The article provides a systematic literature review of market segmentation in the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector. Market segmentation is a critical component of strategic marketing, as it enables ...companies to identify and target specific groups of consumers with relevant products and services. The main objective of this review is to identify the most commonly used and effective methods of segmenting consumer markets and to explore how firms have adapted to the changing technology landscape. Additionally, the review aims to identify areas that have received less attention in research and to develop a conceptual framework for harmonizing and expanding previous research aimed at segmenting consumer markets over the past ten years. Through this review, it is evident that market segmentation is a complex process that uses multiple variables and sub-variables. This systematic literature review provides valuable insights into market segmentation in the B2C sector and contributes to advancing the fragmented literature on this topic.
This paper analyzes a BigTech lender's pricing strategies in the business‐to‐customer unsecured loan market using a proprietary data set of consumer loans in China. We find that the credit rating ...constructed by the BigTech lender is informative of the customers' default risk. Moreover, the interest rate decreases and the credit limit increases with the credit rating. Interestingly, the BigTech lender charges different interest rates to its customers based on the customer channel, although it does not provide information about the customers' default risk. Following the passage of the China Banking Regulatory Commission Act, which reduced credit market competition, the BigTech lender increased the current rate and decreased the credit limit. We rationalize these empirical findings in a simple model of credit contract design.
Initial public offerings (IPOs) are a crucial step for entrepreneurial firms. Despite the growing popularity of social media among various audiences, including potential investors, limited studies ...have investigated how firms can utilize social media to attract financial capital during the IPO process. We utilize the signaling theory and the electronic word of mouth (eWOM) literature to shed light on this issue. Our study, based on Twitter and SDC data of 367 firms that went public in the USA from 2014 to 2015, provides evidence in support of a positive relationship between social media use by a firm and its IPO value. Furthermore, the effectiveness of a firm’s tweets is mediated by public responses to its tweets, and such effectiveness is found to be stronger for B2C firms and firms with more traditional media coverage.
This paper provides a theoretical framework of multi-stakeholder systems to explain value co-creation through the contextual means of actor-to-actor (A2A) interactions. In applying the A2A model, we ...explicate the resources provided by three actors in particular – customer, firm and social media platform in co-creating value via resource integration. The resources afforded by social media platforms positions these actors as “systems resource integrators” in both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) contexts. The role of social media platforms as systems resource integrators is to provide a technological platform that exposes its modular resources to facilitate higher order resource formations through the active participation of non-intermediary actors (i.e. customers and firms); which otherwise limits the ability of firms and customers to realize their optimal value co-creation potential.
Six propositions are derived from the conceptual framework provided in this paper. Through the higher order resource formation analogy underpinning the discussion in this paper, we argue the significance of understanding the qualities of social media resources for managers to facilitate more efficient resource configurations in the creation, transformation and renewal of resources via resource integration in actor interactions. The paper concludes with the strategic implications of the conceptual framework provided and future research directions.
•Actor interaction is the basis for value co-creation via resource integration.•Higher order resource formation defines value co-creation in digital market places.•Information transforms social media platform technological functions to resources.•Social media platform is a ‘systems resource integrator’ by its modular resources.•Social media platform intermediary role bridges the B2B and B2C contextual divide.
The Indian consumer protection law confines itself to Business to Consumer (B2C) transactions and leaves out Business to Business (B2B) transactions from its ambit. This issue has been a subject of ...litigation in consumer courts over the years. The Supreme Court of India has had to adjudicate the issue a number of times over last three and a half decades. A two Judge Bench of the Supreme Court of India (SCI) in the recent case of Shrikant G. Mantri vs Punjab National Bank again observed that ‘business to business’(B2B) disputes cannot be construed as consumer disputes and claims arising out of the same cannot be entertained under the Consumer Protection Act (CPA). The judgment brings back to focus one of the most contentious is- sues in the consumer protection arena – the ‘commercial purpose’ interpretation. This research paper seeks to explore the rationale for the rigid classification between Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) transactions and argues the justification of the said classification under the CPA. It shall trace the development of consumer jurisprudence on this issue through some of the land- mark Judgments of the National Commission (NC) and Supreme Court of India (SCI).
•The negative impact of perceived privacy control on privacy concerns may not always be significant.•Trust in e-commerce partially mediates the influence of perceived privacy control on privacy ...concerns.•Internet privacy experience positively moderates the relationship between perceived privacy control and trust in e-commerce.•Both Internet privacy experience and risk propensity negatively moderate the relationship between trust in e-commerce and privacy concerns.
Consumer privacy protection has become an important issue and challenge in the development of e-commerce, and consumers' concerns for privacy may lead to negative user experiences and make them more cautious about disclosing personal information. As one of the widely adopted privacy concerns inhibiting approaches, the accumulated information privacy literature indicated that providing privacy controls may not always mitigate privacy concerns, implying that there are potential boundary conditions to be clarified. This study aims to explain the inconsistent effect of perceived privacy control on privacy concerns from the perspective of individual factor differences among consumers. We investigated the roles of trust, Internet privacy experience, and risk propensity in the relationship between perceived privacy control and privacy concerns. We collected empirical data containing 625 representative samples of Chinese consumers based on a mainstream online survey platform in China. The results suggest that trust in e-commerce partially mediates the influence of perceived privacy control on privacy concerns. Internet privacy experience positively moderates the relationship between perceived privacy control and trust in e-commerce, and both Internet privacy experience and risk propensity negatively moderate the relationship between trust in e-commerce and privacy concerns. This study extends existing information privacy and trust literature through the analysis of the mediating effect of trust and the moderating effects of consumers' individual factors. We also discuss the potential positive and negative implications of this research.
The recent hype in online purchasing has skyrocketed the importance of the electronic commerce (e-commerce) industry. One of the core segments of this industry is business-to-consumer (B2C) where ...businesses use their websites to sell products and services directly to consumers. Thus, it must be taken care of that B2C websites are designed in a way which can build a trustworthy and long-term relationship between businesses and consumers. Thus, this study assesses and prioritizes factors for designing a successful B2C e-commerce website. The study employs multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), and to minimize any ambiguity and greyness in the decision-making, it integrates fuzzy and grey respectively with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to form FAHP and TOPSIS-Grey. Initially, the study conducts a thorough literature survey to screen important factors reported in past studies. Five main factors and nineteen sub-factors were selected for further prioritization. Later, FAHP prioritized factors based on their importance. Finally, based on the FAHP results, TOPSIS-Grey ranked five alternatives (e-commerce websites). FAHP revealed “service quality” as the most successful website designing factor, while TOPSIS-Grey reported “Website-3” as the most successful website, having incorporated the factors required to design a successful website.
Human Action Recognition plays a driving engine of many human-computer interaction applications. Most current researches focus on improving the model generalization by integrating multiple ...homogeneous modalities, including RGB images, human poses, and optical flows. Furthermore, contextual interactions and out-of-context sign languages have been validated to depend on scene category and human per se. Those attempts to integrate appearance features and human poses have shown positive results. However, with human poses' spatial errors and temporal ambiguities, existing methods are subject to poor scalability, limited robustness, and sub-optimal models. In this paper, inspired by the assumption that different modalities may maintain temporal consistency and spatial complementarity, we present a novel Bi-directional Co-temporal and Cross-spatial Attention Fusion Model (B2C-AFM). Our model is characterized by the asynchronous fusion strategy of multi-modal features along temporal and spatial dimensions. Besides, the novel explicit motion-oriented pose representations called Limb Flow Fields (Lff) are explored to alleviate the temporal ambiguity regarding human poses. Experiments on publicly available datasets validate our contributions. Abundant ablation studies experimentally show that B2C-AFM achieves robust performance across seen and unseen human actions. The codes are available here 1 .
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