Business Commons^™

Double Learning Or Double Blinding: An Investigation Of Vendor Private Information Acquisition And Consumer Learning Via Online Reviews, Nan Hu, Kevin E. Dow, Alain Yee Loong Chong, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, building upon information acquisition theory and using portfolio methods and system equations, we made an empirical investigation into how online vendors and consumers are learning from each other, and how online reviews, prices, and sales interact among each other. First, this study shows that vendors acquire information from both private and public channels to learn the quality of their products to make price adjustment. Second, for the more popular products and newly released products, vendors are more motivated to acquire private information that is more precise than the average precision to adjust their price. Third, we document …

Heterogeneous Embedding Propagation For Large-Scale E-Commerce User Alignment, Vincent W. Zheng, Mo Sha, Yuchen Li, Hongxia Yang, Yuan Fang, Zhenjie Zhang, Kian-Lee Tan, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We study the important problem of user alignment in e-commerce: to predict whether two online user identities that access an e-commerce site from different devices belong to one real-world person. As input, we have a set of user activity logs from Taobao and some labeled user identity linkages. User activity logs can be modeled using a heterogeneous interaction graph (HIG), and subsequently the user alignment task can be formulated as a semi-supervised HIG embedding problem. HIG embedding is challenging for two reasons: its heterogeneous nature and the presence of edge features. To address the challenges, we propose a novel Heterogeneous …

The Rise And Fall Of Bike-Sharing Platforms: A Lesson In E-Commerce, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

In the era of digital economy, bike-sharing platforms have grown rapidly. However, not all of them survived the competition. Why?

A Strategic Value Appropriation Path For Cloud Computing, Abhishek Kathuria, Arti Mann, Jiban Khuntia, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-based information management is one of the leading competitive differentiation strategies for firms. With the increasing criticality of information management in value creation and process support, establishing an integrated capability with cloud computing is vital for organizational success in the changing landscape of business competition. These issues have received scant attention, however. We draw on the resource-based view, dynamic capability hierarchy concepts, and the perspective of operand and operant resources to suggest a cloud value appropriation model for firms. We argue that, to appropriate business value from cloud computing, the firm needs to effectively deploy cloud computing and leverage cloud …

Modeling Contemporaneous Basket Sequences With Twin Networks For Next-Item Recommendation, Duc Trong Le, Hady W. Lauw, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our interactions with an application frequently leave a heterogeneous and contemporaneous trail of actions and adoptions (e.g., clicks, bookmarks, purchases). Given a sequence of a particular type (e.g., purchases)-- referred to as the target sequence, we seek to predict the next item expected to appear beyond this sequence. This task is known as next-item recommendation. We hypothesize two means for improvement. First, within each time step, a user may interact with multiple items (a basket), with potential latent associations among them. Second, predicting the next item in the target sequence may be helped by also learning from another supporting sequence …

Towards Easy Comparison Of Local Businesses Using Online Reviews, Yong Wang, Hammad Haleem, Conglei Shi, Yanhong Wu, Xun Zhao, Siwei Fu, Huamin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of e-commerce, there is an increasing number of online review websites, such as Yelp, to help customers make better purchase decisions. Viewing online reviews, including the rating score and text comments by other customers, and conducting a comparison between different businesses are the key to making an optimal decision. However, due to the massive amount of online reviews, the potential difference of user rating standards, and the significant variance of review time, length, details and quality, it is difficult for customers to achieve a quick and comprehensive comparison. In this paper, we present E-Comp, a carefully-designed …

A Proposal For A Decentralized Liquidity Savings Mechanism With Side Payments, Adam Fugal, Rodney Garratt, Zhiling Guo, Dave Hudson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most countries, the central bank provides the medium to physically settle the smallest payments (cash) and the means to electronically settle the largest payments, which typically are wholesale payments between banks. For the latter purpose the central bank usually operates a system through which banks can settle payments in central bank money. Historically, interbank payments were settled via (end of day) netting systems, but as volumes and values increased central banks became worried about the risks inherent in deferred net settlement systems, so most central banks opted for the implementation of a Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system. With …

Zalora: Growing With E-Commerce, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Asia’s fastest-growing online fashion retailer recalibrates its mobile strategy

According to research by Forrester, one-fourth of global retail sales in 2022 will take place online, and it will be in Asia-Pacific. Of that, 80 percent of that will happen on mobile devices, reflecting a well-acknowledge trend of all things going mobile.

The Role Of Urban Mobility In Retail Business Survival, Krittika D'Silva, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascolo, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Economic and urban planning agencies have strong interest in tackling the hard problem of predicting the odds of survival of individual retail businesses. In this work, we tap urban mobility data available both from a location-based intelligence platform, Foursquare, and from public transportation agencies, and investigate whether mobility-derived features can help foretell the failure of such retail businesses, over a 6 month horizon, across 10 distinct cities spanning the globe. We hypothesise that the survival of such a retail outlet is correlated with not only venue-specific characteristics but also broader neighbourhood-level effects. Through careful statistical analysis of Foursquare and taxi …

Didi’S Strategic Move Towards Globalisation, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

This January, Didi Chuxing, China’s largest car-hailing app, announced that it has acquired the remaining shares of Brazil's 99 car share service, Uber's main rival in Latin America. The news came days after Uber raising from Softbank a new round of capital with the valuation at USD48 billion.

How To Build A Retail Website That Keeps On Selling, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

E-commerce appeal is a dynamic art and firms need to keep up

With e-commerce giant Amazon launching its online retail service in Australia to a muted reception, new research from Eric Lim and his colleagues, Fei Liu, Bo Xiao and Chee-Wee Tan, on the impact of product appeal and website quality on online purchases is timely.

Modelling Domain Relationships For Transfer Learning On Retrieval-Based Question Answering Systems In E-Commerce, Jianfei Yu, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang, Jun Huang, Shuangyong Song, Wei Chu, Haiqing Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nowadays, it is a heated topic for many industries to build automatic question-answering (QA) systems. A key solution to these QA systems is to retrieve from a QA knowledge base the most similar question of a given question, which can be reformulated as a paraphrase identification (PI) or a natural language inference (NLI) problem. However, most existing models for PI and NLI have at least two problems: They rely on a large amount of labeled data, which is not always available in real scenarios, and they may not be efficient for industrial applications. In this paper, we study transfer learning …

Evolution Of Digital Payments: Early Learnings From Singapore’S Cashless Payment Drive, Dennis Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper discusses the digital payment scenario unfolding in Singapore as the country’s government ponders the tremendous leap made by China in the digital payment space. The paper discusses possible key factors contributing to the success of digital payments in China, such as the success of WeChat, and whether this could be replicated in a country like Singapore. Although China and Singapore are vastly different in size, they share many similarities, including a strong one-party government which is actively involved in the direction and growth of the economy. Both countries share similar cultural and social influences including materialism, IT adoption …

Influence Of Online Consumer Reviews On Brand Choice, Patricia Lui

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Social interaction encourages consumers toshare information in the digital age. Many consumers use online reviews of products and services to supporttheir brand choice. The concept ofreference group explains how peers can influence consumer purchasedecisions. Peers can exert influence onconsumers in the forms of informational, utilitarian and value-expressiveinfluences. This proposed study aims atexamining how these three forms of reference group influence would affectconsumers in using online consumer reviews when making a brand choice decision. It also explores the role of brand trust onthe brand choice. This paper serves thepurpose of providing a conceptual framework for developing further research.