Control Mechanisms for Assessing the Quality of Handmade and Artistic Products in e-Marketplace Platforms

Selling handmade and artistic goods online is challenging since buyers need to be able to assess product quality before purchase. This study aims to explore how control mechanisms aid the assessment of the product quality of handmade and artistic goods. We do so by extracting control mechanisms for e-marketplace platforms from existing literature and discussing to what extent these are suitable for handmade and artistic goods. We found that existing literature mainly focuses on reputation systems. We reshaped the findings by conducting desk research to identify how control mechanisms are applied in a number of e-marketplaces. Our results show that in e-marketplaces that focus on selling handmade artistic products, a reputation system is not sufficient to ensure product quality in an online environment. Thus, it is critical to apply other control mechanisms which are more effective in increasing the trustworthiness of the seller of artistic and handmade goods. Last, we also suggest alternative control mechanisms to be explored in future research

DO NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES AFFECT PLATFORM MEMBERSHIP CONDITIONS? THE IMPACT OF MORAL AND REGULATORY LEGITIMACY ON PLATFORM GOVERNANCE

When allowing third parties to join their platforms, platform owners run the risk of attracting harmful third-party complements. Existing literature considers that low-quality offerings negatively affect cross-side user satisfaction and attractiveness, ultimately harming the platform\u27s reputation and stability. However, recent events show that negative externalities from third-party offerings can also motivate platform sponsors to adapt their membership conditions. Existing platform literature does not explain the underlying theoretical mechanisms. In this paper, we examine why platform sponsors adjust the conditions that govern third parties joining their platforms in response to negative externalities. We apply legitimacy theory to a critical case on a payment transaction platform. We find that negative externalities affect both moral and regulatory legitimacy, which in turn motivate the platform sponsor to adjust the conditions under which third parties may join the platform

Preferences in data usage and the relation to the use of mobile applications

While most user studies on mobile telecommunications focus on adoption of services, preferences in the use of data networks has hardly been studied. In this paper, we analyse data collected directly on smartphones to study preferences of users between cellular and WiFi networks. Moreover, we assess how the use of specific types of applications contributes to data consumption. In absolute terms, use of WiFi is higher than use of cellular networks. The spread among participants in use of cellular networks is very high, ranging from 0 to 100% of their total traffic. There are no significant differences between Apple and Android users. No effects were found of the size of the data plan on the amount of cellular data being consumed. Cellular network usage is especially driven by chat, social networking and browsing applications. High users of video applications do not significantly consume more bandwidth, which is at odds with conventional ideas on the capacity crunch. Log data on application usage explains data consumption better than self- -reported usage levels. The results are relevant for telecom operators to steer the amount of data being consumed over their cellular and WiFi networks. However, data consumption levels do differ greatly across the population, and as a large proportion of data traffic cannot be explained by application usage levels, preferences for data usage cannot be very well explained

Rethinking consumers\u27 data sharing decisions with the emergence of multi-party computation: an experimental design for evaluation

Consumers are increasingly reluctant to share their personal data with businesses due to mounting concerns over privacy and control. Emerging privacy-enhancing technologies like multi-party computation (MPC), which allows generating insights while consumers retain data control, are challenging the current understanding of why consumers share their data. In this research-in-progress paper, we develop and evaluate an instrument and experimental design to investigate the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data and its antecedents. Preliminary analysis from a pre-study (N=300) indicates a good fit for our model. Also, MPC enhances consumers’ control and trust while reducing privacy concerns and risk, ultimately increasing data sharing willingness. The findings suggest that privacy-enhancing technologies significantly affect both the willingness to share data itself and its typical antecedents. The next step will conduct a large-scale online experiment using the developed instruments to evaluate further the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data

Designing business model tooling for business model exploration: An experimental design for evaluation

Disruptive technologies drive enterprises to rethink how to create and capture value by revising their business models (BM). Even in cases that the need for BM innovation is clear, how entrepreneurs can do it and what they need to be changed it is not always obvious. That leads to the need for BM exploration. BM tooling can support this process, however, existing BM tools are not widely focused on the BM exploration. In previous steps of our research, we designed and developed a digital tooling for BM exploration. This RiP paper presents the experimental design we plan to use to evaluate the effects of the tooling on the BM exploration. Initial results and future steps are discussed. We expect to contribute to the BM literature by understanding what features of BM tooling contribute to BM exploration

Action Design Research for Social Innovation: Lessons from Designing a Health and Wellbeing Platform

IT artifacts play an important role in solving societal problems and realizing social innovations. Existing practice-inspired design science research (DSR) approaches, such as Action Design Research (ADR), do not consider social innovation as an explicit starting point for design iterations. In this paper, we explore how social innovation as a starting point affects the ADR approach. By reflecting on a three-year long ADR project in the domain of health and wellbeing, we suggest four principles to extend the ADR approach: (1) Translate a societal problem into practical problems on a stakeholder-level; (2) Reciprocal shaping between social practices and the IT artifact; (3) Involve citizens early and throughout the project; and (4) Balance political, economic and societal values for evaluating ADR results

Smart Home: Aligning Business Models and Providers Processes; A case survey

Smart Home projects require product, service and business model innovation by organizations from multiple sectors. A considerable number of Smart Home projects, however, fail to live up to expectations and to commercialize their services. Business models that enable these projects have to be viable and feasible for the project as a whole as well as for individual involved providers. Moreover, the processes of involved providers have to be aligned, and exchange of information and value has to be well defined. In this paper, we propose three alignment domains that address the operational interactions between the involved providers. Based on a case survey it can be concluded that insufficient attention is paid to the alignment of Business Model as well as to Business Processes between involved providers, who are an essential to service innovation in a value network

A Consumer Perspective on Mobile Service Platforms: A Conjoint Analysis Approach

Digital platforms need to attract both application developers and end users. Existing literature suggests various strategies related to openness, flexibility, and generativity to attract application developers. However, how consumers make decisions on adopting platforms has not been studied. This paper studies which characteristics of digital platforms consumers most prefer. We focus on mobile platforms where application stores, operator portals, and service provider platforms compete for the consumer’s attention. We conducted a conjoint analysis among 166 consumers to determine the most important characteristics of the mobile platforms. We found that application-related characteristics were most important, especially the number of available applications. Governance-related and technical characteristics were hardly important. Platform characteristics were considerably less important than the brand of the operating system linked to the platform. These findings were consistent between European and Chinese users, and between males and females. The study paves the way for IS scholars to integrate consumer perspectives in the provider-dominated discourse of digital platforms