Green Online Retailer Towards Brand Sustainability

The shift in shopping methods from physical (offline) stores to virtual (online) stores has crystallized even more. Gradually the shift allows consumers to feel easy and comfortable in respect to buying products by online methods. This earliness paradigm shift becomes interesting if it becomes a topic of the research regarding the possibility of its sustainability in the triple bottom line. The clarity of the consumer's perspective on brand sustainability in terms of the main three pillars is being tested to clarify the roots of the paradigm by becoming a hypothesis in this research. The hypothesis was tested using Structural Equation Modeling on the answers of 278 respondents to identify the significant path. The findings are quite surprising so that entrepreneurs require to put forward the sustainability side of their brand. Future research should be aimed at adding more detailed factors related to the need for the process of achieving sustainability.

EXPRESS: Interacting User-Generated Content Technologies: How Questions & Answers Affect Consumer Reviews

This article studies the question and answer (Q&A) technology of electronic commerce platforms, an increasingly common form of user-generated content that allows consumers to publicly ask product-specific questions and receive responses, either from the platform or from other customers. Using data from a major online retailer, the authors show that Q&As complement consumer reviews: unlike reviews, questions are primarily asked pre-purchase and focus on clarification of product attributes rather than discussion of quality; answers convey fit-specific information in a predominantly sentiment-free way. Based on these observations, the authors hypothesize that Q&As mitigate product fit uncertainty, leading to better matches between products and consumers, and therefore improved product ratings. Indeed, when products suffering from fit mismatch start receiving Q&As, their subsequent ratings improve by approximately 0.1 to 0.5 stars and the fraction of negative reviews that discuss fit-related issues declines. The extent of the rating increase due to Q&As is proportional to the probability that purchasers will experience fit mismatch without Q&A. These findings suggest that, by resolving product fit uncertainty in an e-commerce setting, the addition of Q&As can be a viable way for retailers to improve ratings of products that have incurred low ratings due to customer-product fit mismatch.

Location-Price Equilibria when Traditional Retailers Compete Against an Online Retailer

We consider a location-then-price game where two traditional retailers compete with a location-irrelevant online retailer. We characterize the existing equilibria, and we show that in any possible equilibrium there is direct competition between the traditional retailers. Furthermore, the traditional retailers locate at neither a maximal nor minimal distance. In equilibrium, the price of the online retailer might be higher or lower than the price of the traditional retailers, depending on the relative competitiveness of the online retailer and the traditional retailers.

Welfare Implications in Intermediary Networks

Competitive pressures have forced many traditional companies to evolve into a platform-based business model. Trade commissions and even supreme courts recognize the need for economic analysis as the nature of competition changes in the market. There have been many mergers and acquisitions across platform-based businesses. In the ride-sharing sector, Lyft and Didi Chuxing were initially in a partnership to thwart Uber but Uber merged its operation with Didi Chuxing eventually. Amazon and Walmart competed fiercely to buy the Indian online retailer Flipkart, which Walmart eventually won. Traditional antitrust models studying the implications of mergers do not consider the underlying network structure of these intermediary markets. This is the main focus of our model and analysis. We provide a network measurement to evaluate the effect of mergers on welfare. Our analysis shows that because of the underlying networks mergers can sometimes improve welfare.