Pub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101438
Qian Wang, Xixi Li, Xiangbin Yan, Ruihao Li
Live commerce is a novel form of social commerce characterized by real-time interaction and synchronous visualization. Drawing upon affordance theory and the affective-cognitive framework, we propose a comprehensive research model that integrates three key dimensions of affordances of live commerce technology, namely utilitarian (visibility), social (social presence, interactivity, self-presentation), and hedonic affordances (entertainment), together with consumers’ cognitive and affective states (perceived diagnosticity and psychological distance). Furthermore, we explore age as an important contingency factor in understanding consumers’ purchase intention in live commerce. We collect data from 353 consumers who have live shopping experiences in China and analyze the research model with the structural equation model approach. Results indicate that visibility, social presence, and interactivity positively contribute to perceived diagnosticity, whereas entertainment and the three social affordances reduce psychological distance. Notably, the influence of perceived diagnosticity on purchase intention is more pronounced among older consumers, whereas the impact of psychological distance on purchase intention is stronger among younger consumers. This study not only advances the understanding of affordance theory within live commerce contexts but also offers practical insights for streamers and live commerce platforms.
{"title":"How to enhance consumers’ purchase intention in live commerce? An affordance perspective and the moderating role of age","authors":"Qian Wang, Xixi Li, Xiangbin Yan, Ruihao Li","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101438","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101438","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Live commerce is a novel form of social commerce characterized by real-time interaction and synchronous visualization. Drawing upon affordance theory and the affective-cognitive framework, we propose a comprehensive research model that integrates three key dimensions of affordances of live commerce technology, namely utilitarian (visibility), social (social presence, interactivity, self-presentation), and hedonic affordances (entertainment), together with consumers’ cognitive and affective states (perceived diagnosticity and psychological distance). Furthermore, we explore age as an important contingency factor in understanding consumers’ purchase intention in live commerce. We collect data from 353 consumers who have live shopping experiences in China and analyze the research model with the structural equation model approach. Results indicate that visibility, social presence, and interactivity positively contribute to perceived diagnosticity, whereas entertainment and the three social affordances reduce psychological distance. Notably, the influence of perceived diagnosticity on purchase intention is more pronounced among older consumers, whereas the impact of psychological distance on purchase intention is stronger among younger consumers. This study not only advances the understanding of affordance theory within live commerce contexts but also offers practical insights for streamers and live commerce platforms.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101438"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141954565","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101440
Sravan S.S. , Susmita Mandal , P.J.A. Alphonse
Offline payment solutions exist today to enable customers to avail themselves of the privileges of the cashless economy. Financial inclusion is visualized as a key factor in encouraging digital transactions in rural and semi-urban regions. Recently, the Government of India, along with the Reserve Bank of India, announced a framework that allows offline payments with finite transaction limits. This aims at providing access to formal financial services in an affordable manner to deepen financial inclusion. However, the remote population rarely access their digital bank accounts due to intermittent network connectivity issues. Hence, the majority of these accounts are in a dormant state, which demeans the impact of financial inclusion. The aim of this research is to design and develop a sustainable, low-cost, highly efficient offline payment solution using a LoRa-enabled IoT ecosystem to connect with Space Information Network (SIN). A novel offline payment system is designed with features of a) recharge and b) payment with offline wallet technology, which can be availed of in the absence of Internet or telecommunication services. The proposed solution, LIO-PAY, allows merchants and end users across the ecosystem to run seamless transactions. We developed a proof of concept and tested it in a lab setup with volunteers to analyze the usability of the application for initiating transactions. We examined 46 customer-initiated transactions and found that 16 (around 34.8%) failed due to merchant data entry errors, likely typos. In a separate analysis of these transactions, 4 customers (approximately 11.5%) incorrectly entered their PIN. The average time to complete a transaction was 35.42 s. Bringing satellite payments to life faces hurdles but holds immense promise for the unbanked. Getting the green light from banking authorities and the satellite network provider is no easy feat. Even if approved, launching a whole new satellite network just for low-value transactions might be too expensive. A more realistic approach could be using existing telecom satellites to bounce transaction data to banks. Regulatory approval is needed from both banking authorities and the satellite network provider. Hence, we simulated the SIN environment with seven LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites using the Matlab tool. These simulations revealed a transmission time range of 2 min to 1 h, indicating a reasonable timeframe for delivering information to a ground station via SIN. Despite terrestrial networks expanding their reach, satellite-based solutions hold promise for areas with no or weak internet connectivity. This becomes even more attractive if launch costs go down or if banking authorities help subsidize the service to bring financial inclusion to remote regions. Thus, we hope this approach may help researchers and policymakers visualize the possibilities of bridging the gap in financial inclusion.
如今,离线支付解决方案的存在使客户能够享受无现金经济带来的便利。普惠金融被视为鼓励农村和半城市地区数字交易的关键因素。最近,印度政府与印度储备银行共同宣布了一个框架,允许在有限的交易限额内进行离线支付。此举旨在以负担得起的方式提供正规金融服务,以深化金融包容性。然而,由于时断时续的网络连接问题,偏远地区的居民很少能访问他们的数字银行账户。因此,这些账户大多处于休眠状态,削弱了普惠金融的影响力。本研究旨在利用支持 LoRa 的物联网生态系统与空间信息网络(SIN)连接,设计并开发一种可持续、低成本、高效率的离线支付解决方案。设计的新型离线支付系统具有以下特点:a) 利用离线钱包技术进行充值和 b) 支付,可在没有互联网或电信服务的情况下使用。拟议的解决方案 LIO-PAY 允许整个生态系统中的商家和最终用户进行无缝交易。我们开发了一个概念验证,并与志愿者一起在实验室进行了测试,以分析该应用程序在发起交易时的可用性。我们检查了 46 项客户发起的交易,发现其中 16 项(约 34.8%)因商家数据输入错误(可能是错别字)而失败。在对这些交易进行的另一项分析中,有 4 位客户(约占 11.5%)输入密码有误。完成一笔交易的平均时间为 35.42 秒。将卫星支付带入生活面临着重重障碍,但对于没有银行账户的人来说却大有可为。要获得银行当局和卫星网络供应商的批准并非易事。即使获得批准,仅为低额交易启动一个全新的卫星网络可能也过于昂贵。更现实的方法是利用现有的电信卫星向银行发送交易数据。银行当局和卫星网络提供商都需要获得监管部门的批准。因此,我们使用 Matlab 工具模拟了七颗 LEO(低地球轨道)卫星的 SIN 环境。模拟结果显示,传输时间范围为 2 分钟至 1 小时,这表明通过 SIN 向地面站传输信息的时间范围是合理的。尽管地面网络的覆盖范围不断扩大,但基于卫星的解决方案仍为没有互联网连接或互联网连接薄弱的地区带来了希望。如果发射成本降低,或者银行当局帮助补贴这项服务,使偏远地区实现金融普惠,那么这种方案就更具吸引力。因此,我们希望这种方法可以帮助研究人员和政策制定者直观地了解缩小普惠金融差距的可能性。
{"title":"LIO-PAY: Sustainable low-cost offline payment solution","authors":"Sravan S.S. , Susmita Mandal , P.J.A. Alphonse","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101440","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101440","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Offline payment solutions exist today to enable customers to avail themselves of the privileges of the cashless economy. Financial inclusion is visualized as a key factor in encouraging digital transactions in rural and semi-urban regions. Recently, the Government of India, along with the Reserve Bank of India, announced a framework that allows offline payments with finite transaction limits. This aims at providing access to formal financial services in an affordable manner to deepen financial inclusion. However, the remote population rarely access their digital bank accounts due to intermittent network connectivity issues. Hence, the majority of these accounts are in a dormant state, which demeans the impact of financial inclusion. The aim of this research is to design and develop a sustainable, low-cost, highly efficient offline payment solution using a LoRa-enabled IoT ecosystem to connect with Space Information Network (SIN). A novel offline payment system is designed with features of a) recharge and b) payment with offline wallet technology, which can be availed of in the absence of Internet or telecommunication services. The proposed solution, LIO-PAY, allows merchants and end users across the ecosystem to run seamless transactions. We developed a proof of concept and tested it in a lab setup with volunteers to analyze the usability of the application for initiating transactions. We examined 46 customer-initiated transactions and found that 16 (around 34.8%) failed due to merchant data entry errors, likely typos. In a separate analysis of these transactions, 4 customers (approximately 11.5%) incorrectly entered their PIN. The average time to complete a transaction was 35.42 s. Bringing satellite payments to life faces hurdles but holds immense promise for the unbanked. Getting the green light from banking authorities and the satellite network provider is no easy feat. Even if approved, launching a whole new satellite network just for low-value transactions might be too expensive. A more realistic approach could be using existing telecom satellites to bounce transaction data to banks. Regulatory approval is needed from both banking authorities and the satellite network provider. Hence, we simulated the SIN environment with seven LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites using the Matlab tool. These simulations revealed a transmission time range of 2 min to 1 h, indicating a reasonable timeframe for delivering information to a ground station via SIN. Despite terrestrial networks expanding their reach, satellite-based solutions hold promise for areas with no or weak internet connectivity. This becomes even more attractive if launch costs go down or if banking authorities help subsidize the service to bring financial inclusion to remote regions. Thus, we hope this approach may help researchers and policymakers visualize the possibilities of bridging the gap in financial inclusion.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101440"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141782249","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101439
Ping Ni , Xianquan Wang , Bing Lv , Likang Wu
In the ever-expanding digital library of scholarly articles, navigating through the vast amount of available research papers to find relevant work poses a significant challenge to researchers. Addressing this issue, we introduce the Graph Topic-aware Recommender (GTR), an innovative end-to-end deep neural model tailored for scholarly recommendation systems. Unlike traditional methods that primarily rely on Collaborative Filtering, Content-Based Filtering, and Graph-Based approaches with limited consideration of the intricate citing logic within scientific documents, GTR captures the nuanced relationships and citing topics inherent in scholarly networks. By leveraging an advanced neural topic modeling technique, GTR transfers item-to-user recommendation into an item-to-item framework, facilitating a more accurate and contextually relevant paper recommendation process. Our study leverages the contextual richness of scholarly networks through Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), addressing the overlooked aspect of differentiated semantic relationships within these networks. The model stands out by effectively mining relation topics and conducting differentiated representations to minimize information redundancy, which enables GTR to adaptively infer latent citation topics, enhancing the model’s explainability and recommendation accuracy. Besides, the optimization function of GTR incorporates a novel component pooling module, designed to encode the sub-graph information of samples without traditional message passing, thereby improving the model’s efficiency and scalability. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world scholarly datasets, GTR demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art models, offering both high accuracy and explainability in its recommendations.
{"title":"GTR: An explainable Graph Topic-aware Recommender for scholarly document","authors":"Ping Ni , Xianquan Wang , Bing Lv , Likang Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101439","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101439","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In the ever-expanding digital library of scholarly articles, navigating through the vast amount of available research papers to find relevant work poses a significant challenge to researchers. Addressing this issue, we introduce the Graph Topic-aware Recommender (GTR), an innovative end-to-end deep neural model tailored for scholarly recommendation systems. Unlike traditional methods that primarily rely on Collaborative Filtering, Content-Based Filtering, and Graph-Based approaches with limited consideration of the intricate citing logic within scientific documents, GTR captures the nuanced relationships and citing topics inherent in scholarly networks. By leveraging an advanced neural topic modeling technique, GTR transfers item-to-user recommendation into an item-to-item framework, facilitating a more accurate and contextually relevant paper recommendation process. Our study leverages the contextual richness of scholarly networks through Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), addressing the overlooked aspect of differentiated semantic relationships within these networks. The model stands out by effectively mining relation topics and conducting differentiated representations to minimize information redundancy, which enables GTR to adaptively infer latent citation topics, enhancing the model’s explainability and recommendation accuracy. Besides, the optimization function of GTR incorporates a novel component pooling module, designed to encode the sub-graph information of samples without traditional message passing, thereby improving the model’s efficiency and scalability. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world scholarly datasets, GTR demonstrates superior performance over existing state-of-the-art models, offering both high accuracy and explainability in its recommendations.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101439"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141782250","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-20DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101437
Meiling Xin , Wei Liu , Ling Jian
The live streaming e-commerce industry is developing rapidly, significantly influencing consumer decision-making processes. Unlike previous studies focusing solely on singular outcomes, this research concurrently examines impulse buying and repurchase intentions. It constructs a theoretical model based on the heuristic-systematic model to validate the effectiveness of two types of marketing signals (product-related signals and interactive signals) in live streaming. Additionally, this study introduces the uniqueness of streamers, products, and performance as moderating variables, aiming to elucidate the mechanisms through which different marketing signals in live streaming affect consumer cognition, impulse buying, and repurchase intentions. Through the collection and analysis of 468 survey responses, this research reveals that viewer-streamer interactive signals and viewer-viewer interactive signals positively impact the narrowing of psychological distance. Simultaneously, product-related signals positively influence the enhancing of consumer perceived value. Furthermore, three interesting moderating effects are identified. By integrating signal theory and the heuristic-systematic model, this study provides a clear depiction of the pathway through which consumers process marketing signals in live streaming, offering theoretical support and practical insights for streamers, platforms, and businesses.
{"title":"Live streaming product display or social interaction: How do they influence consumer intention and behavior? A heuristic-systematic perspective","authors":"Meiling Xin , Wei Liu , Ling Jian","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101437","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101437","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The live streaming e-commerce industry is developing rapidly, significantly influencing consumer decision-making processes. Unlike previous studies focusing solely on singular outcomes, this research concurrently examines impulse buying and repurchase intentions. It constructs a theoretical model based on the heuristic-systematic model to validate the effectiveness of two types of marketing signals (product-related signals and interactive signals) in live streaming. Additionally, this study introduces the uniqueness of streamers, products, and performance as moderating variables, aiming to elucidate the mechanisms through which different marketing signals in live streaming affect consumer cognition, impulse buying, and repurchase intentions. Through the collection and analysis of 468 survey responses, this research reveals that viewer-streamer interactive signals and viewer-viewer interactive signals positively impact the narrowing of psychological distance. Simultaneously, product-related signals positively influence the enhancing of consumer perceived value. Furthermore, three interesting moderating effects are identified. By integrating signal theory and the heuristic-systematic model, this study provides a clear depiction of the pathway through which consumers process marketing signals in live streaming, offering theoretical support and practical insights for streamers, platforms, and businesses.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101437"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141782251","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-17DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101436
Seongjun Yun , Soyoung Jun , Jong Woo Kim
Online reviews help consumers make purchasing decisions on e-commerce platforms by addressing uncertainties in online shopping. In the context of information overload, the value of review helpfulness has become increasingly evident. This study aims to explore the effects of discrete emotions on helpfulness by categorizing Ekman’s six basic emotions based on arousal and valence, and extracting their probabilities from Amazon reviews using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). The results indicate high arousal or negative emotions adversely influence review usefulness. Furthermore, anger, disgust, and fear, characterized by high arousal and displeasure, significantly affect the perceived helpfulness of the reviews. Additionally, we identify product involvement as a significant moderator, suggesting that consumers’ investment in products influences their interpretation of reviews’ emotional content. This study contributes to understanding the relationship between discrete emotions, product involvement, and review helpfulness in e-commerce, offering insights for online retailers and platform developers to enhance consumer decision-making.
{"title":"The impact of high arousal and displeasure on online review helpfulness: Exploring the moderating role of product involvement","authors":"Seongjun Yun , Soyoung Jun , Jong Woo Kim","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101436","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101436","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Online reviews help consumers make purchasing decisions on e-commerce platforms by addressing uncertainties in online shopping. In the context of information overload, the value of review helpfulness has become increasingly evident. This study aims to explore the effects of discrete emotions on helpfulness by categorizing Ekman’s six basic emotions based on arousal and valence, and extracting their probabilities from Amazon reviews using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). The results indicate high arousal or negative emotions adversely influence review usefulness. Furthermore, anger, disgust, and fear, characterized by high arousal and displeasure, significantly affect the perceived helpfulness of the reviews. Additionally, we identify product involvement as a significant moderator, suggesting that consumers’ investment in products influences their interpretation of reviews’ emotional content. This study contributes to understanding the relationship between discrete emotions, product involvement, and review helpfulness in e-commerce, offering insights for online retailers and platform developers to enhance consumer decision-making.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101436"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141853379","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-14DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101435
Lu-Yu Chang , Chuan-Xu Wang , Qing Zhang
Conventional wisdom demonstrates that the retailer sharing information voluntarily can prevent encroachment (i.e., information strategy) under the reselling agreement. Considering the prevailing emerging agency selling agreement, we reexamine the effectiveness of the platform’s information strategy when the manufacturer and platform jointly participate in selling format decisions, and further analyze the strategic role of selling format in preventing encroachment. We show that adjusting selling format decision (i.e., sales strategy) can also be an anti-encroachment tool which may be even better than information strategy for the platform. Interestingly, adopting sales strategy and information strategy synthetically (i.e., synthetical strategy) may produce a synergy area to prevent encroachment, outperforming the two strategies used alone. Surprisingly, selling format can also serve as a strategic tool for the manufacturer to promote encroachment. Specifically, if the manufacturer changes from reselling to agency selling, information strategy’s anti-encroachment effectiveness may be eliminated, thus encouraging encroachment. Moreover, switching to agency selling may induce the platform to change information sharing decision, resulting in promoting encroachment.
{"title":"Promote or prevent manufacturer encroachment? The strategic role of selling format under asymmetric demand information","authors":"Lu-Yu Chang , Chuan-Xu Wang , Qing Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101435","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101435","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Conventional wisdom demonstrates that the retailer sharing information voluntarily can prevent encroachment (i.e., information strategy) under the reselling agreement. Considering the prevailing emerging agency selling agreement, we reexamine the effectiveness of the platform’s information strategy when the manufacturer and platform jointly participate in selling format decisions, and further analyze the strategic role of selling format in preventing encroachment. We show that adjusting selling format decision (i.e., sales strategy) can also be an anti-encroachment tool which may be even better than information strategy for the platform. Interestingly, adopting sales strategy and information strategy synthetically (i.e., synthetical strategy) may produce a synergy area to prevent encroachment, outperforming the two strategies used alone. Surprisingly, selling format can also serve as a strategic tool for the manufacturer to promote encroachment. Specifically, if the manufacturer changes from reselling to agency selling, information strategy’s anti-encroachment effectiveness may be eliminated, thus encouraging encroachment. Moreover, switching to agency selling may induce the platform to change information sharing decision, resulting in promoting encroachment.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101435"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141699005","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-14DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101433
Chloe Satinet , François Fouss , Marco Saerens , Pierre Leleux
Many e-commerce websites use product recommendation systems. With the growing awareness of the environmental impact of our consumption, these recommender systems, well-known for encouraging purchases and consumption, are being challenged. In recent literature, it has been suggested that recommender systems should balance the exploitation of existing preferences with the exploration of sustainable items, i.e., to make sustainable alternatives more accessible to consumers and promote sustainable consumption habits. In this paper, we therefore analyse how to increase the presence of sustainable products in recommendation lists, without overly decreasing their accuracy. More precisely, we test three in-processing and four post-processing strategies using an offline experimental design. The post-processing strategies 1 (relevance scores’ adjustment) and 3.1. (incremental list formation with calibration) manage to offer interesting accuracy-sustainability trade-offs on our datasets. For instance, by applying post-processing strategy 3.1 to a content-based recommendation algorithm, a gain of up to 20% can be achieved for the sustainability metric without any loss of accuracy. Greater sustainability improvements can be achieved if a loss of accuracy is tolerated. For practitioners, i.e., e-commerce platforms, this means that they could continue to offer relevant recommendations while promoting a more sustainable consumption.
{"title":"In-processing and post-processing strategies for balancing accuracy and sustainability in product recommendations","authors":"Chloe Satinet , François Fouss , Marco Saerens , Pierre Leleux","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101433","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101433","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many e-commerce websites use product recommendation systems. With the growing awareness of the environmental impact of our consumption, these recommender systems, well-known for encouraging purchases and consumption, are being challenged. In recent literature, it has been suggested that recommender systems should balance the exploitation of existing preferences with the exploration of sustainable items, i.e., to make sustainable alternatives more accessible to consumers and promote sustainable consumption habits. In this paper, we therefore analyse how to increase the presence of sustainable products in recommendation lists, without overly decreasing their accuracy. More precisely, we test three in-processing and four post-processing strategies using an offline experimental design. The post-processing strategies 1 (relevance scores’ adjustment) and 3.1. (incremental list formation with calibration) manage to offer interesting accuracy-sustainability trade-offs on our datasets. For instance, by applying post-processing strategy 3.1 to a content-based recommendation algorithm, a gain of up to 20% can be achieved for the sustainability metric without any loss of accuracy. Greater sustainability improvements can be achieved if a loss of accuracy is tolerated. For practitioners, i.e., e-commerce platforms, this means that they could continue to offer relevant recommendations while promoting a more sustainable consumption.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101433"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141710532","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-11DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101434
Jia Qian , Jiannan Shen , Xiaofeng Shao
Reselling or online marketplace are the two common selling modes for e-tailers in online retailing, and in each selling mode, logistics service is an important strategy that is provided by e-tailers, manufacturers, or third-party logistics (abbreviated as 3PL) companies. We formulate a multi-stage game to sequentially investigate the optimal selling mode and the equilibrium of service format selection and find that under the identical logistics service costs for all service providers, the e-tailer is willing to choose reselling when the fraction of the manufacturer’s revenue sharing as a commission rate is low or choose online marketplace when the fraction is medium–low. When the fraction is medium to high, the selling mode choice is influenced by the fraction and the logistics service’s cost sensitivity to demand, and interestingly the e-tailer does not always choose online marketplace with a high fraction of revenue sharing. Further, we find the logistics service undertaken by the e-tailer is the equilibrium when the e-tailer chooses reselling, or online marketplace with a medium to high fraction, while the manufacturer is the equilibrium when the e-tailer chooses online marketplace with a medium–low fraction. Moreover, we identify the “win–win” conditions by examining the consistency in choosing the selling mode between the e-tailer and the manufacturer. Finally, the e-tailer and manufacturer would outsource the logistics service to a 3PL company with a lower service cost regardless of the selling mode. Last, the optimal selling mode and the consistency are robust under each extended discussion.
{"title":"Selling mode choice with logistics service: Reselling or online marketplace?","authors":"Jia Qian , Jiannan Shen , Xiaofeng Shao","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101434","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101434","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Reselling or online marketplace are the two common selling modes for e-tailers in online retailing, and in each selling mode, logistics service is an important strategy that is provided by e-tailers, manufacturers, or third-party logistics (abbreviated as 3PL) companies. We formulate a multi-stage game to sequentially investigate the optimal selling mode and the equilibrium of service format selection and find that under the identical logistics service costs for all service providers, the e-tailer is willing to choose reselling when the fraction of the manufacturer’s revenue sharing as a commission rate is low or choose online marketplace when the fraction is medium–low. When the fraction is medium to high, the selling mode choice is influenced by the fraction and the logistics service’s cost sensitivity to demand, and interestingly the e-tailer does not always choose online marketplace with a high fraction of revenue sharing. Further, we find the logistics service undertaken by the e-tailer is the equilibrium when the e-tailer chooses reselling, or online marketplace with a medium to high fraction, while the manufacturer is the equilibrium when the e-tailer chooses online marketplace with a medium–low fraction. Moreover, we identify the “win–win” conditions by examining the consistency in choosing the selling mode between the e-tailer and the manufacturer. Finally, the e-tailer and manufacturer would outsource the logistics service to a 3PL company with a lower service cost regardless of the selling mode. Last, the optimal selling mode and the consistency are robust under each extended discussion.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101434"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141623254","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}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101431
Siyuan Zhu , Shaofu Du , Tengfei Nie , Yangguang Zhu
Consumer innovation, which is the participation of consumers (or users) in product research and development, has become increasingly popular in recent years. Simultaneously, large technological advances on the internet have provided a convenient channel for consumers to contribute creative ideas in co-creation activity, providing an opportunity to rebuild our business ecosystem. We focus on how the platform impacts the process of consumer innovation. In this paper, we consider a setting in which a platform enterprise, a producer, and a group of consumers jointly design and produce a co-created product. In the co-creation process, the platform collects consumers’ ideas, sets three different innovation standards (i.e., practicality-oriented innovation, novelty-oriented innovation, and mixed innovation), and then sells the integrated idea to the producer. We demonstrate that each of the three innovation standards has its own scope of application, and no one standard is strictly dominant. Furthermore, a consumer is more willing to purchase the product with the increase in the effort exerted by himself when participating in a co-creation activity. Finally, we find that government subsidies for the platform enterprise are not always high-efficient in terms of increasing social welfare.
{"title":"Pricing strategy for co-created products in platform-based consumer innovation","authors":"Siyuan Zhu , Shaofu Du , Tengfei Nie , Yangguang Zhu","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101431","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Consumer innovation, which is the participation of consumers (or users) in product research and development, has become increasingly popular in recent years. Simultaneously, large technological advances on the internet have provided a convenient channel for consumers to contribute creative ideas in co-creation activity, providing an opportunity to rebuild our business ecosystem. We focus on how the platform impacts the process of consumer innovation. In this paper, we consider a setting in which a platform enterprise, a producer, and a group of consumers jointly design and produce a co-created product. In the co-creation process, the platform collects consumers’ ideas, sets three different innovation standards (i.e., practicality-oriented innovation, novelty-oriented innovation, and mixed innovation), and then sells the integrated idea to the producer. We demonstrate that each of the three innovation standards has its own scope of application, and no one standard is strictly dominant. Furthermore, a consumer is more willing to purchase the product with the increase in the effort exerted by himself when participating in a co-creation activity. Finally, we find that government subsidies for the platform enterprise are not always high-efficient in terms of increasing social welfare.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101431"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141583073","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}
Pub Date : 2024-06-28DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101420
Kwee Keong Choong , Liz Bacon
Electronic commerce (EC) is becoming a popular platform for online retail shopping and online payment, and it has become a new phenomenon of business transactions and innovation. In view of EC importance in global business transactions, surprisingly, there is no proper and appropriate system of performance measurement. Even if an EC firm were to measure performance, typically, the focus is on financial results using the traditional accounting system (AS) of measurement. The aim of this paper is to identify the metrics and indicators needed for EC performance measurement as the AS is inappropriate for many of the EC activities such as traffic flow, reliability of security of online payments, use of social-media data, etc. We first use a systematic analysis of selected articles to help us identify, understand and select metrics and indicators that are applicable for EC performance measurement. The Delphi method is then undertaken to conduct a questionnaire survey to gauge consensus of experts’ opinions with respect to (wrt) the use of those metrics and indicators selected. We found the respondents largely agreed that the metrics and indicators proposed by us are necessary or very necessary for use in EC performance measurement, although the experts consider three of the metrics proposed − traffic sources, emails subscribers and customer lifetime value be replaced with three accounting indicators (net income, return on investment and break-even points). The data is robust as it is verified by statistical tests. This study has both academic and practical implications; for the former, the metrics and indicators proposed meet the theoretical mathematical measurement system, and for the latter, the metrics and indicators proposed allows operation and strategic managers to design and develop an organization’s PMS.
{"title":"A metric and indicator performance measurement system for e-commerce organizations: A consensus analysis of their usefulness","authors":"Kwee Keong Choong , Liz Bacon","doi":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101420","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.elerap.2024.101420","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Electronic commerce (EC) is becoming a popular platform for online retail shopping and online payment, and it has become a new phenomenon of business transactions and innovation. In view of EC importance in global business transactions, surprisingly, there is no proper and appropriate system of performance measurement. Even if an EC firm were to measure performance, typically, the focus is on financial results using the traditional accounting system (AS) of measurement. The aim of this paper is to identify the metrics and indicators needed for EC performance measurement as the AS is inappropriate for many of the EC activities such as traffic flow, reliability of security of online payments, use of social-media data, etc. We first use a systematic analysis of selected articles to help us identify, understand and select metrics and indicators that are applicable for EC performance measurement. The <em>Delphi method</em> is then undertaken to conduct a questionnaire survey to gauge consensus of experts’ opinions with respect to (wrt) the use of those metrics and indicators selected. We found the respondents largely agreed that the metrics and indicators proposed by us are necessary or very necessary for use in EC performance measurement, although the experts consider three of the metrics proposed − traffic sources, emails subscribers and customer lifetime value be replaced with three accounting indicators (net income, return on investment and break-even points). The data is robust as it is verified by statistical tests. This study has both academic and practical implications; for the former, the metrics and indicators proposed meet the theoretical mathematical measurement system, and for the latter, the metrics and indicators proposed allows operation and strategic managers to design and develop an organization’s PMS.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":50541,"journal":{"name":"Electronic Commerce Research and Applications","volume":"67 ","pages":"Article 101420"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141623253","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}