Research On The Impediments And Seller Response Behaviors Of Product Uncertainty In E-commerce

With the rapid development of the E-commerce,consumers can purchase almost all kinds of products remotely from their home or office via the Internet,phone,facsimile,or mail order catalogs.However,online customers cannot interact physically with the products,and only depend on perceived assessments to judge whether the products are worthy of being purchased.The serious product uncertainty significantly impedes the healthy development of E-commerce.Various innovative tools,such as online product reviews and virtual reality technology,are continuously proposed in e-commerce with the aim of mitigating product uncertainty.If we want to better design and use these technologies,then we should first realize the effects of product uncertainty in e-commerce.Presently,however,our understandings about product uncertainty are still limited.This thesis first develops single-period static analytical model and multi-period dynamic analytical model to evaluate the effects of product uncertainty on product prices,actual demands,return rates,and seller profits at different phases,taking into consideration the moderating effects of return costs,product types,and consumer structures.Then,this thesis builds a two-period analytical model to explore whether and how seller should simultaneously adopt management response and review fraud.Finally,this thesis help platform design a RB-TPSC allocation algorithm to assign the spatial crowdsourcing tasks.The main research contents include the influence mechanisms of product uncertainty on product prices,demands,and seller profits;the influence mechanism of product uncertainty on return rates;the moderating effects of return costs,product types and consumer structures on the impediment mechanisms;and the seller and platform response behaviors.When studying the influence mechanisms of product uncertainty on product prices,demands,and seller profits,results corroborate product uncertainty has slight effects on quality-dominant-fit products,has normal effects on quality-equal-fit products,and has serious effects on fit-dominant-quality products.Normally,product uncertainty decreases product price,and in turn,decrease seller profit.But,the effect of product uncertainty on actual demand is not consistent,since the decreasing product prices caused by product uncertainty increase actual demand,which may outweigh the decrease in actual demand directly caused by product uncertainty.That is,at the initial stage with serious product uncertainty,a higher price perhaps leads to an increase in sales instead of a decrease in sales.When product uncertainty is slight,the product price becomes rational since it is related with quality value.If product uncertainty is well controlled,online sellers are significant benefited,particularly the online sellers selling high-quality products.When studying the influence mechanism of product uncertainty on return rates,results articulate the reason causing the current high return rate.If we cannot mitigate product fit uncertainty,then the return rate of quality-equal-fit and fit-dominantquality products cannot be effectively reduced.But even when product quality and fit uncertainties are well controlled,the return rate of low-quality products are still very hight.Online sellers tend to take varying strategies about these tools used to mitigate product uncertainty when faced with different types of products.When studying the moderating effects of return costs,product types and consumer structures on the impediment mechanisms,results suggest that online sellers and platforms should design suitable consumers' return costs when product fit uncertainty is effectively controlled.Moreover,results show that there is a clear differentiation of return rates emerges among different types of products and that online sellers and platforms can expend more efforts in mitigating product quality and fit uncertainties when they sell high-quality products or hold more loyal consumers.Furthermore,a typical seller's prisoner's dilemma is revealed to describe seller behaviors in capturing loyal consumers.When studying the seller behaviors,results show that online sellers have higher motivations to adopt management response but fewer motivations to adopt review fraud under three situations,including the sold products are high-quality,the discount factor is higher,and the penalty for fake reviews is high.Moreover,online sellers have higher motivations to adopt both management response and review fraud under some situation.In the above situations,the degree of management response can be as much as possible,but the degree of review fraud is negatively affected by product quality,the discount factor of the market,and the penalty for fake reviews.The adoption of management response or review fraud negatively affects the motivations of the firm adopting the other firm behavior.From new perspectives,this study confirms that fake positive reviews are more common than fake negative reviews and proposes some efficient suggestions to reduce fake reviews.While studying the platform behaviors,this study proposes a novel RB-TPSC allocation algorithm to assign spatial crowdsourcing tasks.The second stage of RBTPSC algorithm focuses on the spatial crowdsourcing tasks with serious product uncertainty to improve the successful allocation rate.