Virtual Marketplace Research Articles

Resisting media marginalisation: Black women’s digital content and collectivity

ABSTRACT Based on analysis of 23 interviews, this paper examines how social media and online content is implicated in the collective, resistant and transnational media experiences of Black women in Britain. It contributes to scholarship concerning race and the virtual marketplace by examining tensions between the countercultural, communal and commercial qualities of Black women’s online experiences. Drawing upon theorising of the oppositional spectator gaze of Black women, and narratives of technology consumption, we unpack how Black women’s digital activity can enable them to navigate the hegemony of US content, their marginalisation in British mass-media, and situate them within a Black experience that transcends Britain’s borders. Our work illustrates how Black women’s online encounters can be a source of resistance, Black digital commentary and community, as well as being subject to corporate co-optation. We conceptualise such online experiences as being shaped by transnational dimensions of the relationship between race, media and markets.

A MaaS platform architecture supporting data sovereignty in sustainability assessment of manufacturing systems

The digitalization of industrial processes together with the broad integration of IoT infrastructures across production systems, are drastically impacting manufacturing value chains and the business models built on the top of them. Starting from the idea of dematerializing production resources and of embracing servitization, this paper describes the architecture behind a platform in the Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) domain, creating an ecosystem that acts as a virtual marketplace bringing un-exploited production capacity, as well as other virtual and physical assets, closer to the production demand, to obtain their optimal matching. The platform creates a direct connection among manufacturing services providers, the technologies they integrate, and the products/resources customers are looking for. As the measurement of the sustainability performances of products and companies is a relevant element in the service/product selection process, the platform supports the automated acquisition of manufacturing data, their elaboration through an LCA based engine and the aggregation into indicators. Such indicators are used to sort suppliers into the sustainability perspective and/or provide means of communication of impacts generated by manufacturing. As a data rich platform, it integrates the INTERNATIONAL DATA SPACES (IDS) connector to link different entities through secure exchange and trusted sharing of data, thus supporting data sovereignty. The integration of the IDS reference architecture forms the basis for data privacy and security offering trust between platform participants and guaranteeing for data creators, respect to who is using their data, for how long, for which application, how many times and according to which terms & conditions.

Value-informed pricing for virtual digital products: Evidence from Chinese MMORPG industry

Value-informed pricing strategy, which focuses on determining the price level of products based on consumer value perception, is especially suitable to be applied in digital products rather than industrial ones. By carrying out 65 in-depth interviews with people involved in the Chinese Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) industry, this article explores the process through which a value-informed pricing strategy is applied to determine the price level of virtual in-game accessories—exploring pricing preference through interacting with game players, swaying pricing alternatives through managing the competitive environment, and manipulating value perception through shaping the virtual marketplace. Furthermore, this article constructs a theoretical framework of value-informed pricing, including the above process, and deciphers the linkage mechanism between different segments. The findings not only enrich the theory of value-informed pricing under the application context of virtual digital products but also have implications for the practitioners in the MMORPG industry.

The effects of task criticality and target modality on a simulated battlefield search task

ABSTRACTWarfighters often rely on lengthy, lexical object descriptions when performing search tasks in critical environments. Several theoretical frameworks, including the Pictorial Superiority Effect, posit images to be more effective forms of instruction for short-term memory recall tasks. However, it is unclear whether pictures are superior forms of object description when the search task has serious consequences. The purpose of the current work was to determine whether pictorial or lexical descriptions are more effective forms of instruction for military search tasks of varying criticalities. Twenty participants with military deployment experience and 20 students with no deployment experience navigated a virtual marketplace environment to search for pictorially and lexically described targets. Participants searched for targets under conditions of both low and high task criticality. Mixed analyses of variance showed that both samples collected more pictorially described targets in the high criticality condition than in the low criticality condition. Participants collected pictorially described targets faster than lexical targets, and military participants took longer to locate lexically described targets in the high criticality condition. These results lend credence to the pictorial superiority effect and may be used to inform design of instructional tools.

Secure Multi-Attribute One-to-Many Bilateral Negotiation Framework for E-Commerce

Electronic trading (e-trading) provides a virtual marketplace (e-Marketplace) where buyers and sellers can engage in business activities through electronic media rather than direct physical contact. Although negotiation is a fundamental component of e-trading, the critical risks of missing out on top utility offers that expire before client's negotiation deadline has not been addressed. In order to address these problems, we propose a mobile-agent based secure one-to-many bilateral e-trade negotiation framework that efficiently manages the risk of losing top utility offers and maximizes client's utility taking into account various temporal constraints. Theoretical and empirical analysis of the proposed approach is performed. We evaluated the performance of the proposed strategy in terms of client's utility and negotiation time and compared it with two baseline negotiation strategies. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed strategy maximizes client's utility, shortens negotiation time, and ensures adequate market search. Proofs of validity of the proposed utility function are presented. The security protocol is formally verified and the verification shows that the protocol is free of security flaws and hence, negotiation data are secured.

Value Congruence, Trust, and Their Effects on Purchase Intention and Reservation Price

We study the roles of value congruence and trust in increasing online shoppers’ intention to purchase goods and their reservation prices for these goods. Hypotheses are developed and a controlled experiment is conducted to measure subjects’ value congruence with and their trust in online sellers with disparate values, along with their purchase intention and willingness to pay price premiums. Using social exchange theory, we find that, for business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, value congruence increases consumer online trust, and both value congruence and online trust have direct effects on purchase intention and reservation prices. In particular, in the positive value congruence vs. value neutral case, trust has a greater effect than value congruence on purchase intention, but value congruence has a greater effect than trust on reservation price. These findings suggest that trust is essential to a consumer's intention to purchase online but value congruence can induce price premiums from potential buyers for online sellers. This implies that trust is essential to B2C e-commerce, but value congruence can be a more effective instrument for online sellers to achieve competitive advantage through value-based differentiation in the virtual marketplace.

E-Tailing in India A Paradigm Shift Shopping in the Virtual World

The internet medium has revolutionized the way of living and shopping online has become a way of life. With easy accessibility of smart phones and internet connectivity, Indian consumers have embraced the virtual marketplace to buy products across all categories. For the venture capitalist and angel investors, E-tailing is a lucrative investment option. India has a big pool of internet savvy population that is not only accessing internet but also buying online. The internet has created a retail and consumer uprising by being a new platform for retailing. The virtual market place has a vast array from products – from grocery to gold jewellery and buyers buy everything. Consumers across all metros and towns from tier I to tier III are inclined towards online shopping. Since the entry of Flipkart in 2007, a significant number of E-tailers are inching space in the virtual world to woo customers to buy from them. In an attempt to study the causes why people shop online, this study finds that experiential factors dominate the buying motive. No discrimination exist with reference to age, gender, income level as all sections of the consumers buy online. This study also analyses the challenges facing the E-tailing industry and identifies a plethora of controllable factors which should be addressed by the E-tailers to offer the best online shopping experience to the consumers.

Human factors in crowdsourcing

Today, crowdsourcing is used to "taskify" any job ranging from simple receipt transcription to collaborative editing, fan-subbing, citizen science, and citizen journalism. The crowd is typically volatile, its arrival and departure asynchronous, and its levels of attention and accuracy diverse. Tasks vary in complexity and may necessitate the participation of workers with varying degrees of expertise. Sometimes, workers need to collaborate explicitly and build on each other's contributions to complete a single task. For example, in disaster reporting, CrowdMap allows geographically closed people with diverse and complementary skills, to work together to report details about the course of a typhoon or the aftermath of an earthquake. This uber-ization of human labor requires the understanding of workers motivation in completing a task, their ability to work together in collaborative tasks, as well as, helping workers find relevant tasks. For over 40 years, organization studies have thoroughly examined human factors that affect workers in physical workplaces. More recently, computer scientists have developed algorithms that verify and leverage those findings in a virtual marketplace, in this case, a crowdsourcing platform. The goal of this tutorial is to review those two areas and discuss how their combination may improve workers' experience, task throughput and outcome quality for both micro-tasks and collaborative tasks. We will start with a coverage of motivation theory, team formation, and learning worker profiles. We will then address open research questions that result from this review.

Home Bias in Online Investments: An Empirical Study of an Online Crowdfunding Market

An extensive literature in economics and finance has documented home bias, the tendency that transactions are more likely to occur between parties in the same geographical area rather than outside. Using data from a large online crowdfunding marketplace and employing a quasi-experimental design, we find evidence that home bias still exists in this virtual marketplace for financial products. Furthermore, through a series of empirical tests, we show that rationality-based explanations cannot fully explain such behavior and that behavioral reasons at least partially drive this remarkable phenomenon. As crowdfunding becomes an alternative and increasingly appealing channel for financing, a better understanding of home bias in this new context provides important managerial, practical, and policy implications. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Consumer-To-Consumer Online Market for Used Goods : A Case Study of OLX in India

Online sale and purchase of second-hand products is on the rise in India. OLX is a free-to-use website for consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online auction of used goods. This study uncovered the needs and expectations of current and potential users of virtual marketplaces of used products. Consumers were studied separately for their perspectives as sellers and as buyers. Existing service performance of OLX was studied and potential hurdles in creating a free online market for second-hand goods was revealed. In-depth interviews, focus group discussions, content analysis, and question-based survey were used for this research. In addition, the paper also discussed the implications of findings for marketers.

Dynamic reallocation and rescheduling of steel products using agents with strategical anticipation and virtual marketstructures

Abstract: A multi-agent system for the steel production is presented. It re-allocates off-spec products to existing alternative orders. The system consists of three main Industry 4.0 components: agents, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and a semantic modelling of the process chain. Using economic principles like virtual marketplaces, the solution of the reallocation is reached by means of auctions, where product agents act as sellers and order agents act as bidders. A virtual price defines the key for the matching process between order and product. To incorporate postprocessing, product agents anticipate their possibly reachable future states with first-principle models. The matching between order and product characteristics is then based on the predicted product future and the order specification. As the post-processing comes at a cost, logistics costs, administrative costs and transformation costs are also considered for constructing the virtual price. The presented system runs as online open-loop prototype at a steel plant of ArcelorMittal and shows promising results for the reallocation task.

Provenance of global seafood

AbstractKnowing where and how seafood is caught or farmed is central to empowering consumers, and the importers that supply them, with informed choices. Given the wide‐ranging, complex and at times commercially sensitive nature of global seafood trade, it can prove very challenging to link imported seafood with information about its provenance. The databases involved are incomplete, at times vague and not harmonized. Here, we present a first attempt to link all global seafood imports through a virtual marketplace to exports and map their origins. Considerable work remains to ground‐truth the specific origins of all seafood commodities. We illustrate the flow of seafood and its evolution since the 1970s when supporting records began. This work allows the impact of fishing or marine farming to be associated with seafood imports.

Civil liability of virtual marketplaces in Argentina for the sale of counterfeits

Civil liability of virtual marketplaces in Argentina for the sale of counterfeits

Profiling online recreational/prescription drugs' customers and overview of drug vending virtual marketplaces.

Internet and social networking sites play a significant role in the marketing and distribution of recreational/prescription drugs without restrictions. We aimed here at reviewing data relating to the profile of the online drug customer and at describing drug vending websites. The PubMed, Google Scholar, and Scopus databases were searched here in order to elicit data on the socio-demographic characteristics of the recreational marketplaces/online pharmacies' customers and the determinants relating to online drug purchasing activities. Typical online recreational drugs' customers seem to be Caucasian, men, in their 20s, highly educated, and using the web to impact as minimally as possible on their existing work/professional status. Conversely, people without any health insurance seemed to look at the web as a source of more affordable prescription medicines. Drug vending websites are typically presented here with a "no prescription required" approach, together with aggressive marketing strategies. The online availability of recreational/prescriptions drugs remains a public health concern. A more precise understanding of online vending sites' customers may well facilitate the drafting and implementation of proper prevention campaigns aimed at counteracting the increasing levels of online drug acquisition and hence intake activities.

Built for niche: Rethinking the role of manufacturing in developing designer fashion in New Zealand

Abstract The fashion system in New Zealand has strong ties to its northern hemispheric roots, largely due to its colonial past. As a result, local understandings of fashion and design have been derived from predominant British influences in terms of garment design, aesthetics, construction and manufacturing systems. This article examines the appropriateness of continuing these traditional systems as opposed to exploring more dynamic methods suited to the local environment and culture. A global fashion economy and the disconnection of design from geography in the virtual marketplace is discussed through an examination of practice-based enquiry and historical fashion contexts. The authors propose that there is a significant refocus which needs to happen for New Zealand fashion to reinvent itself as a dynamic and international industry. The rethinking of traditional methods of manufacturing and the way we use existing technology offer the best opportunity to drive innovative design both in terms of process and aesthetics. New Zealand does not need to manufacture more clothing but instead should focus on producing high end, distinctive products for an international niche market, a strategy that has proven successful for other New Zealand industries, particularly the premium wine and tourism industries.

Turning ideas into products: subjective well-being in co-creation

New services, like fabrication spaces, 3D printer rentals and virtual marketplaces, have made it easier for empowered consumers to co-create innovative products without almost any involvement of traditional companies. Adopting a consumer-grounded view, this work takes a step forward from the existing service literature by investigating the link between psychological motives and happiness in co-creation. Specifically, the study measures how community affiliation, personal growth and utilitarian motives are predictors of subjective well-being (SWB). The results illustrate that community affiliation and personal growth motives predict high scores of SWB, while utilitarian motives do not. In addition, empowered consumers who co-create with others are happier than consumers who create alone. This indicates that direct interactions are not only a powerful platform for service co-creation, but are also predictors of SWB. We discuss the implications for traditional companies and for decision makers regarding the benefits offered by digital fabrication services.

Slovak Virtual Market in the Light of Analysis af Possibilities of Detecting On-Line Reputation for Selected Subjects

The main aim of this article is to analyze the theoretical possibilities of detecting an On-Line reputation of selected subjects functioning on Slovak virtual market. The purpose of article is also to present selected method of measuring on-line reputation of selected subjects based on newest knowledge in the field of managerial sciences. For purposes of this article, subjects are represented by on-line presence of Slovak towns in a virtual market place. In particular, cultural and anthropological context, and the resulting specificities and peculiarities typical of the post-communist block of countries will be taken into account in relation to the chosen market. The target group is narrowed to 20 biggest Slovak towns as the best representation of subjects which officially presented themselves to internet users on the specific type of market.

Reputation mechanism for e-commerce in virtual reality environments

The interest in 3D technology and virtual reality (VR) is growing both from academia and industry, promoting the quick development of virtual marketplaces (VMs) (i.e. e-commerce systems in VR environments). VMs have inherited trust problems, e.g. sellers may advertise a perfect deal but doesn’t deliver the promised service or product at the end. In view of this, we propose a five-sense feedback oriented reputation mechanism (supported by 3D technology and VR) particularly for VMs. The user study confirms that users prefer VMs with our reputation mechanism over those with traditional ones. In our reputation mechanism, five-sense feedback is objective and buyers can use it directly in their reputation evaluation of target sellers. However, for the scenarios where buyers only provide subjective ratings, we apply the approach of subjectivity alignment for reputation computation (SARC), where ratings provided by one buyer can then be aligned (converted) for another buyer according to the two buyers’ subjectivity. Evaluation results indicate that SARC can more accurately model sellers’ reputation than the state-of-the-art approaches.

Exploratory Study on Self-Fulfillment Effect of Self-Designing Process in Adaptive Customization Services

Services for self-designing, or adaptive customization services, have become dominant in virtual marketplaces and are believed to create additional values both for the company as well as for the customer. While most research focused on the value from the services' outputs, this research attempts to address the customer-perceived value deriving from the process of the services, and focuses on the self-fulfillment effect of the involved mental processing. An online survey was administered with 313 U.S. shoppers. In the results, participants using adaptive customization services reported higher self-fulfillment perceptions, than did those not using the services. Furthermore, both the self-fulfillment perceptions (i.e., autonomy and competence) significantly increased perceived design utility. The results suggest that the process of adaptive customization services should be strategically managed to improve the customers' positive mental states that subsequently improve the perceived value of the output designs. Implications and suggestions for future studies are dsicussed.

The Length of a Wide Highway: On the Archive, the (Electronic) Marketplace, and the End of a Collection

This essay is an image-driven reflection on the archive, the collection and collecting, and the act of acquisition. Using parts of her collection of cinema-related ephemera, the author draws on the writing of Apollinaire, Benjamin, Canudo, Derrida, and Dugas to animate questions about their ownership and their place and function in both the archive and the activities of writing and research. By also examining the dynamics of real and virtual marketplaces, the author in turn explores how questions concerning reproduction, purchasing and repetition inhabit the theoretical strata of today’s archive, as well as comprise the archival strata of the collection itself.