JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 671-691: Social Media Managers’ Performance: The Impact of the Work Environment

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010036

Authors: Zaira Camoiras-Rodríguez Concepción Varela-Neira

The continuous growth of social media is causing significant modifications in the business strategies developed by organizations. Using a structural equation modeling approach, this research analyzes how the work environment affects the social media managers thriving at work and task performance. The proposed model is tested using a sample of 190 social media managers and 190 supervisors from 190 companies in the tourism sector. The results highlight the importance of proper design and implementation of social media marketing planning and top management support to enhance both thriving at work and the performance of social media managers. This research contributes to the literature on social media by examining how and when the work environment influences the attitudes and performance of social media managers, whose role is crucial in organizational performance. Simultaneously, it expands the literature on thriving, as knowledge about the impact of contextual factors on thriving is still limited. The results also demonstrate that managers can compensate for the lack of certain contextual or personal resources with other resources, providing insights into when the work environment is more beneficial in shaping positive attitudes and behaviors in employees.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 633-653: Mobile Payment Innovation Ecosystem and Mechanism: A Case Study of Taiwan’s Servicescapes

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010034

Authors: Wai-Kit Ng Shi Chen Wei-Hung Chen Chun-Liang Chen Jhih-Ling Jiang

This paper examines how businesses in Taiwan’s servicescapes are adapting to the growing trend of mobile payments and innovation ecosystems. Through the analysis of four case studies, we uncover the strategies these firms employ to address the challenges posed by changing consumer payment habits. Our research reveals that these companies are establishing efficient mechanisms within their ecosystems, supported by well-structured organizational frameworks. By leveraging innovation ecosystems, they are reshaping financial services and promoting collaborative growth among participants through technology, platforms, resource sharing, and knowledge exchange. This collaborative approach is driving significant changes in the sector, helping these businesses navigate through various challenges while fostering innovation and growth. Additionally, the scarcity of comprehensive observations of the digital payment ecosystem highlights the necessity for further exploration of actor interactions, regulatory mechanisms, and ecosystem management strategies. Such research efforts are crucial for enhancing our understanding of the evolving landscape of digital payments and innovation ecosystems, facilitating informed decision-making and promoting sustainable development in this dynamic industry.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 615-632: Influence of Electronic Word-Of-Mouth on Restaurant Choice Decisions: Does It Depend on Gender in the Millennial Generation?

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010033

Authors: Giovanny Haro-Sosa Beatriz Moliner-Velázquez Irene Gil-Saura María Fuentes-Blasco

Given the exponential growth of eWOM, especially among the millennial generation, an analysis of the consultation behaviour of online opinions is essential to better understanding the decision-making process. The aim of this proposal is to analyse how the motivations towards eWOM consultation contribute to the final adoption of eWOM, especially in the restaurant context, exploring the relationship chain “motivations to consult eWOM—intention to consult eWOM—adoption to consult eWOM”. Moreover, studying the moderating effect of gender in this chain is argued. Based on a sample of 341 millennials with experience in reading online reviews and visiting restaurants, a causal model was estimated through PLS estimation in the geographic area of Ecuador. The results confirm that millennials’ motivations influence directly their intention to consult eWOM and indirectly on eWOM adoption. In addition, gender does not show a significant effect on the chain of effects. Given that virtual platforms have the potential to influence men and women equally, the communication efforts of restaurants focused on this target audience and carried out on social media must focus on aspects other than gender.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 597-614: Fog Computing-Based Smart Consumer Recommender Systems

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010032

Authors: Jacob Hornik Chezy Ofir Matti Rachamim Sergei Graguer

The latest effort in delivering computing resources as a service to managers and consumers represents a shift away from computing as a product that is purchased, to computing as a service that is delivered to users over the internet from large-scale data centers. However, with the advent of the cloud-based IoT and artificial intelligence (AI), which are advancing customer experience automations in many application areas, such as recommender systems (RS), a need has arisen for various modifications to support the IoT devices that are at the center of the automation world, including recent language models like ChatGPT and Bard and technologies like nanotechnology. This paper introduces the marketing community to a recent computing development: IoT-driven fog computing (FC). Although numerous research studies have been published on FC “smart” applications, none hitherto have been conducted on fog-based smart marketing domains such as recommender systems. FC is considered a novel computational system, which can mitigate latency and improve bandwidth utilization for autonomous consumer behavior applications requiring real-time data-driven decision making. This paper provides a conceptual framework for studying the effects of fog computing on consumer behavior, with the goal of stimulating future research by using, as an example, the intersection of FC and RS. Indeed, our conceptualization of the “fog-based recommender systems” opens many novel and challenging avenues for academic research, some of which are highlighted in the later part of this paper.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 581-596: How Personality Traits Affect Customer Empathy Expression of Social Media Ads and Purchasing Intention: A Psychological Perspective

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010031

Authors: Serhan Demirci Chia-Ju Ling Dai-Rong Lee Chien-Wen Chen

Consumers’ personality traits significantly influence their perceptions regarding social media advertising. While prior research on consumers’ purchasing intentions in social networking sites advertising has mainly focused on advertising valence antecedents, it is crucial to recognize that consumers’ susceptibility to advertising persuasion, particularly in terms of empathic expression, varies based on a key criterion: whether consumers are driven to attain a specific desired state or are more inclined to avoid an undesirable state. Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT) posits that individuals operate under distinct motivational mechanisms that govern their determination to achieve desired goals, influencing how they process and evaluate advertising messages. In light of RFT, we conducted an online survey with 524 valid responses, utilizing partial least squares (PLS) for research model analysis. The findings revealed that promotion-focused individuals have positively influenced perceptions of social media ad effectiveness (informativeness, ad creativity, perceived relevance, and emotional appeal). In contrast, prevention-focused individuals negatively perceived social media ad effectiveness. Furthermore, this study highlighted that perceived relevance and emotional appeal have a more significant impact on attitudes toward expressing empathy than informativeness and ad creativity.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 538-560: The Impact of Academic Publications over the Last Decade on Historical Bitcoin Prices Using Generative Models

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010029

Authors: Adela Bâra Simona-Vasilica Oprea

Since 2012, researchers have explored various factors influencing Bitcoin prices. Up until the end of July 2023, more than 9100 research papers on cryptocurrencies were published and indexed in the Web of Science Clarivate platform. The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of publications on Bitcoin prices. This study aims to uncover significant themes within these research articles, focusing on cryptocurrencies in general and Bitcoin specifically. The research employs latent Dirichlet allocation to identify key topics from the unstructured abstracts. To determine the optimal number of topics, perplexity and topic coherence metrics are calculated. Additionally, the abstracts are processed using BERT-transformers and Word2Vec and their potential to predict Bitcoin prices is assessed. Based on the results, while the research helps in understanding cryptocurrencies, the potential of academic publications to influence Bitcoin prices is not significant, demonstrating a weak connection. In other words, the movements of Bitcoin prices are not influenced by the scientific writing in this specific field. The primary topics emerging from the analysis are the blockchain, market dynamics, transactions, pricing trends, network security, and the mining process. These findings suggest that future research should pay closer attention to issues like the energy demands and environmental impacts of mining, anti-money laundering measures, and behavioral aspects related to cryptocurrencies.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 561-580: Do Dynamic Signals Affect High-Quality Solvers’ Participation Behavior? Evidence from the Crowdsourcing Platform

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010030

Authors: Xue Liu Xiaoling Hao

The emergence of the crowdsourcing platform enables seekers to obtain higher-quality services at lower costs. High-quality services are often provided by high-quality solvers, which is the key to the sustainable development of crowdsourcing platforms. Therefore, how to attract more high-quality solvers to participate needs to be focused on. Most previous studies that used stock data to measure crowdsourcing performance failed to describe the contest process of high-quality solvers’ behavior. Different from the previous study, this paper explores the information signals that influence the participation of high-quality solvers in the dynamic process of crowdsourcing contests. Based on the creative projects of the Winvk platform, dynamic models affecting the participation of high-quality solvers are constructed from the perspective of reducing information asymmetry, and the effects of quality signals and intention signals are explored in depth. The results show that for logo design projects, clear information display and monetary mechanisms have a significant impact on alleviating information asymmetry and attracting the participation of high-quality solvers. Interestingly, the effect of market competition on high-quality solvers shows a U-shaped change. The research results provide a reference for enterprises to reduce information asymmetry, obtain high-quality solutions, and enrich the theoretical application in the field of crowdsourcing.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 526-537: Who Are the Online Medication Shoppers? A Market Segmentation of the Swedish Welfare State

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010028

Authors: John Magnus Roos Magnus Jansson Pernilla J. Bjerkeli

The present study aimed to explore the online shopping of medicines from demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors. A quantitative survey design was used with a quote sample representing the Swedish population regarding age, gender, and residential area. In total, 1863 persons responded to a survey, including measures of age, gender, income, education, area of residence, personality traits (BFI-10), values (Rokeach Value Survey), self-estimated health-status, internet usage, online shopping in general, and online shopping of medicines. Firstly, the data were analyzed with chi-squares and independent t-tests. From these initial analyses, online shopping of medicines was associated with young age, female gender, high income and education, living in a big city, extraversion, several values of desirable end-states of existence (e.g., self-respect, a sense of accomplishment, and pleasure), internet usage, and general online shopping. Secondly, the significant (p < 0.05) variables from the initial analysis were included in a logistic regression analysis. This comprehensive model showed that online medication shoppers are best predicted by being female and the use of internet. Unlike what was previously known about medication shoppers, the typical online medication shopper appears to be driven by hedonistic values and self-actualization, rather than health status. We suggest that further research replicate this study outside and inside Sweden, and that health status is measured in a different way.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 486-506: Emerging Trends in Play-to-Earn (P2E) Games

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010026

Authors: Andreea Raluca Duguleană Cristina Roxana Tănăsescu Mihai Duguleană

This research aims to establish the primary drivers influencing the development and consumers’ decision-making process in web3 games—decentralized games that function according to the play-to-earn paradigm. We observe several types of micro-economies developed within five play-to-earn games and highlight four roles consumers play at any given time. Our study offers a different perspective on rational consumer behaviour in cryptocurrency-based games and paves the way to better understanding their dynamics and evolution. Results shed light on the construction of in-game economies and how individuals of a given type engage in different playing activities. Furthermore, we compare the key features of web3 games with those similar to classic online games and assess if the play-and-earn implementations represent an evolution from previous revenue models. Using our proposed methodology, researchers can compare and classify any P2E games. We conclude by establishing a set of actions that enable consumers to benefit from this new phenomenon.

JTAER, Vol. 19, Pages 507-525: Public Perception of Online P2P Lending Applications

Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research doi: 10.3390/jtaer19010027

Authors: Sahiba Khan Ranjit Singh H. Kent Baker Gomtesh Jain

This study examines significant topics and customer sentiments conveyed in reviews of P2P lending applications (apps) in India by employing topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The apps considered are LenDenClub, Faircent, i2ifunding, India Money Mart, and Lendbox. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we identified and labeled 11 topics: application, document, default, login, reject, service, CIBIL, OTP, returns, interface, and withdrawal. The sentiment analysis tool VADER revealed that most users have positive attitudes toward these apps. We also compared the five apps overall and on specific topics. Overall, LenDenClub had the highest proportion of positive reviews. We also compared the prediction abilities of six machine-learning models. Logistic Regression demonstrates high accuracy with all three feature extraction techniques: bag of words, term frequency-inverse document frequency, and hashing. The study assists borrowers and lenders in choosing the most appropriate application and supports P2P lending platforms in recognizing their strengths and weaknesses.