Alibaba Research Articles

Aliyun and Chinese Academy of Sciences Sign MoU for Quantum Computing Laboratory

Alibaba Group's cloud computing subsidiary, Aliyun, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) signed a memorandum of understanding on 31 July 2015 in Shanghai to co-found the Chinese Academy of Sciences – Alibaba Quantum Computing Laboratory. The aim of the new research facility is to advance the study and applications of quantum theory, thereby creating new technologies and platforms for information security, connectivity and computing.

E-commerce business model mining and prediction

We study the problem of business model mining and prediction in the e-commerce context. Unlike most existing approaches where this is typically formulated as a regression problem or a time-series prediction problem, we take a different formulation to this problem by noting that these existing approaches fail to consider the potential relationships both among the consumers (consumer influence) and among the shops (competitions or collaborations). Taking this observation into consideration, we propose a new method for e-commerce business model mining and prediction, called EBMM, which combines regression with community analysis. The challenge is that the links in the network are typically not directly observed, which is addressed by applying information diffusion theory through the consumer-shop network. Extensive evaluations using Alibaba Group e-commerce data demonstrate the promise and superiority of EBMM to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of business model mining and prediction.

Assessing Elements of Storytelling in Chinese e-Entrepreneur Giant Alibaba's Business Information Graphics

Alibaba Group is China's largest e-commerce company and leader in e-business infographic publishing. This study attempts to understand how Alibaba's infographics use texts, visual aids, and statistical graphics to facilitate understanding of their contents. A quantitative content analysis of its 460 infographics suggests that while Alibaba's content preference aligns with its mission to education small business owners, the design and forms of its infographics have much room for improvement. To facilitate better storytelling and visual communication, the infographic design needs to make better use of introductory and conclusive texts, to use visual aids that facilitate interdependent storytelling and that serve more functional than decorative purposes, and to better utilize the power of statistical graphics to quickly convey patterns behind numeric values.

Quantifying Cross-Network Effects in Online C2C Platforms

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) platforms have become a major engine of growth in Internet commerce. This is especially true in countries such as China, which are experiencing a big rush towards electronic commerce. The emergence of such platforms gives researchers the unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of such platforms by focusing on the growth of both buyers and sellers. In this research, we build a utility-based model to quantify both cross and direct network effects on Alibaba Group’s Taobao.com, the world’s largest online C2C platform (based in China). Specifically, we investigate the relative contributions of different factors that affect the growth of buyers and sellers on the platform. Our results suggest that the direct network effects do not play a big role in the platform’s growth (we detect a small positive direct network effect on buyer growth and no direct network effect on seller growth). More importantly, we find a significant, large and positive cross-network effect on both sides of the platform. In other words, the installed base of either side of the platform has propelled the growth of the other side (and thus the overall growth). Interestingly, this cross-network effect is asymmetric with the installed base of sellers having a much larger effect on the growth of buyers than vice versa. The growth in the number of buyers is driven primarily by the seller’s installed base and product variety with increasing importance of product variety. The growth in the number of sellers is driven by buyer’s installed base, buyer quality, and product price with increasing importance of buyer quality. We also investigate the nature of these cross-network effects over time. We find that the cross-network effect of sellers on buyers increases and then decreases to reach a stable level. In contrast, the cross-network effect of buyers on sellers is relatively stable. We discuss the policy implications of these findings for C2C platforms in general and Taobao in particular.

"Organizational Imprinting, Managerial Cognition, and Firm Strategy in Emerging Economies"

This article, based on a case study of Alibaba Group which is the worldi¯s largest online business-to-business trading platform for small businesses, explores the evolutionary mechanism of organizational imprinting, and the interaction between organizational imprinting, managerial cognition, and corporate strategy in emerging economies. We find that the founder of an organization, conditions at founding, and events subsequent to founding has critical effects on the formation of organizational imprinting. Organizational imprinting which evolves along with organizational development largely influences managerial cognition, and consequently determines firm strategy and organizational structure to a large extent. We also find that firm strategy has a feedback effect on the evolution of organization imprinting. Specifically, the founder and events subsequent to founding reinforce and modify organizational imprinting. This article not only contributes to the imprinting literature by examining the interaction of...

E-business Ecosystem and its Evolutionary Path: The Case of the Alibaba Group in China

The rapid growth of online consumers and e-business websites in China has attracted a large number of organizations to participate in the e-business industry; many of them have gone through several stages of evolution and aggregations. The purpose of this study is to apply the business ecosystem theory as the theoretical lens to explore the phenomenon of e-business growth in China. The Alibaba Group was chosen as a case to demonstrate the process by which a typical e-business ecosystem got shaped, developed, and matured. Four stages in the evolution path of Alibaba’s ecosystem and their respective characteristics are identified. The findings are useful for understanding the development of e-business in china. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.