Complimentary Return-Freight Insurance Serves as Quality Signal or Noise?

Most information system (IS) theories arise from Western research and the transferability of these _theories to other cultures is under-researched. Business intelligence (BI) has topped CIOs’ _technology priority list for years and BI is the largest IT spend at present. Chinese BI software _markets have great potential because Chinese economy supports its technological development. _China adopts a different culture and a different management philosophy to the Western _organizations. Guanxi and constructs from the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology __(UTAUT) are applied in two large Chinese organizations, where UTAUT constructs cannot explain _managerial BI system use. A model of Chinese BI use (MCBIU) is proposed to fill this gap, and this _model is the major theoretical contribution of the research paper. This research also contributes to _practice by improving Chinese managers’, BI consultants’ and developers’ understanding of the _topic.

Green Technology Investment in a Decentralized Supply Chain under Demand Uncertainty

Green technology investment is an important factor that influences the sustainability and performance of the supply chain. In this paper, we use the game-theoretic approach, which is quite suitable to operation decision research, to model a supply chain consisting of one supplier and one retailer and discuss who should invest in green technology in a decentralized supply chain under demand uncertainty. An important result we found is that the retailer has a stronger investment motivation and higher investment efficiency compared to the supplier. The retailer also tends to invest in green technology himself when customers are not so sensitive to the product’s retail price. We analyze the supply chain sustainability, and find that high levels of green technology investments are not always necessarily good for environmental sustainability, it depends on the environmental impact’s sensitivity to green technology. Lastly, a joint investment mechanism is designed to induce the retailer to join in the green technology investment when he has no investment intention, and that realizes a Pareto improvement of the supply chain. Based on the results, we recommend designing more incentive mechanisms to induce the retailers to join in the green technology investment according to supply chain conditions

MEASUREMENT OF PRIVACY LEAKAGE TOLERANCE ON THE MOBILE INTERNET

On the mobile Internet, individual identification and information transmission are more convenient. With the popularity of mobile Internet, private information of users is easily accessed. Appropriate access to users’ information can help enterprises understand consumers’ demand better and improve marketing effectiveness. However, grabbing users’ information excessively may increase the costs of enterprises and induce the privacy leakage, which causes users’ dissatisfaction. Recently, events of privacy leakage based on the mobile Internet are frequently exposed in China. It triggers much attention and results in great social impact. From the perspective of mobile Internet users, the concept of privacy leakage tolerance is put forward to describe users’ acceptance of privacy leakage. Based on the description and dimensions of privacy leakage tolerance, a three-dimension and second-order privacy leakage tolerance measurement scale is designed and will be verified. We believe that the scale has good reliability and validity for the measurement of privacy leakage tolerance on the mobile Internet and data show users’ attitude to privacy leakage exactly. The measurement of privacy leakage tolerance on the mobile Internet has important significance both in business practices and theory studies. It is conducive for mobile Internet enterprises to collect users’ information appropriately and to protect users’ privacy with target, which makes contribution to optimizing information allocation and to exerting the economic value of information. Moreover, it provides a new concept to describe users’ privacy attitude and it is helpful to analyze users’ privacy behaviors and to explain the privacy paradox 1

Complimentary return-freight insurance serves the dark side: An innovative online return policy in China

E-commerce is a typical form of retail digitalization that introduces online uncertainty and product returns. To decrease the negative influence of online uncertainty, the largest Chinese e-commerce company, the Alibaba Group, invited an insurance company to develop return-freight insurance (RFI), a new kind of insurance, to compensate for consumers' losses in the event of online product returns. Complimentary RFI can increase consumer confidence in the retailer and attract more demand. Retailers who offer complimentary RFI demonstrate to consumers that their products and services are too good to incur excessive product returns. However, some low-quality online retailers can mimic competitors’ behavior by offering complimentary RFI to consumers. This study aims to introduce an innovative online return policy based on RFI and to explore whether low-quality online retailers would use complimentary RFI as their return strategy to mislead consumers. Using signaling theory, we built a conceptual economic model that includes three exogenous pricing variables: RFI, insurance premium, and compensation. These variables play different roles in the model because consumers cannot observe the insurance premium, but the compensation can be. The main finding of this study is that innovative complimentary RFI could be abused by low-type retailers when the premium and compensation are appropriate. Interestingly, compensation plays different roles for retailers with different product values: low-type retailers use complimentary RFI as a noise tool. When the product works for the consumer and the insurance profit is not too high, the compensation for the low-quality product should be larger than that for the high-quality product, which is different from conventional wisdom. Although high-type online retailers may use complimentary RFI as a product quality signal, there is still a significant risk that nefarious elements will use it to create product quality noise