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As an industrial phenomenon with rich Chinese characteristics, Taobao Villages have formed a complete industrial chain from production to sale and core goods to supporting industries, bringing extensive spatial linkage and profound influence. Through questionnaire surveys and interviews, the paper obtained first-hand data on Taobao Village stores in Haining City and explored the spatial linkage characteristics of Taobao Village's industrial chain from the operation process perspective. The results revealed that the operation process of online stores can be divided into four core parts: research & development or sampling, production or purchasing, online sale, and delivery. The main operation parts of self-production and sales stores and local-dependent online market-oriented stores were in Haining City, forming close industrial linkages, whereas for nonlocal-dependent online market-oriented stores, only a few parts of the operation process were in Haining. Accordingly, Taobao Villages and Haining City undertook all parts of the operation, becoming a complex space and also the main area realizing a strong spatial linkage among Taobao Villages. The area outside Jiaxing City is mainly a sales market (Hangzhou City provides a sales platform), and their connection with Taobao Village relies primarily on the Internet. To form a more extensive spatial linkage and play a leading role, Haining City should encourage the self-production and sales stores and local-dependent online market-oriented stores to create a locally-rooted production system or industrial cluster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialization in criminal activities generally refers to offenders that repeat the same or similar offenses over time. While some research has found support for offender specialization, most empirical studies suggest that most offenders engage in various forms of offenses during their criminal trajectory and fail to specialize in a specific offense. The aim of this paper is to build on past research to understand the specialization of offenders involved in the online illicit trade of tobacco. To do so, we characterize the offenders involved in the online illicit trade of tobacco, the products (other than tobacco) that these vendors traffic as well as the differences between the offenders involved in the online illicit trade of tobacco and those involved only in other types of illicit trades. We find that a small share of vendors on cryptomarkets are involved in the illicit trade of tobacco. These vendors trade cigarettes, cigars and rolling tobacco generating monthly revenues of $8952 from the sales of these items. These revenues pale in comparison to these vendors' revenues from non-tobacco product listings ($22,177) and the monthly revenues generated by other cryptomarkets vendors (over $37 million US dollars). This paper confirms the diversification of offenders involved in online illicit markets and extends past research by quantifying the degree to which these offenders are diversified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores political drivers and policy process of the reform of the framework for Artificial Intelligence regulation and governance in the European Union (EU). Since 2017, the EU has been developing an integrated policy to tighten control and to ensure consumer protection and fundamental rights. This policy reform is theoretically interesting, raising the question of which conceptual approaches better explain it, and it is also empirically relevant, addressing the link between risk regulation and digital market integration in Europe. This paper explores the policy reform mainly by using two case study methods—process tracing and congruence procedure—using a variety of primary and secondary sources. It evaluates the analytical leverage of three theoretical frameworks and a set of derived testable hypotheses concerning the co-evolution of global economic competition, institutional structure, and policy preferences of domestic actors in shaping incremental approach to AI regulation in the EU. It is argued that all three are key drivers shaping the reform and explain the various stages of the policymaking process, namely problem definition, agenda-setting, and decision-making, as well as the main features of the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the vigorous development of e-commerce, digital content consumption has prospered in the consumer market. Considering the perishability of digital content products and the negative utility of advertisements on users, the paper develops a dynamic game model for the supply chain with a digital content platform and an upstream advertiser, and obtains the optimal (or equilibrium) resource investing, pricing, and advertising strategies under the centralized and decentralized decision-making cases. The main results show that the marketing strategies of pricing and advertising are constant over the planning horizon, while the operation strategy of resource investing which depends on digital content products' perishability is decreasing over time. And, the platform may open resource for free to benefit more from advertising. Furthermore, for a certain region with relatively small price sensitivity, a counterintuitive result is obtained that the resource investing level and the profits of both members increase with the price sensitivity under the decentralized case, which is in sharp contrast to the centralized case. Finally, ignoring the product perishability in the decision-making process will cut down the resource investment level and profit, and the profit loss is intensified by a lower price or advertising sensitivity of consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) provides major advantages as it allows for more creativity and competitiveness for E-marketing and distribution. The IoT technologies in digital marketing have virtually no detailed and interconnected view detecting the growth in E-marketing. Many marketing platforms have recognized the drawback to establishing distribution deals with marketing companies. Therefore in this paper, the Internet of things-assisted E-marketing and distribution framework (IoT-EDF) has been proposed to improve the marketing strategies in the different phases of the distribution, procurement, and promotion process E-marketing. IoT-EDF is implemented for customer retention actions and focuses on data that are the strongest sources of information. The IoT offers an unparalleled way to collect data via client support. EDF allows the acceptance of nonprofit e-marketing by nonprofits with soft computing and varies largely from the potential for the preparation of marketing distribution. Moreover, preparation affects the adoption of e-marketing greatly, and adopting capability plays a crucial role in effective acceptance. The results found that top management's concentration on e-marketing contributes to the acceptance of e-marketing. The Internet of things impacts related marketing fields, including goods, place, price, advertising, procedures, and the hard evidence, based upon the findings from the proposed IoT-EDF. The experimental result obtained achieves the highest efficiency rate of 98.56% and satisfaction rate of 97.9%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the automation of a Web advertising recognition algorithm, using regular expressions. Currently, the use of regular expressions, optical character recognition, Databases, and automation tests have been critical for multiple Software implementations. The tests were carried out in three Web browsers. As a result, the detection of advertisements in Spanish, that distract attention and that above all extract information from users was achieved. The main feature of the algorithm is that automatic and versatile execution does not require access to the code of the page in question and that in the future it can be an application with background operation. Being supported by optical character recognition gives us acceptable efficiency in detecting advertising. Thanks to this identification, it may be possible to generate different applications, both in favor of the user and the brands, always with the aim of improving current online marketing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to (i) analyze how different users of social media (Twitter) interact and spread cause-related communication and (ii) explore how people search for cause-related marketing campaigns online, allowing a comparison between individualist and collectivist cultures. A social network analysis was used to map the different types of networks created by online users. A second in-depth study on how online users search for cause-related marketing campaigns used a 5-year analysis. Online users in individualist countries are more engaged with a broader community than those in collectivist countries who focus their attention on a narrower set of CRM messages. These findings are useful insights for companies and charities, which should adopt different strategies depending on the culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User decision intuition is challenging and complex, even if the user and product are known. Thus, recommending products is a management decision with high degree of incertitude. What if we are facing also the cold-start problem, like new products or visitors? This is a hot topic in recommender systems, tackled in variously, successfully or not. This perspective adds more incertitude to the existing uncertain scenario. Our philosophy is the shift from a user-centric view, hit by uncertainty, to a company-centric one taken in certainty circumstances, later to apply win–win approaches. We propose a multi-criteria algorithm -MRS OZ- for an ecommerce site RS that tackles the cold-start differently. It uses Onicescu method, being adapted according to Zipf's Law, very popular in internet marketing. The paper opted for an exploratory research based on primary and secondary methods, consisting in literature review, 2-step survey addressed to 110 managers splat in 2 groups, and statistical analyses. The algorithm may substitute the human expertise on the given sample item list and criteria set. This work reveals that Onicescu method is suitable for recommender systems field, but relative inner category rankings and more domain related weight ratios strengthen the algorithm. Onicescu method has a wide applicability, but not for recommender systems. Also, the mixture with Zipf's Law is completely experimental in research area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we have conducted a comprehensive measurement and analysis on the Dream market, an anonymous online market that uses cryptocurrency as transaction currency. We first collect data between October 30th 2018 and March 1st 2019. Then we use decision tree-based approach to classify goods. Following we analyze the category of goods sold in the market, the shipping place of vendors. By analyzing more than 1,970,303 items, we find the goods sold in Dream Market are mainly drugs and digital goods. We estimate the total sales of all vendors, and find that an average monthly income is $14 million during the measurement period, which means that the market commission income is more than $560,000 per month. Based on these data, we use transaction cost theory to analyze the transaction attributes of illegal transactions, which shows that anonymous online market can reduce transaction cost of illegal transactions. We finally discuss the results analyzed and the intervention policy, as well as recent DDoS attacks and future trends of illegal transactions in anonymous online market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word-of-mouth plays an important role in the spread of influence by means of a cascading manner, e.g., the promotion of new products, information dissemination, etc. Today's Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide viral marketing for many companies to conduct business promotion, and the idea behind viral marketing comes from the word-of-mouth effects. Given a predefined budget (e.g., the set size k), influence maximization selects a set of initial users to help companies to promote their products. The budget-making often is of challenging owning to the hardness of trade-off between profit and cost. Most of recent research on influence maximization primarily study the problem of independent product promotion, but few take into account the impacts of other existing products that users have already owned. Moreover, the current solutions encounter scalability problem whenever facing a large scale social network. In this paper, we explore the viral marketing by defining a general influence maximization problem where a practical scenario of coexistence of multiple products is considered. To capture the impacts of other existing products, we put forward a new method to measure the influence between users. Different from previous work, the goal of our general problem is to maximize the profit/cost ratio which can avoid the difficulty of budget-making and reflects maximization effects better. Then, we propose a ( 1 2 + ε )-approximate algorithm with linear complexity to solve the problem, and further design a distributed implementation to achieve good scalability. Extensive experiments on real world datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal data and its use have become the front-line of businesses in the digital market. With the potential to be extracted for information, making this available for various purposes, big data transforms into a powerful tool for data controllers for effective marketing, defining strategic business decisions, and establishing a strong foothold in the market. The use of personal data for targeted marketing exemplifies this. While privacy has been subject to the regime of privacy protection, privacy violation might entangle competition law analysis when it involves abuse of market dominance. This paper addresses these problems by discussing three key issues: first, how competition law addresses the use of personal data as the new frontier of innovation and competition; second, whether big data plays a role to qualify dominance; and third, if non-negotiable policy on privacy infringes the prohibition of dominance abuse under competition law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring the performance of a web marketing campaign is usually a long-lasting, low-effort but distracting task, where a user repeatedly glances at some sort of visual analytics tools to check whether the campaign is going well. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach for this task, where the performance of a web marketing campaign is monitored through sonification, using the soundset of popular 8-bit arcade video games. On one hand, sonification would allow a user to be constantly informed about the current state of the campaign without being distracted. On the other hand, the sound metaphors coming from popular 8-bit arcade video games would be able to convey information about the status of the campaign in a simple and effective way (i.e., if the sonification of a campaign resembles the audio of a successful game session, then the campaign is going well). We investigated this idea by developing a prototype system for the sonification of the behavior of a web server activity through a configurable set of sound metaphors. We then analyzed the effectiveness of our approach by conducting a simple experimental study. This was done, first, by sonifying the progress of a given web marketing campaign using the soundset of two popular 8-bit video games: Super Mario Bros and Bubble Bobble. The outcoming soundtrack was then used in a controlled setting to assess the performance of a group of 20 participants listening to our soundtrack under different work conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relative efficiency of buyers and sellers on the online diamond market using a non-parametric double-frontier setting. Our data consists in a sample of more than 100,000 round cut diamonds offered for sale online. For a given quality defined by a combination of color and clarity grades, we turn to the free disposal hull model to estimate the sets of efficient diamonds respectively for buyers and sellers in the price-weight space. We find that the average bargaining power of buyers is lower than that of sellers. Regression estimates show that the relative efficiency of buyers is reduced for heavier diamonds and when there are many diamonds of the same quality offered for sale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the progress of mobile devices and wireless broadband, a new eMarket platform, termed spatial crowdsourcing is emerging, which enables workers (aka crowd) to perform a set of spatial tasks (i.e., tasks related to a geographical location and time) posted by a requester. In this paper, we study a version of the spatial crowdsourcing problem in which the workers autonomously select their tasks, called the worker selected tasks (WST) mode. Towards this end, given a worker, and a set of tasks each of which is associated with a location and an expiration time, we aim to find a schedule for the worker that maximizes the number of performed tasks. We first prove that this problem is NP-hard. Subsequently, for small number of tasks, we propose two exact algorithms based on dynamic programming and branch-and-bound strategies. Since the exact algorithms cannot scale for large number of tasks and/or limited amount of resources on mobile platforms, we propose different approximation algorithms. Finally, to strike a compromise between efficiency and accuracy, we present a progressive algorithms. We conducted a thorough experimental evaluation with both real-world and synthetic data on desktop and mobile platforms to compare the performance and accuracy of our proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid growth of the number of netizens in China, the Internet has become one of the most important parts in the lives of people who not only can get more information on the Internet, but can also express their own views. In other words, the Internet has also become a part of real-world events. Drawing on a case study about ‘The Boycott of Carrefour’ in China during the spring of 2008, the paper first discusses the role and functions of new media during the incident. Through analyses of a story about the culture of labeling others and a conflict between burning a wrong flag in this case, the paper then explores the capriciousness of Chinese cyberspace. The author proposes an explanation on how the illusion of truth is generated on the Internet and then influences the events in the real world. The paper concludes that the Internet is not just a simple technological tool, but it is intertwined with the sociocultural contexts in which it is rooted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to discuss the increasingly unbalanced structure of public communication in Thailand. To this end, an Internet survey and an in-depth interviews will be employed to investigate the unprecedented popularity of the Internet with people who are dissatisfied with the mainstream media (commercial newspapers, radio and television), which do not serve their need to have their voice heard in public. The study argues that due to (1) the media domination of political and business powers, (2) the lack of a public channel of communication and (3) the suppression of opposing viewpoints by the government, people utilise the Internet and the bulletin boards, in particular, as an alternative form of communication to express their concerns and engage in public affairs. The main argument of this paper is to dispel the notion that the Internet is a medium that is exclusively the purview of those who are affluent, who are privileged with resources, income or education. The predominant belief in Thailand today is that the Internet is there to serve the privileged and that this could lead to even more elitist control and censorship. Conversely, this investigation reveals that people as users can in fact make a difference; that is, to a large extent, they are capable of influencing the medium to be more supportive of them and their environment. As the Internet is capable of being a venue of popular usage, this paper argues that it is crucial to support this new medium’s penetration of a wider public. The problem of a digital divide needs to be addressed; large sections of population, especially those who lack either financial resources or technical skills, must be included in this Information and Communication Technologies development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unique features of handheld devices, including their mobility, personalization and location-awareness engender new types of applications for mobile commerce, such as mobile advertising. Mobile marketing and advertising applications deliver promotional information to consumers based on their preferences and location. In this paper, we present SMMART, a context-aware, adaptive and personalized m-commerce application designed to deliver targeted promotions to the users of mobile devices about the products they like while guarding the users’ identity and protecting them from any unsolicited messages. Promotions distributed by SMMART are personalized by performing intelligent matching of the user’s shopping interests to current promotions available at a retail site. SMMART can adapt to changing preferences of its user by inconspicuously monitoring his or her shopping habits. We describe a fully functional prototype of SMMART built for Pocket PCs running Windows CE with .NET Compact Framework. This paper also presents a study demonstrating end-user usability and economic viability of SMMART. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalization by means of third party application is one of the greatest advantages of smartphones. For example, when a user looks for a path to destination, he can download and install a navigation application with ease from official online market such as Google Play and Appstore. Such applications require an access to the Internet, and most users prefer Wi-Fi networks which are free to use, to mobile networks which cost a fee. For this reason, when they have no access to free Wi-Fi networks, most smartphone users choose to try to use unknown Wi-Fi access points (AP). However, this can be highly dangerous, because such unknown APs are sometimes installed by an adversary with malicious intentions such as stealing information or session hijacking. Today, smartphones contains all kinds of personal information of the users including e-mail address, passwords, schedules, business document, personal photographs, etc., making them an easy target for malicious users. If an adversary takes smartphone, he will get all of information of the users. For this reason, smartphone security has become very important today. In wireless environments, malicious users can easily eavesdrop on and intervene in communication between an end-user and the internet service providers, meaning more vulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, we try to reveal the risk of using unknown APs by presenting demonstration results. The testbed is composed of two smartphones, two APs, and one server. The compromised AP forwards messages of victim smartphone to the fake server by using domain name system spoofing. Thus, the application that is running on the victim smartphone transfers HTTP request to the fake server. As a result, this application displays the abnormal pop-up advertisement, which contains malicious codes and links. Our demonstration shows that merely connecting to compromise APs can make a malicious behavior even the applications are benign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates dynamic brand and channel advertising and their effects on market expansion and market share in a dual channel supply chain by using differential game theory. Nash equilibrium of the differential game will be obtained by the feedback approach. A sensitivity analysis was performed to assess the impact of key parameters on optimal strategies and to characterize behaviors of both the manufacturer and retailer over time. Comparative statistics show that a higher compatibility of a product with online marketing leads to a higher advertising effort for the online channel by the manufacturer, an enhanced steady state for demand of the brand as well as greater sales in the steady state through the online channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon empirical research, and using a range of methods, this paper examines the behaviour and experiences of consumers in online bookselling settings and offers comparison between online and offline (traditional) bookselling. The research finds that while the convenience of online bookshops is important, the key factors enticing consumers online are a combination of breadth of range, ease of access to obscure titles, as well as 'personalised' recommendations and customer reviews. The research is of value to the book trade, highlighting consumer responses to widely adopted online marketing approaches. The research also contributes to scholarly knowledge in the fields of consumer behaviour, e-marketing and e-commerce in online bookselling, as well as providing findings which can be tested in other online settings, informing future theoretical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Online auction sites have very specific workloads and user behavior characteristics. Previous studies on workload characterization conducted by the authors showed that (1) bidding activity on auctions increases considerably after 90% of an auction’s life time has elapsed, (2) a very large percentage of auctions have a relatively low number of bids and bidders and a very small percentage of auctions have a high number of bids and bidders, (3) prices rise very fast after an auction has lasted more than 90% of its life time. Thus, if bidders are not able to successfully bid at the very last moments of an auction because of site overload, the final price may not be as high as it could be and sellers, and consequently the auction site, may lose revenue. In this paper, we propose server-side caching strategies in which cache placement and replacement policies are based on auction-related parameters such as number of bids placed or percent remaining time till closing time. A main-memory auction cache at the application server can be used to reduce accesses to the back-end database server. Trace-based simulations were used to evaluate these caching strategies in terms of cache hit ratio and cache efficiency. The performance characteristics of the best policies were then evaluated through experiments conducted on a benchmark online auction system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer trust is important in agent-mediated electronic commerce, web-mediated electronic commerce, and traditional commerce. However, the meaning of customer trust in these contexts has not been clearly defined or fully delineated. This paper proposes a new trust model that differentiates between cognitive trust and emotional trust, defines customer trust in each type of commerce as cognitive trust and emotional trust in the various entities (e.g., website, computer agent) that make up a commerce context, and then compares customer trust across the three types of commerce. We propose that, first, emotional trust merits research, particularly in e-commerce. Second, both awareness of the known and awareness of the unknown will be higher in e-commerce than in traditional commerce; this will lead to lower cognitive trust and emotional trust in e-commerce. Third, the key to increase customer trust in e-commerce is to design and develop technologies to reduce the distance between a customer and each entity, thereby increasing awareness of the known and decreasing awareness of the unknown. Fourth, cognitive trust and emotional trust fall along a continuum with potentially asymmetric effects on customer dependence on entities in e-commerce (e.g., computer agent adoption). Finally, future research on customer trust in e-commerce is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even as more organizations are moving towards implementing Web-based B2B procurement solutions, they are unsure of the real benefits of the Web. In other words, what is the value of B2B e-procurement to an organization and how to measure this value? What factors affect this value? In this paper, we discuss an evaluation framework to determine the value of B2B e-procurement and the effect of process characteristics on the value. We use an empirical study to highlight the different value created by different procurement types. We then develop a more comprehensive economic model to capture the additional effects of demand volume and process complexity. The integration of theoretical and empirical approaches provides a strong foundation to develop and evaluate useful adoption strategies for B2B e-procurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]