Search Results (26)

Addressing the outflow of rural labor remains central to achieving inclusive and sustainable development in many emerging economies. This study investigates how rural e-commerce—encompassing both trade- and finance-oriented platforms—affects local employment dynamics. Drawing on panel data from 28 Chinese provinces between 2012 and 2020, we construct a composite index of rural e-commerce development and apply a two-way fixed-effects model to assess its impact on labor retention. Based on a nationwide regression analysis of Chinese survey data, we find that rural e-commerce significantly increases intra-county employment, with estimated effects robust across model specifications. Specifically, a one-unit increase in the e-commerce development index is associated with a 0.1 increase in the likelihood of local labor retention, significant at the 1% level. However, benefits are unevenly distributed: positive impacts are concentrated in eastern and central regions, while western provinces experience adverse effects, and northeastern areas show no significant change. These findings underscore the role of rural e-commerce as a driver of digital inclusion and local economic resilience, while also revealing structural barriers that hinder equitable access to its benefits. By identifying the enabling conditions, this study contributes to a more context-sensitive understanding of how platform economies can support spatially balanced and socially just rural development. Policies that promote rural e-commerce are thus likely to facilitate the local redeployment of rural labor. Full article

With the rapid advancement of e-commerce delivery technologies, understanding consumer responses to different types of innovations has become increasingly important. This study examines how consumers react to incremental innovations (e.g., smart lockers) versus radical innovations (e.g., autonomous drones) by integrating personal innovativeness into the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) framework. Based on 300 valid survey responses from Chinese consumers and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM), the findings demonstrate that personal innovativeness significantly influences key adoption determinants—performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. The adoption of smart lockers is primarily driven by perceived performance and convenience, whereas the adoption of autonomous drones is more strongly shaped by social influence. The proposed model provides both theoretical and practical implications for firms seeking to promote diverse e-commerce delivery technologies. Full article

Perceived ESG performance refers to stakeholders’ assessment of a company’s efficacy in implementing and maintaining ESG initiatives. This perception is crucial as it influences stakeholders’ trust and engagement with the company. The present study aims to test the relationships between the perceived performance of Chinese e-commerce firms and their employees’ green behaviors, with the mediating role of green psychological climate and the moderating role of ESG actions: substantive vs. symbolic. Employees’ green behavior is defined as any measurable individual behavior that contributes to environmental sustainability goals in the work context. Green psychological climate is defined as employees’ perceptions and interpretations of their organization’s policies, procedures, and practices regarding environmental sustainability. The sample includes 1285 employees from various Chinese e-commerce firms. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 66 years, with a mean age of 37.27 years (SD = 10.35). This study examines the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance on green behaviors among employees in Chinese e-commerce companies. Leveraging data from organizational surveys, the findings reveal that perceived ESG performance significantly influences green behaviors, both directly and indirectly, through the mediating role of green psychological climate. Mediation analysis underscores the pivotal role of green psychological climate in bridging ESG performance and individual green behaviors, with the strength of this relationship varying significantly across levels of substantive ESG actions. Furthermore, while the moderating effects of ESG substantive and symbolic actions on the relationships between ESG performance, green psychological climate, and green behaviors did not achieve conventional statistical significance, observed trends suggest a nuanced interplay worthy of further exploration. These findings highlight the complexity of translating organizational ESG commitments into employee actions, emphasizing the importance of both substantive and symbolic ESG initiatives in fostering a green psychological climate. This study contributes novel insights into the mechanisms driving green behaviors in organizational contexts, offering implications for both academic research and managerial practice. Full article

In recent years, the rapid growth of e-commerce and on-demand delivery services has placed a significant strain on urban logistics systems. Technological advances such as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based logistics systems have thus emerged as promising solutions in urban environments and are increasingly being piloted worldwide. However, the implementation of UAV logistics risks exacerbating social inequities, particularly in marginalized communities that may disproportionately bear the noise and safety risks. To mitigate these risks, it is crucial to integrate social equity considerations into urban UAV logistics. This study explores social equity factors through a systematic literature review and social media analysis of Xiaohongshu (the Little Red Book), a popular Chinese social media platform known for its extensive user base and active discussions on social issues. This literature review involves a full-text examination, while latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling is used to analyze social media comment datasets. Each method identifies social equity factors and separately assesses their relative importance, resulting in the final identification of 24 key factors that provide a holistic view of public sentiment and academic discourse. The findings reveal a divide between academic concerns around systemic risks and a public focus on immediate needs. By synthesizing these insights, this study provides a social equity landscape for urban UAV logistics and actionable references for policymakers and stakeholders. Full article

Social commerce blurs the boundary between online social interaction and online shopping. The emergence of video streams introduces novel marketing modalities to social commerce. However, there is a paucity of comprehensive studies investigating the impact of emerging marketing techniques such as short videos and live streaming on consumer purchase intention. This study employs Bourdieu’s conceptual framework to construct a Field Theory-based model, investigating the impact of atmospheric and capital characteristics of social commerce platforms on consumer purchase intention through affective and rational pathways, respectively. A survey involving 515 Chinese social commerce consumers demonstrates that atmospheric characteristics (emotion and social presence) and capital characteristics (information quality and quantity) in video streams enhance similarity and power. Both similarity and power are associated with an increase in consumer purchase intention. This study validates the dual-path influence of social commerce characteristics and discusses theoretical and managerial implications. Full article

Rural e-commerce is rapidly expanding in rural China, profoundly affecting the agricultural and rural development of China. This paper focuses on the impact of farmers’ e-commerce adoption on land transfer, aiming to reveal the role of farmers’ e-commerce adoption in promoting rural transformation. Based on the 2020 Comprehensive Survey of Rural Revitalization in China conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this study employs the method of least squares and propensity score matching to evaluate the impact of farmers’ e-commerce adoption on land-transfer behaviors in China. The results indicate that farmers’ e-commerce adoption promotes farmers’ participation in land transfer, significantly facilitating farmers’ land transfer in and increasing the area of land acquired. Additionally, farmers’ e-commerce adoption also promotes the trend of standardization and contractualization in land transfer, significantly increasing the probability of farmers signing formal agreements, clarifying lease terms, and renting land to strangers when acquiring land. This study can provide some theoretical inputs for policies to promote the development of agricultural land markets in developing countries and for policy formulation to promote e-commerce development. Full article

The application of ecological techniques by farmers is important for ensuring the environmentally sustainable advancement of the grain sector. Based on micro-level survey data from 921 Chinese wheat growers in the Hebei and Henan provinces, this study employed an endogenous switching probit model and counterfactual analysis to investigate the impact and mechanisms of digital information utilization on ecological production technology adoption. The results indicated that 43.87% of sample wheat farmers had a low level of adoption of ecological techniques. The utilization of digital information significantly promoted farmers’ adoption. If farmers who currently used digital information were to opt-out, the probability of their high adoption would decrease by 11.26%. The utilization of digital information significantly enhanced the adoption of ecological technologies through three mediating factors: technological cognition, production monitoring, and market channels. Therefore, it is imperative to encourage farmers to broaden their social networks and enhance their perception of the importance of digital information. Additionally, it is essential to promote the industrialization and scale operation of wheat production, direct policy subsidies towards new types of management entities, and ensure the accuracy of the supply of digital information for green production through multiple channels. Therefore, it is imperative to expand farmers’ social networks and leverage rural communities to increase their perceived importance of digital information. Governments should increase subsidies and promote the scale and industrialization of wheat production. Moreover, the accuracy of digital information supply for sustainable production should be promoted through digital learning platforms, production monitoring systems, and e-commerce networks. Full article

Amidst the digital economy surge, live streaming e-commerce of agricultural products has significantly boosted agricultural prosperity. Investigating farmers’ behavioral intentions toward adopting live streaming e-commerce holds critical importance for fostering agricultural healthy and swift growth. Utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a foundation, this study incorporates three additional variables—government support, platform support, and social learning—to devise a theoretical model. It takes the agriculture-related live streaming e-commerce platform as an example, with 424 Chinese farmers as the sample, to quantitatively assess the factors that impact the intentions to adopt live streaming e-commerce behaviors. The findings indicate that, firstly, the TAM is applicable to the assessment of farmers’ intentions to adopt live streaming e-commerce. Secondly, government support positively impacts perceived usefulness, social learning enhances perceived ease of use, and platform support positively impacts both perceived ease of use and usefulness. Lastly, the technology acceptance extension model applicability varies among farmer groups: government support influence on perceived ease of use is more significant among traditional farmers, social learning impact on perceived ease of use is higher in farmers with higher education levels, and platform support effect on perceived usefulness is stronger among farmers experienced in e-commerce. Therefore, differentiated promotion strategies by the government are necessary, and e-commerce platforms should leverage their technology to offer efficient services and encourage farmer education. A multi-party collaboration model involving the government, platforms, and farmers is essential to collectively foster the healthy development of rural live streaming e-commerce. Full article

Livestreaming shopping platforms have emerged as dynamic and innovative channels for e-commerce, mobile commerce, and social commerce, revolutionizing the way consumers engage with online retail. Drawing upon the Technology Acceptance Model 3 framework, this research seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between perceived risk, trust, innovativeness and deal proneness in shaping consumers’ purchasing behavior in the livestreaming social commerce context. A snowball sampling method was applied to collect data from 675 Chinese livestreaming customers in December 2022. A PLS-SEM analysis was used to measure the proposed model. The results confirm that the present model has weak explanatory power except for medium predictive accuracy in explaining consumers’ purchasing behavior in the livestreaming social commerce context (R² = 0.35; Q² = 0.31). This research contributes to the social commerce literature by extending the Technology Acceptance Model 3 (TAM 3) to the novel domain of the livestreaming social commerce context, offering insights into the unique drivers of consumers’ purchasing behavior. It also provides practical implications for platform developers and marketers aiming to enhance consumer experiences and increase sales performance, thereby increasing economic growth. Full article

The proliferation of short texts resulting from the rapid advancements of social networks, online communication, and e-commerce has created a pressing need for short text classification in various applications. This paper presents a novel approach for short text classification, which combines a hierarchical heterogeneous graph with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) fusion. Our method first models the short text dataset as a hierarchical heterogeneous graph, which incorporates more syntactic and semantic information through a word graph, parts-of-speech (POS) tag graph, and entity graph. We then connected the representation of these three feature maps to derive a comprehensive feature vector for the text. Finally, we used the LDA topic model to adjust the feature weight, enhancing the effectiveness of short text extension. Our experiments demonstrated that our proposed approach has a promising performance in English short text classification, while in Chinese short text classification, although slightly inferior to the LDA + TF-IDF method, it still achieved promising results. Full article

Sentiment analysis of subjective texts in social media is beneficial to help people adjust and intervene in a negative mental state in time, which is significant to mental health care. At present, limited by the accuracy of word segmentation, sentiment analysis of subjective text has difficulties in dealing with context, sentence patterns, and word co-occurrence. This paper aims to propose an efficient method of semantic feature representation and sentiment analysis, thereby providing a basis for sentiment visualization and interactive applications. Based on Ernie-Tiny and BiGRU, this paper proposes a sentiment analysis model ET_s_BG+p to solve problems in analyzing Chinese subjective texts’ complex semantics, diverse sentence patterns, and shortness. The model inputs the semantic features obtained via Ernie-Tiny into BiGRU and then splices the output with the sentence vectors of Ernie-Tiny to form final text features and perform sentiment classification. Experiments are performed on a dataset integrating text comments from Weibo, takeaway, and e-commerce platforms. The results show that the model proposed in this paper performs best in most of the evaluation indicators compared with baseline models such as CNN, BiLSTM, and GRU. The experiments show that the accuracy of the model on the dataset built in this research is 84.30%, the precision is 83.95%, the recall rate is 88.35%, and the F1 value is 85.98%. At the same time, based on ET_s_BG+p, this paper develops a prototype visual display platform that integrates functions such as text input, sentiment analysis, and agent interaction, which can provide support for daily emotion monitoring and adjustment. Full article

In the internet era, the development of e-commerce has had an important impact on all aspects of society. Many previous studies focused on the social and economic effects of the development of e-commerce. However, previous studies paid little attention to the impact of e-commerce development on the urban–rural income gap. Here, the influence of electronic commerce growth on the urban–rural income gap is investigated based on Chinese provincial panel data. The result reveals that electronic commerce growth measured by per capita express volume (pair value) can effectively explain the urban–rural income gap, i.e., the income gap between cities and the countryside is reduced with the rise of the electronic commerce growth level after a series of possible factors for the urban–rural income gap (e.g., urbanization rate, industrial proportion, dependency ratio, and human capital) are controlled. In the abovementioned conclusions, the influence of electronic commerce growth on the income gap between cities and the countryside still takes on significance even after the use of the post office number and the mileage of grade roads in 1991 as the instrumental variables of the current electronic commerce growth and the robustness test. The growth of electronic commerce is a vital new approach for adjusting the urban–rural income distribution pattern. The study further reveals that electronic commerce growth does not directly affect the urban–rural income gap by affecting technological innovation. The research results of this study provide a reference for electronic commerce growth and the income distribution of cities and the countryside. Full article

Over recent years, social commerce has evolved into a powerful segment of e-commerce, creating new opportunities for brands of all types and sizes. However, if social commerce is to continue to grow and deliver the many benefits it promises, it must address a number of key challenges, including privacy, trust, and ethical concerns. This paper explores the extent to which privacy issues affect the attitudes and behaviours of social media platform (SMP) users towards social commerce, and investigates whether these attitudes and behaviours are a function of cultural context. The approach adopted for the research is a two-stage method, which initially uses semi-structured interviews of social-commerce users to identify their key privacy concerns. These concerns are then used to develop, using the theory of reasoned action (TRA), a structural model that facilitates the formation of hypotheses which relate users’ attitudes to privacy to subsequent behaviour. This model is assessed by analysing the responses to a questionnaire from a large sample of participants. This allows us to evaluate the general accuracy of the model and to compare culturally distinct subgroups (Saudi vs. Chinese) using partial least-squares analysis. Results show good support for all of our hypotheses and indicate that there are clear cultural effects. One of these effects is the inadequacy of privacy policies implemented by SMP providers, regarding culturally specific ethical concerns. Full article

As an emerging e-commerce model that combines the convenience of traditional e-commerce with the real-time and interactive nature of live streaming, live-streaming (LS) e-commerce is loved and recognized by consumers. At the same time, LS e-commerce also faces many difficulties such as homogenization of marketing content and consumers’ low willingness to repeat purchase. Therefore, how to better stimulate consumers’ continuous purchase willingness in LS has become a hot topic of current research. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model, this paper constructs a model of consumers’ purchase intention mediated by consumers’ trust in LS e-commerce, measuring consumers’ perceived value in LS e-commerce in three dimensions: utilitarian value, hedonic value and social value, and using consumers’ trust in the streamer and trust in the product as mediators to investigate the influence of perceived value on consumers’ continuous purchase intention. Data of Chinese users were collected by questionnaire survey to prove the assumptions of this paper. The results show that consumers’ perceived utilitarian value, hedonic value and social value significantly and positively influence their trust in the streamer; consumers’ perceived utilitarian value and social value significantly and positively influence their trust in product; trust in streamer significantly and positively influences their trust in the product; and consumer trust partially mediates the relationship between perceived value and consumers’ willingness to continue to purchase. Full article

Due to the spike in online-retail demand during the pandemic, couriers confront increased workload and safety concerns, posing significant social-sustainability challenges for courier companies. This study explores the impact of social-sustainability practices on couriers’ job satisfaction in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We designed the research model from the theoretical lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, equity, and psychological-safety theories. We collected the views of 428 couriers from the Chinese market, where there is a developed e-commerce industry. The structural-equation-model analysis results found that social-sustainability practices such as working environment, working conditions, health and safety, education, and training positively affected the job satisfaction of couriers during the pandemic through the mediators (psychological safety and perceived fairness). These findings provide empirical recommendations for improving employees’ job satisfaction in courier companies during COVID-19 and addressing the social-sustainability issues of courier companies. Full article