(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:

(2020). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 277-278.

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 payment

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 real-world

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 certificates

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 its effect

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 on the

(2020). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 157-158.

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. Furthermore

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, we determine

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 that perceived

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 to consumers

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 that purchase

(2019). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 451-452.

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 social media

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. Yet

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 in the online

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 and

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 forming

(2019). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 295-296.

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 behaviour

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 multidimensional

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 typically

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 strategies

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 for a

(2019). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 145-146.

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 patent

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 when

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 responses

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 return may

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 findings

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

(2019). Finance Big Data: Management, Analysis, and Applications. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 9-11.

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 applying

In the global financial and business world, the wealth that an entity owns usually is composed of various assets or measured by different currencies, the value of which is dependent on the fluctuation of the foreign exchange rates. The analysis of dynamics associated with the foreign exchange rates is one of the important concerns to market strategists, financial planners, or risk managers such that a

Using data from Renrendai, one of the largest peer-to-peer (P2P) lending marketplaces in China, we found an asymmetric relationship between the borrowing rates and the default risks of borrowers; specifically, orders with the same interest rate may have different default risks. A counterintuitive result is that the higher a borrower’s income, the greater the default risk. Furthermore, it is found that

The recent financial network analysis approach reveals that the topologies of financial markets have an important influence on market dynamics. However, the majority of existing Finance Big Data networks are built as undirected networks without information on the influence directions among prices. Rather than understanding the correlations, this research applies the Granger causality test to build

During the product search phase in online retail, consumers typically review product overviews, where they must decide whether to further investigate a product from the assortment and which products to assess. These product overviews are in practice frequently inconsistent in their image characteristics, that is, in terms of their product background (on white background vs. with contextual background)

(2018). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 477-478.

Business-to-Business platforms provide connectivity and data exchange services and compete in several dedicated services, such as electronic invoicing (e-invoicing). Thus far, little research has examined the factors that influence firms’ choice among competing platforms: Which platform features matter, and in what proportion in the decision maker’s choice? To address this gap, we conduct an empirical

This paper proposes a methodological framework that extends the advantages of behavioral targeting while preserving the privacy of the individual. Instead of profiling individual users according to their general interests, we profile website audiences according to their online purchase behavior. This presents a trade-off between looser, aggregate audience profiling and deeper understanding of actual

The fulfillment of customer orders has gained a particularly important role within omni-channel retailing, as it requires significant effort to integrate logistics networks and product flows. Offering additional fulfillment options is costly but allows the enhancement of customer services via cross-channel substitutions and faster deliveries. Retailers are asking themselves how they can leverage these

Traditionally, the online retailer has adopted the wholesale pricing model to work with heterogeneous manufacturers, that is, the retailer buys the products from the competitive manufacturers and then resells them to customers. Recently, the increasing prevalence of online retailing has given rise to a novel agency pricing model; that is, the manufacturers sell their products directly to customers

This study focuses on how product substitutability, electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM), and market size affect equilibrium myopic and far-sighted pricing strategies in a two-period duopoly market. The selling process of each firm consists of two periods. First-period sales influence second-period demand; thus, a firm must be myopic or far-sighted when making pricing decisions. This study derives and

(2018). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 323-324.

Despite the importance and the growing use of avatars in online and offline advertising, investigations on the effectiveness of avatar-based advertising remains scant. This article attempts to narrow this gap by examining several factors that influence consumers’ evaluations of human-like avatar-based ads. Based on mental schema theory, the authors theorize that avatars elicit categorization tension

Advancements in Internet technologies have enabled firms to engage in contextual competitive targeting (CCT); that is, the targeted online advertising practice of contextually identifying and poaching prospective customers of competitors. On the basis of two field quasi-experiment studies conducted with Google’s AdSense contextual targeting platform, this article shows that compared to generate targeting

Mobile commerce still experiences high drop-out rates throughout the sales process. This is especially evident for complex products such as insurance, which consumers often initially explore online but complete the purchase offline to enjoy direct human assistance, helping them to better understand the product and reduce associated risks. To facilitate complex product purchases online, this article

Virtually all sources on service recovery stress the importance of offering an apology to complaining customers. To date, however, our understanding of who should offer the apology and how to offer the apology is still limited. Taking a cross-cultural perspective, Study 1 shows that Eastern customers attach more value to a manager (vis-à-vis a frontline employee) offering an apology than Western customers

Video website operators work in a highly competitive market and, thus, cultivating evangelists who keep coming back and spreading positive word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals is important to retain market share and boost sustainability. This study empirically tests a model proposing that social presence elicited by the emerging bullet screen (“DanMu” in Chinese or “Danmaku” in Japanese) system in video websites

(2018). Editor’s Introduction. International Journal of Electronic Commerce: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 159-160.

Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) constitute a large and important sector of the U.S. and U.K. economies and e-commerce platforms have evolved that are designed specifically to help small business owners and entrepreneurs. Despite the popularity and importance of these digital platforms, there is a paucity of research in this area. This article contributes to theory by being the first study

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has gained increased attention from both practitioners and academia. Its importance lies in its simplicity and yet its profound impact on customers’ attitudes toward specific brands or goods, and thus affecting customers’ loyalty and purchase behaviors. Although social network services (SNSs) have emerged as a new platform for eWOM communication, less attention has been

By March 2017, Facebook had more than 1.94 billion active users monthly. Even as firms increasingly invest in social media, however, businesses appear only moderately satisfied with the bottom line of such social commerce efforts. To assist future efforts in social commerce, this research builds on social capital theory to investigate the effects of individual social interactions on social networking

Dramatic improvements in high-speed and mobile connectivity have been changing the way people enjoy games. In-game purchases, virtual currency, game feature design for heterogeneous consumers, and strong competition are key challenges for game providers. This study addresses the determination of optimal game design strategies for game providers in the presence of heterogeneous players and copycat competitors