observations, it presents tactics for implementing multimedia technology in the field of tourism. The study offers a point of reference for devising design and communication strategies for tourism brands that incorporate MT. It not only provides theoretical support for the design and communication facets of tourism brands but also guides the trajectory for their future development.

We investigate the effect of online grocery shopping (OGS) business operators’ responses to negative online customer reviews (NOCRs) on prospective shoppers’ attitudes toward OGS. Previous research indicates online customer reviews (OCRs) affect purchasing decisions and trust. We consider the occurrence of NOCRs as a service failure and appropriate managerial responses (apology, compensation) as service recovery efforts. Equity theory suggests managerial responses affect perceived justice and generate trust, enhancing intention to use. A scenario-based experiment was conducted to examine the impact of managerial responses on prospective shoppers’ perceived justice, trust, and intention to use. The results revealed that an apology has a more significant effect on perceived justice than on compensation, influencing trust and intention to use. We defined NOCRs as service failures exposed to prospective shoppers and evaluated the effect of managerial responses on perceived justice. We provide practical implications for OGS by suggesting appropriate responses to NOCRs.

Many online businesses strive to optimize last-mile delivery cost by implementing delivery modes aimed at cutting costs through automation or collaboration. Convincing consumers to adopt cost-efficient last-mile delivery modes is imperative to successfully achieve this goal. Yet, evidence on consumers’ attitude towards different delivery modes is scarce and causes of differences in attitude are currently not well understood. Based on qualitative interviews with e-food industry experts, we identify potential drivers of consumers’ attitude towards last-mile delivery modes. We test these drivers experimentally, finding privacy concerns to fully mediate differences in attitude of in-home and in-garage delivery when compared to timed in-person delivery. In addition, we find evidence indicating the presence of privacy calculus in delivery mode choice. Next to reducing customer risk, providing added customer value could therefore be a viable approach to encourage consumer adoption of more cost-efficient last-mile delivery.

Recommender systems are becoming increasingly indispensable for e-commerce. To achieve interpretable recommendation, review topic-based recommendation is an important research area that aims to infer users’ ratings over their unrated items using existing reviews and corresponding ratings simultaneously. However, combining latent factors and review topics can also introduce uncertainties in the model learning process, both in inference and sampling. To address this challenge, we propose a new model called type-2 fuzzy review topic-based recommendation (T2FR). T2 fuzzy membership functions are introduced to represent the topic parameter uncertainties, and a strategy of dual sampling is developed to deal with the topic T2 membership functions and further used for uncertainty handling. Abundant experiments on data collected from real-world e-commerce platforms demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model compared with baseline methods in terms of rating prediction accuracy with interpretation. Our proposed T2FR can substantially benefit both e-commerce platforms and consumers.