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The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ownership and location strategies as contingency factors, which affect the relationship between SMEs’ open innovation activities and innovation performance in the context of emerging economies. Drawing from the corporate strategy and open innovation literature, we argued that SMEs with state and foreign ownership can more effectively capture economic rents from open innovation in a weak intellectual-property-rights regime. Meanwhile, the subnational environments in which SMEs locate their businesses is also crucial for them to capture value from open innovation. Using the data of 1050 SMEs in China, we found that state ownership positively and significantly moderates the relationship between openness and innovative performance, while foreign ownership partially supports the same effect. By disentangling the pro-business environment and the market development, we found that for SMEs that are located in a region with a stronger pro-business environment and a higher level of market development, open innovation can bring more value than it does for those located in regions with lower levels of those factors. Overall, this paper also contributes to our understanding of the complementary relationships between ownership and location strategies and open innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the deepening of electricity market reform in China, the competition in the electricity retail market becomes increasingly intense. Electricity retailers (ERs) need to explore new business models to enhance their competitiveness in the retail market. Meanwhile, with the improvement of industrial production and people's living standards, more and more nonlinear electrical equipment have been put into use, leading to severe harmonic pollution problems. Harmonic pollution causes loss of electricity, resulting in the economic loss of customers, especially for large industrial customers. In the above contexts, this paper proposes a novel business model that incorporates harmonic control as a value-added service into electricity retail contracts for utility-owned ERs. Both utility-owned ERs and customers can benefit from the designed business model. For customers, it helps them to improve the power quality while saving the electricity cost. For ERs, it helps them to cultivate the customer loyalty and improve the customer satisfaction. A case study is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed business model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsourced live video broadcasting services, such as Twitch and YouTube Live, are becoming increasingly popular. In such a service, viewers are allowed to perform rich interactions, such as posting comments and donating monetary virtual gifts, while watching videos. Understanding viewer interactions is essential for people to comprehend the production and consumption of the crowdsourced live video content and improve the service. However, the basic characteristics of the viewer interactions are still unknown. In this paper, we present a comprehensive measurement study of the viewer interactions on Douyu, a popular crowdsourced live video broadcasting website in China. Our measurement spans four months and contains comment posting and virtual gift donating interactions from tens of millions of viewers in hundreds of thousands of channels. Based on the measurement data, we carry out a content analysis on danmu comments and characterize the patterns of the viewer interactions. We build a suite of models for capturing the gift donating process, viewer activity, and channel popularity. We further analyze the influences of the broadcaster’s behavioral factors on a channel’s popularity and present methodologies for popularity predicting. Our measurement and analysis have important implications on the design and business policy of the crowdsourced live video broadcasting services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops and tests a primary conceptual model of the direct effects of business environment on supply chain integration (SCI) and an alternative moderation model to better understand the role of the environment in developing integration and financial performance improvement. Structural equation modeling and moderated regression are used to analyze the survey data collected from manufacturing firms in China. The results reveal significant positive relationships between environmental dynamism and all three dimensions of SCI, and between environmental hostility and internal integration. The results also indicate that internal integration fully mediates the relationships between environmental hostility and both customer and supplier integration. Supplier integration is significantly and positively associated with financial performance, whereas internal and customer integration are not significantly associated with performance. Importantly, through the test of an alternative model, environmental hostility and environmental dynamism are shown to affect SCI directly, rather than moderating the SCI-performance relationship. This article provides useful guidelines for managers to develop integrated supply chains to improve the financial performance under dynamic and hostile environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of Internet users in China was more than 590 million at the end of June 2013. Among these users, 460 million accessed the Web through mobile devices such as cellphones and tablets. Many Chinese are now using cellphones to perform a wide range of transactions, such as transferring money, paying bills, booking hotels, buying tickets, and shopping in online stores such as Taobao, Paipai, Dangdang, and Yoybuy. An investigation of the development of mobile banking and mobile payments in China, as well as opportunities and barriers, is therefore important. This article is part of a special issue on mobile commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is based on an analysis of a management communication training program used by one large US international hotel company to train newly promoted supervisors and managers in Hong Kong and mainland China. The key communication competencies emphasized in the training materials were listening effectively, giving and receiving feedback, using verbal language correctly, using effective nonverbal communication, and displaying empathy. Implications of this study indicate that planning and executing any communication training program must be done mindfully, which includes comprehensive follow-up through reassessment and coaching by the upper managers in order to support employees' transfer of training. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]