(2021). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 125-126.

(2021). Special Issue: Dark Sides of Digitalization. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 127-135.

ABSTRACT Current measures of technostress do not consider some recent techno-stressors generated by information and communications technologies. Such stressors may affect knowledge professionals by challenging their credibility, such as insecurity induced by artificial intelligence and websites that misinform clients. This paper presents the development and validation of a 25-item self-report instrument

ABSTRACT A broad stream of research strives to understand stress directly or indirectly resulting from the use of information and communication technology (ICT), commonly referred to as technostress. A group at high risk of suffering from the consequences of technostress is adolescents because they grow up using ICT daily and are still developing their identity, acquiring mental strength, and adopting

ABSTRACT After many years of techno-enthusiasm, public discourse has turned to the dark side of technology and notably the dysfunctional consequences (e.g., addiction-like symptoms) of excessive social media use. Recent research in this area draws on dual-system theory and demonstrates that while habit predicts use, it does not directly predict addiction-like symptoms. This is not surprising, since

ABSTRACT Problematic social media use has increasingly become an issue in schools and companies. Individuals often attempt to reduce their problematic use, but some may not be successful. This implies that there are both impeding and maintaining factors influencing problematic use and that different individuals may follow different mechanisms during problematic use. Drawing on cognitive dissonance

ABSTRACT E-commerce logistics services are increasingly offering innovative solutions that invite consumers’ co-creation. Although value co-creation empowers consumers, it also connotes a sense of exploitation. This study explores the fairness perspective of co-creating satisfactory logistics services, using self-collection service as an example. A theoretical model based on synthesized insights of

ABSTRACT With crowdsourcing increasingly contributing to organizations’ innovative performance, it becomes more and more important for them to cultivate the creativity of their crowdsourcing communities. While digital feedback is the main, if not the only, two-way channel of communication between the platforms and the crowdworkers, little is yet known about how to use digital feedback to manage and

(2021). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 1-2.

(2021). Special Issue: Digital Collaboration. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 3-6.

ABSTRACT Distributed team arrangements are becoming “the new normal”. The present study considers the evolution of electronic commerce into an area where operational interaction and coordination of work occurs when previously only commerce occurred. As more teams are moving online, the need to understand the conditions supporting team coordination is becoming increasingly prevalent. By examining the

ABSTRACT Online consumer reviews (OCRs) can function as a venue for digital collaboration among various stakeholders to better meet collaborate in consumer needs. The sheer volume of OCRs, however, has posed challenges to efficient search and navigation. Importantly, consumers' needs of product information may differ because of their different preferences in product features. Such differences remain

ABSTRACT This study aims to better understand trust in human–autonomy teams, finding that trust is important for team performance. A Wizard of Oz approach was used to simulate an autonomous agent team member, in a remotely piloted aircraft system research environment, to study the relationship between trust and team performance in human–autonomy teams. Results show that (1) there are lower levels of

ABSTRACT Social media have changed the way salespeople communicate with and build relationships with clients. This study explores how social media are integrated into the communication strategies of sellers in a business-to-business e-commerce context using an affordances approach to analysis. Seller strategies used to build and develop relationships with clients were analyzed based on data collected

ABSTRACT Price discounts are not always positively correlated with consumers’ purchases. When purchasing nonessential products, a low discount may reduce consumers’ purchase intentions, resulting in the boomerang effect. Thus, the correlation between the discount rate and purchase volume is displayed as a U-shaped curve. The extant research mainly discusses the internal causes of the boomerang effect

(2020). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 419-420.

ABSTRACT This study aims to bridge a significant research gap in the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) literature: measuring the effect of the degree of online review helpfulness (ORH) on firms’ financial performance. As studies of the impact of ORH on firm performance in the context of service industries in general and more specifically in the hospitality sector are virtually nonexistent, this work

ABSTRACT This study investigates how the characteristics of mobile devices influence consumer review-posting behavior. We propose that the characteristics of mobile devices affect a consumer’s perceived review-posting cost in terms of time and cognitive effort. Our empirical analysis, using field data from Booking.com, shows that the relative ratio of extremely positive and negative reviews via mobile

ABSTRACT Cryptocurrencies are a hotly debated topic because it is not clear why they should be valued as they are. Bitcoin, by far the most prominent cryptocurrency, currently trades around $9,500 USD. “Why is Bitcoin valuable?” is a question often heard but seldom answered well. It is not the legal tender of any nation, nor does it represent anything of physical or intrinsic value. Some people attribute

ABSTRACT Online retailers work to optimize product presentations; this study relies on scene perception theory to predict that product images with spatial backgrounds lead to more favorable consumer responses than isolated product images, in which products appear to be floating in the air, because spatial backgrounds facilitate visual processing and aesthetic experiences. Three experiments test these

ABSTRACT Today’s retailers have a strategic imperative to integrate their channels. Some have implemented electronic shelf labels (ESL) to replace paper tags to technologically enable the omnichannel transformation by aligning the presentation of price and product information between online and offline channels. However, consumer reactions to ESL are yet unexplored. They could be positive or negative:

The marketplace for mobile payments services is an arena of intense competition among many multinational and national players. The attractiveness of this marketplace to the providing brands takes in the fact that this provision is a gateway to other fintech services and markets. Thus branding is vital to a lasting embedding and continuing success. The authors of the opening paper of this International

ABSTRACT Given the intense competition in the mobile payment market, researchers have been exploring strategies to maintain brand equity and consumer loyalty. By considering the characteristics of mobile payment, we incorporate cross-side network effects (CNEs) and the complementarity actions (i.e., platform-application, application-service, and service-strategy complementarities) to examine mobile

ABSTRACT Human–computer negotiation has the potential to play an important role in today’s highly dynamic online environment, especially in business-to-consumer e-commerce transactions. However, the lack of research on effective automated negotiation algorithms to respond to human buyers’ strategic and/or tactic offers has limited the development of automated human–computer negotiation systems for

ABSTRACT In online shopping, e-consumers often choose one among many websites on which to place their orders. The choice depends on key attributes such as trust labels. Presence of such a label shows that the website has been independently certified for online security and privacy. However, consumers may not search for websites with security and privacy seals if they do not know the importance of trust

ABSTRACT Enterprise social software platforms (ESSPs) have emerged as an important infrastructure that enables teams to perform in the turbulent business environment. The current study adds to the scanty literature on ESSP by revealing and confirming the underlying mechanisms through which ESSP contributes to a team’s ability to improvise. By surveying current ESSP users, we find that ESSP exercises

ABSTRACT Omni-channel supply chains provide customers with increased convenience to experience products and gather price information. Having more information under omni-channel retailing means customers can strategically choose where to purchase (which retail channel) and when to purchase (purchase now or later), which makes channel integration a challenge for omni-channel retailers. This paper focuses

Crowdfunding of entrepreneurial projects has firmly taken its place in the fintech firmament. The specificity of this means of financing includes (in a successful campaign) a relatively large participation with relatively small investment pledges and the transparency of the funding’s progress. Notably, the motivations of crowdfunders often diverge from the financial gains into various nonfinancial

ABSTRACT This research draws data from survey responses and actual transaction data to examine the effect of primary motivations on funding behavior in reward-based crowdfunding platforms. Findings show that altruistic motivations are associated with early funding, and with larger funding in the early stages. In contrast, reward motivations are associated with late and larger funding across stages

ABSTRACT Promotional events on e-commerce platforms (e.g., November 11 in China and Cyber Monday in the United States) have become very popular. Retailers joining these promotions sell their products on the e-commerce platform at a discount. We analyze a retailer’s decision to join the e-promotion of the platform versus offering a discount on its own. Given the platform’s discount factor and fees,

ABSTRACT Based on the stimulus-organism-response model, this research proposes a model that illustrates the effect of perceived interactivity on brand community members’ attitudes toward the site and brand community relationships. This research recruited 425 Facebook Fan Page (FBFP) users for a survey study, and structural equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses. The results show

ABSTRACT We investigate a manufacturer’s three possible online strategies while the manufacturer also distributes its product through an independent retailer in a traditional channel. Under direct selling, the manufacturer sells its products to online consumers directly. Under reselling, the manufacturer sells its product through an e-tailer. Under agency selling, the manufacturer sells its products

ABSTRACT Online product reviews provide vital information to help customers with their purchase decisions. It is therefore critical for administrators of online review websites to ensure the credibility of their sites. Most studies have focused on customers’ perceptions of the source credibility of online review websites before the customers make a purchase. However, the studies have ignored the fact

ABSTRACT Buyer-side, institution-based trust-building mechanisms, which usually appear in the form of guarantee-required schemes, are prevalently provided by the online labor marketplace for buyers to voluntarily adopt. We integrate signaling theory and organization theories of organizational slack and contractual incompleteness to propose a 3S (screening, signaling, and slack) effect framework to

E-commerce has been gradually changing the nature of labor markets. The opportunities for international and national labor arbitrage, repackaging of the work units into modules that can be handled by various agents (including automated bots), co-creation by unpaid volunteers, emergence of purpose-oriented more or less temporary virtual firms, mass platform-run transportation and delivery services,

ABSTRACT In sponsored search advertising, advertisers need to make a series of keyword decisions. Grouping these keywords to form several adgroups within a campaign is a challenging task because of the highly uncertain environment of search advertising. This paper proposes a stochastic programming model for keywords grouping, taking click-through rate and conversion rate as random variables, with consideration

ABSTRACT Brands use social media to engage consumers in all stages of the customer journey. Prior work on consumer engagement with brand-generated content on social networking sites has not taken into account the different needs and gratifications sought by consumers during consecutive stages of customer journeys over time. We propose that what drives consumer engagement with brand posts on social

ABSTRACT In the software industry, early release or delayed release are important decisions for the competing software vendors in the presence of the word-of-mouth (WOM) effect. This paper explores the optimal release decisions of two competing software vendors in two periods according to their estimations about WOM generated by their products. We find that in most scenarios, the firm expecting to

ABSTRACT Retailers increasingly focus on preventing competitive research shopping through a closer integration of their retail channels. This integration often focuses on prepurchase aspects of the purchase process (e.g., tablets in stores to access the online store). Cross-channel delivery might be a postpurchase means to reduce competitive research shopping. One distinguishes between click and collect

Value co-creation by users is an encompassing phenomenon of the contemporary Internet, with many and various components and motivations [1]. Articulations on social media are a prominent part of it. The greater the engagement and the lasting commitment of the users of a social media platform, the more extensive the breadth, depth, and reach of information sharing among them, the more successful can

ABSTRACT Internet users have been actively using social media to share various kinds of information online, offering opportunities for companies to gain valuable data from their customers. Although researchers have paid considerable attention to users’ information-sharing behavior, few studies have attempted to explore their psychological perceptions in decision-making about sharing information on

ABSTRACT Online healthcare communities (OHCs) have become increasingly popular and now impact the way that doctors connect with patients. In the OHCs, many doctors have become multitype service providers. Considering that doctors’ contributions to online free services and the private benefits of online paid services are both important, it is vital for platforms to encourage doctors’ online participation

ABSTRACT Numerous online retail platforms have begun to operate in a hybrid mode, which blends the use of a traditional reselling mode (operated by the platform owner) and increasingly prevalent agency-selling mode (operated by the affiliated agency sellers) to leverage internal and external resources. Two types of sellers interact and cooperate to improve the competitiveness of the hybrid platform

ABSTRACT Studying how weather conditions might relate to customer ratings and reviews represents a research lacuna, even though anecdotal evidence suggests that weather is likely to influence the reviewer behavior. Building on affect theories, the present research combines two complementary methodologies to investigate whether and how the levels of air quality influence customers’ online numeric ratings

ABSTRACT Consumers’ trust in the source of an online review message is largely determined by the consumers’ trustworthiness beliefs about the source that can potentially influence their willingness to engage in a transaction. While extant research examined consumer trust in a message source (i.e., a reviewer), little attention has been paid to the role of trust transfer within the review platform in

The two papers that open this issue of International Journal of Electronic Commerce explore complementary aspects of social commerce. In social commerce, two key faces of the Internet—the marketplace and the social medium—combine to bring out the power of electronic marketplaces. To an extent, most e-commerce is social, as the user-generated content of electronic word-of-mouth affects the decisions

ABSTRACT Social commerce (s-commerce)—the use of social media to support electronic commerce—has become pervasive. This paper aims to investigate an important type of consumer behaviour that could generate considerable economic value: impulsive purchase behaviour. Specifically, we focus on the role of peer influence. Social influence theory posits that the process via which peers change a consumer’s

ABSTRACT Consumers are relying increasingly on social commerce for making their purchase decisions, and e-vendors have great interests in applying social commerce features in the traditional e-commerce sites to increase sales. Although the importance of trust has been well recognized in the literature, the previous studies have mainly focused on trust in e-commerce sites and failed to incorporate its

ABSTRACT A wide variety of consumer data are available, including data that consumers make available online to the public for free. Because online users talk a lot about TV shows and brands online, these messages can be used to measure TV and brand audiences and help marketers answer questions about who is talking, what they are saying, and where to find them. However, the demographics of online users

ABSTRACT Offering promotional programs is a common strategy for firms to induce consumers to make purchases. This paper investigates promotional programs in the market of cloud computing. We identified the following two popular forms of promotional programs for cloud computing services in this paper: the coupon and the free trial promotional program. We first studied the cloud provider’s promotional

ABSTRACT In a freemium business model, the pricing of virtual goods with conspicuous features is a key challenge, because firms face a trade-off between increasing the total installed base and maintaining scarcity. In this study, we establish a model to facilitate this trade-off by considering a reference-based utility shift related to conspicuous consumption, and we offer the optimal pricing strategy

As a leading form of intellectual property, patents undergird our knowledge economy. The products with a high and multisourced content, such as smartphones, can touch hundreds of thousands of patents, directly or indirectly. Having a viable market for patent trading is, therefore, essential. It is also difficult, owing to the many facets the patents and their limitations have and to the frequently

ABSTRACT The emerging patent trading platforms help to ease information asymmetry and trust issues during transaction, but a proactive recommendation mechanism that intelligently helps patent buyers identify relevant patents is still absent in the literature. This study proposes a recommendation mechanism for patent trading empowered by heterogeneous information networks (HIN) that integrates various

ABSTRACT Social commerce platforms have gained prominence in e-commerce, as social media has become an integral part of users’ online activities. Therefore, firms have been either developing or utilizing social commerce platforms to increase user engagement by adding social shopping facility onto their electronic commerce platforms. However, managing user engagement and user interaction becomes complex

ABSTRACT Previous research has consistently found an effect of the valence (positive vs. negative) of electronic word of mouth in general and of word of mouth on a social networking site (sWOM) specifically on consumer responses. The current study investigates how interpersonal and person-to-site relational characteristics (homophily, tie strength, and source credibility) moderate this effect on consumer

ABSTRACT E-consultation is considerably significant in today’s highly competitive environment in reducing medical costs, improving operational efficiency and effectiveness, enhancing the equity of medical resources, and meeting customers’ satisfaction. However, the prosperity of e-consultation depends on doctors’ consistent participation and continued contribution. In addition, receiving a monetary

ABSTRACT Although users are likely to seek external information sources regarding brand awareness and social norms to evaluate a cyber service, the effects of external information sources on privacy risk perceptions are unknown. This study examined how external information sources affect users’ perceptions of cyber privacy risk. Structural equation modeling was used to test the study hypotheses. The

(2019). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-8.

Big Data is an emerging paradigm in almost all industries. Finance big data (FBD) is becoming one of the most promising areas of management and governance in the financial sector. It is significantly changing business models in financial companies. Many researchers argue that Big Data is fueling the transformation of finance and business at-large in the ways that we cannot as yet assess. A new research

ABSTRACT Market regulators around the world are still debating whether high-frequency trading (HFT) plays a positive or negative role in market quality. We develop an artificial futures market populated with high-frequency traders (HFTs) and institutional traders using Strongly Typed Genetic Programming (STGP) trading algorithm. We simulate real-life futures trading at the millisecond time frame by