Active interactions and relationships among members are crucial to the success of consumer-to-consumer (c2c) e-commerce. Prior studies have rarely articulated the relationship between the social interactions among members and their loyalty to the c2c platform provider. this paper differentiates two types of trust in c2c e-commerce-mutual trust among members and members' trust in the platform provider-and then proposes that trust in the platform provider mediates the relation between mutual trust and loyalty to the platform provider. A study using a sample from chinese c2c Web sites shows that information interaction and emotional interaction both boost mutual trust among members, which in turn boosts their trust in and loyalty to the platform provider. For platform providers, the findings suggest a strategic route to building members' loyalty in a competitive market.
Although firms are leveraging weather conditions in promotions, they struggle to quantify the impact. This study exploits field experiment data on weather-based mobile promotions with over six million users. Results find that sunny and rainy weather have first-order main effects. Purchase responses to promotions are higher and faster in sunny weather relative to cloudy weather, whereas purchase responses to promotions are lower and slower in rainy weather. These findings are robust across different measures of weather changes with both backward-looking historical weather and forward-looking forecasts, as well as deviations from normal weather. Also, sunny and rainy weather have second-order interactive effects with ad copies of mobile promotions. Compared with the neutral ad copy, the prevention frame ad copy hurts the initial promotion boost induced by sunshine, but improves the initial promotion drop induced by rainfall. For marketers, these findings imply new opportunities in customer data analytics for more effective weather-based mobile targeting.
Firms face significant risk when they adopt digital supply chain systems to transact and coordinate with their partners. Drawn upon modular systems theory, this study proposes that system modularity mitigates the risk of adopting digital supply chain systems and therefore motivates firms to digitize more of their supply chain operations. The study theorizes how the risk-mitigating effect of system modularity can be enhanced by the allocation of decision rights to the IT (information technology) unit. The main logic is that IT managers with more domain IT knowledge can better utilize their knowledge in decision making to achieve effective system modularity. We tested these theoretical propositions using a survey study of Chinese companies and found empirical support. We also found that the allocation of decision rights to the IT unit does not directly mitigate the perceived risk of digital supply chain systems, which highlights the role of decision allocation to the IT unit as a key moderator in risk mitigation. The study generates theoretical and practical implications on how IT governance and system modularity may jointly mitigate risk and foster supply chain digitization.
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