J. Theor. Appl. Electron. Commer. Res., Volume 14, Issue 3 (September 2019) – 10 articles

This study targeted community members who have purchased smartphone and have joined the official brand fan pages of the smartphone brands for at least six months. A total of 681 valid samples were collected. Structural equation modeling was employed to conduct path analyses, and the results show that the 7 hypothetical paths proposed in this study are supported by the theoretical model, which exhibited desirable goodness of fit. In the mediation effect, brand passions partially mediate exogenous factors and brand loyalty. This study is aimed at increasing understanding of how a firm that possesses a cluster of fans who actively protect its brand maintain a strong brand relationship with its brand fans through brand community. Full article

The acceptance of gamified learning environment is rapidly becoming inevitable in educational learning environment. This gives a widespread popularity by deploying Gamification in to present day curriculum as part of a new educational technology tool. This study addresses perception and usage of gamified learning environment from hedonic motivation perspective through incorporating the Hedonic-Motivation System Adoption Model to Gamified Learning Environment. In this study, a model was developed and tested using a Structure Equation Modelling technique. The results show that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, enjoyment and control all have a significant positive relationship with behavioural intention of use and focused immersion which indicates that the acceptance of Gamified Learning Environment could serve as a new educational tool to expedite the improvement of pedagogical and instructional technology. Also, increases students’ motivation and engagement in learning. On the contrary, we also found a negative relationship exists between enjoyment and focused Immersion. Possible research on the effect of enjoyment on focused immersion in gamification could be another area of concentration. In this study, aside from the introduction, the literature explains the adoption of the gamified learning environment and the hedonic motivation model at the end, the analysis and interpretation of our methodology were discussed. Full article

The access economy business model has been applied to a wide range of digital goods and services such as software, movies, music, and books. The digital platforms that manage transactions between buyers and sellers enable product rights owners to define product usage rights with a great deal of precision. In this paper, music product usage rights for digital consumption and platform attributes of music streaming systems are discussed and a model for digital music streaming system adoption and digital piracy is presented. The results of a quasi-experiment suggest that the perceived freedom to tryout, modify, and share digital music products contribute to both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment of a product format and the music streaming system. In turn, perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment lead to the intention to adopt a music streaming system. The perceived usefulness of a music streaming system is associated with a reduction of pirating intention. Full article

In this study, we identified the factors that influence consumer purchasing intentions and their perceptions of the trustworthiness of the privacy-related practices of e-commerce websites. We produced a list of website attributes that represent these factors in a series of focus groups. Then we constructed and validated a research model from an online survey of 117 adult participants. We found that security, privacy (including awareness, information collection, and control), and reputation (including company background and consumer reviews) have a strong effect on trust and willingness to purchase, while website quality plays only a marginal role. Although the perception of trustworthiness and purchasing intention were positively correlated, in some cases participants were more willing to buy from a website that they judged as untrustworthy with regard to privacy. We investigated how behavioral biases and decision-making heuristics may explain the discrepancy between perception and behavioral intention. Finally, we determined which website attributes and individual characteristics impact customer’s trust and willingness to buy. Full article

Mobile web services pattern mining is an emerging field today, in which utility is playing an important role. Utility may be the profit, cost or price of an item. In the case of mobile web services, accessed preference is considered as a utility. With the help of utility mining, one can extract highly interesting frequent patterns of mobile web services. In previous related studies, most of the approaches use utility as an essential parameter to discover interesting patterns, but they also generate a large number of uninteresting patterns too. Another problem is related to computational time; because no filtration is applied and computational time is too much. In this paper, an efficient approach, Utility Based Frequent Pattern Mining, is proposed. It extracts utility based frequent patterns with high filtration in less computing time. The experimental results show that the proposed approach has good performance in terms of execution efficiency and memory utilization. Full article

Offering digital content for renting has become popular among online retailers. Following the trend, textbook retailers have introduced e-textbook rental programs which satisfy students’ needs to reduce the cost of textbooks. Under the e-textbook rental model, retailers have homogeneous digital products and delivery channel. Therefore, they need specific differentiation strategies to distinguish themselves in the competition. In this study we aim to investigate the key factors of retailers’ differentiation strategy and their impact on retailers’ price advantage in the market. Our horizontal model shows that factors such as service quality are essential for the leading retailer to maintain price advantage in the competition. We also carry out an empirical study on service design and consumers’ input by analyzing a unique data set of 151 e-textbooks from two major textbook rental retailers Amazon and Chegg. Our results show that factors including service flexibility, earliest return time, consumers’ rating, and e-textbook selling price play a significant role in retailers’ pricing differentiation strategy. Overall, our research provides useful managerial insights and operational policies for online textbook rental retailers. Full article

Outsourcing of services has been an industry trend for more than two decades. In particular, public software acquisitions have followed this trend. Governments are significant consumers of software and these processes may fail due to different causes such as incomplete requirements elicitation, limited budget, lack of tenderers or even proper tenderers. Moreover, the fact of there being only one qualified tenderer may make the process suspect. The aim of this paper is to identify the variables which influence the result of a software tender process. We present a two-step research: first a quantitative approach and then a qualitative analysis. Initially we formulated the hypothesis that the quality of documents in public software tenders was related to the success of the bidding process. We studied 142 public tenders in Chile, which neither confirmed nor denied any relationship between success and quality of the tender document. In the second step, we applied a focus group and a semi-structured online questionnaire identifying N new potentially factors to success. For them, we found social theories supporting these relationships. The main contribution of this work is to propose a wider set of variables, not merely technical ones, which influence the success of software tender processes. Full article

The great potential of crowdsourcing contest is bringing the issue of how to sustain solvers’ participation intention to be a hot topic in research and practice. This study uses the framework of Expectation-confirmation model to explain solvers’ continuance intention. Due to the uncertainties inherent in crowdsourcing contest, trust, a salient psychological belief, should be taken into account with the Expectation-confirmation model framework to predict solvers’ continuance intention. In addition, the intensive demand of intelligence and competition indicate interaction and fairness as two crucial factors for solvers to achieve expectation, thus suggesting that they may have influence on the confirmation level. Corresponding to these challenges, this study integrates platform trust, interaction, and perceived fairness into an extended Expectation-confirmation model to examine solvers’ continuance intention. Using a sample of 306 solvers, empirical results show that satisfaction, perceived benefits, and platform trust, which are positively associated with confirmation, are three significant antecedents of solvers’ continuance intention. Confirmation is further found to be significantly determined by interaction and perceived fairness. These findings provide some implications in both theory and practice for understanding the process of triggering sustained intention with an Expectation-confirmation model framework in crowdsourcing contest. Full article

This paper aims to analyze the determinants of participation in crowdfunding. As any individual may participate in a crowdfunding project, the study analyzes the general audience as potential contributors. This study develops and tests a model that includes personal determinants-internal locus of control and altruism-of the intention to participate in crowdfunding. Trust in crowdfunding is proposed as a mediator in the model. Data from 245 individuals were gathered via an online panel to test the hypotheses. Altruism and internal locus of control are found to enhance trust in crowdfunding, which, in turn, influences individuals’ intention to participate. Companies or entrepreneurs that are currently using or expecting to use crowdfunding to finance their project should develop marketing strategies that focus on enhancing trust towards their projects. Likewise, they should target individuals who are more altruistic and with higher levels of internal locus of control. Full article