Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to argue for the role of the blockchain, i.e., distributed ledger technology, in building innovative business models, including machine money, autonomous economic ...agents and decentralised organisations.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is conceptual/argumentative. As such, it draws on research on (e-)commerce, theories of markets, disruptive innovation and extant studies and conceptual work at the intersection of cryptocurrencies, machine-to-machine commerce and the Internet of Things.
Findings
The authors highlight three application areas for blockchains, whereby they can function as applications, can help develop autonomous economic agents and can lead the development of decentralised autonomous organisations. With regards to the question of market disintermediation, the authors suggest that, rather than complete disintermediation, the most probable scenario is that of new types of intermediaries finding previously unthinkable roles to play in mediating blockchain-based economic transactions. With regards to the inhibitors that slow down the technology’s adoption and, therefore, the development of new business applications, the authors posit that these relate mainly to the inherent risk of the technology, infrastructure requirements, scepticism of early decision makers and the lack of required new skills and competencies.
Originality/value
The authors examine how new forms of digital money and technologies embedding trust in decentralised networks will alter markets and commerce, at a time when many regulatory issues remain unresolved; in doing so, the authors focus on how blockchain-enabled technologies can be used to enable and further develop decentralised trusted peer-to-peer transaction ledger systems and applications and lead to sustainable business models.
The concept of appropriation is of paramount importance for the lasting use of an Information Technology (IT) artefact following its initial adoption, and therefore its success. However, quite often, ...users’ original expectations are negatively disconfirmed, and instead of appropriating the IT artefact, they discontinue its use. In this study we examine the use of IT artefacts following negative disconfirmation and use Grounded Theory Method techniques to analyse 136 blogposts, collected between March 2011 – July 2017, to investigate how users appropriate or reject the tablet when technology falls short of users’ expectations. Our findings show that users overcome negative disconfirmation through a trial and error process. In doing so, we identify that users appropriate the tablet when the attained benefits significantly outweigh the risks or sacrifices stemming out of its use. We discuss our contribution within the context of the appropriation literature, and highlight that the success of IT lies with the user’s success in identifying personal use scenarios within and across diverse contexts of use.
Research on mobile commerce has attracted the interest of e-commerce scholars ever since mobile and portable devices became a widespread and effective means of commercial transactions and business ...practices. In the present editorial of this special issue of IJEC, we first revisit the past of m-commerce practice and research through an analysis of m-commerce-related publications and prevailing business models from 2000 to 2011. The analysis points to the increasingly topical and maturing status of the field, as well as to a gradual move from engineering-driven to socioeconomic-focused research. We then move to examine the field's present, by examining the submissions to this special issue and the five accepted papers that appear herein. This discussion provides a glimpse into the questions on m-commerce researchers' minds today; however, it also allows us to investigate what lies ahead in the future of m-commerce research as we move toward the more social-minded, hyperconnected world of tomorrow's social commerce (s-commerce).
The proliferation of Big Data & Analytics in recent years has compelled marketing practitioners to search for new methods when faced with assessing brand performance during brand equity appraisal. ...One of the challenges of current practices is that these methods rely heavily on traditional data collection and analysis methods such as questionnaires, and face to face or telephone interviews, which have a significant time lag. In this paper we introduce a computational model that combines topic and sentiment classification to elicit influential subjects from consumer perceptions in social media. Our model devises a novel genetic algorithm to improve clustering of tweets in semantically coherent groups, which act as an essential prerequisite when searching for prevailing topics and sentiment in big pools of data. To illustrate the validity of our model, we apply it to the Uber transportation network, from data collected through Twitter for the period between January and April 2015. The results obtained present consumer perceptions and produce insights for two fundamental brand equity dimensions: brand awareness and brand meaning. Simultaneously, they improve clustering results, in comparison to the k-means approach.
•We introduce a computational model that elicits influential subjects from consumer perceptions in social media.•We devise a novel Genetic Algorithm to improve clustering of data in semantically coherent groups.•Our model produces insights for two fundamental brand equity dimensions: brand awareness and brand meaning.•We empirically apply the model to guide the analysis of over 280.000 tweets related to the Uber transportation network.•Our experimental results reveal negative and positive consumer perceptions for specific subjects related to Uber.
As eBusiness is moving towards maturity, research interests shift to the investigation of opportunities for market exploitation of eBusiness technologies. As a result, the debate around business ...models naturally becomes more topical. However, while many researchers and practitioners are contemplating business models, there is an alarming lack of theoretical tools in the literature to structure and codify knowledge in the area. This paper draws on an extensive review of the literature to propose an analytic framework that decomposes the area of business models into eight research sub-domains. The proposed framework is then applied to organize and critically review existing research under each sub-domain as well as to define an agenda of future challenges on business model research. The framework can benefit future research by allowing researchers to better concentrate their efforts and place their contributions in an overall context, thus assisting in building a coherent body of knowledge in the challenging research domain of business models.
•How consumers respond to SMS advertisements for different product categories?•Simulated field experiment (N=736).•The relationship between product involvement and purchase intention is moderated by ...impulse buying tendencies.
While research in mobile advertising is abundant, limited attention has been paid to date to how consumers respond to mobile advertisements for different product categories and in which way impulsivity affects intentions to purchase. In this paper, we study the dimensionality of the product involvement construct and its effects on consumers’ purchase intentions via a simulated field experiment (N=736). We show that the cognitive dimension of product involvement and impulsiveness significantly affect purchase intentions. We also present that the relationship between product involvement and purchase intention is moderated by the consumers’ impulse buying personality traits. These findings progress the current state-of-the-art in mobile advertising research, while also having significant practical consequences for the design of effective mobile SMS advertising campaigns.
Today's ubiquitous computing technology is imbedded in everyday objects from cars to clothes to shipping containers, whose location, context, and state can be monitored, instantly processed, and ...acted upon. This new volume in the "Advances in Management Information Systems" series provides an in-depth review of the state-of-the-art practices and research opportunities in a new era where information technology resides in physical space. Written for both scholars and practitioners, "Pervasive Information Systems" is organized into three sections, each investigating a distinct part of the subject. Part I focuses on the design challenges of Pervasive Information Systems (PS), and discusses issues relating to the coordination of PS through middleware structures as well as issues related to the efficient deployment of PS. Part II discusses the challenges and limitations of deploying pervasive technologies to support domestic, corporate, and public systems. Part III presents two emerging research fields of PS - design for aesthetics and PS evaluation.
Recommender systems are a special class of personalized systems that aim at predicting a user's interest on available products and services by relying on previously rated items or item features. ...Human factors associated with a user's personality or lifestyle, although potential determinants of user behavior are rarely considered in the personalization process. In this paper, we demonstrate how the concept of lifestyle can be incorporated in the recommendation process to improve the prediction accuracy by efficiently managing the problem of limited data availability. We propose two approaches: one relying on lifestyle alone and another integrating lifestyle within the nearest neighbor approach. Both approaches are empirically tested in the domain of recommendations for personalized television advertisements and are shown to outperform existing nearest neighborhood approaches in most cases.
This paper suggests a modeling framework to investigate the optimal strategy followed by a monopolistic firm aiming to manipulate the process of opinion formation in a social network. The monopolist ...and a set of consumers communicate to form their beliefs about the underlying product quality. Since the firm’s associated optimization problem can be analytically solved only under specific assumptions, we rely on the sequential quadratic programming computational approach to characterize the equilibrium. When consumers’ initial beliefs are uniform, the firm’s optimal influence strategy always involves targeting the most influential consumer. For the case of non-uniform initial beliefs, the monopolist might target the less influential consumer if the latter’s initial opinion is low enough. The probability of investing more in the consumer with the lower influence increases with the distance between consumers’ initial beliefs and with the degree of trust attributed on consumers by the firm. The firm’s profit is minimized when consumers’ influences become equal, implying that the firm benefits from the presence of consumers with divergent strategic locations in the network. In the absence of a binding constraint on total investment, the monopolist’s incentives to manipulate the network decrease with consumers’ initial beliefs and might either increase or decrease with the trust put in consumers’ opinion by the firm. Finally, the firm’s strategic motivation to communicate persistently high beliefs during the opinion formation process is positively associated with the market size, with the available budget and with the direct influence of the most influential consumer on the other but negatively associated with consumers’ initial valuation of the good.
Mobile phone advertisements, in the form of text messages (SMS, or short message service), have been recognized as an important form of product promotion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate ...factors that influence the effectiveness of SMS advertising by using a hierarchy of effects approach. We employ a simulated experiment with 736 respondents to examine how consumers react to SMS advertisements and identify factors that influence their attitude toward the ad, their attitude toward the brand, and their purchase intention. Perceived ad credibility, attitude toward mobile advertising, message appeal, argument quality, incentive, product involvement, and interactivity were found to be antecedents of the attitude toward the ad. Moreover, there is a clear link between attitude and behavioral intention. The study is among the first to provide an experimental-based assessment and a unified model linking consumer attitudes toward mobile text ads with brand attitudes and purchase intentions.
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