E-Commerce Application and Achievement of Competitive Advantage

The Effect of the Implementation of E-Service Quality on Customer Satisfaction During the COVID-19 Pandemic at PT. Shopee Internasional Indonesia

Conventional wisdom and current research suggest that the Internet will lower electronic commerce (EC) product prices by causing intense competition among vendors. However, this does not seem to be happening. This research presents a multi-industry investigation of pricing behavior using a customized data-collecting Internet agent that we call the Time Series Agent Retriever (TSAR). We use theories of information asymmetry and Stackelberg pricing to show how Internet technology increases the ability of firms to tacitly collude to keep prices higher than expected in the presence of intense competition. Our results are developed using an econometric technique called vector autoregression (VAR). They show that Internet technology creates the potential to lower information asymmetry among Internet-based sellers. Thus, it allows rapid reaction between competitors, thereby allowing firms to avoid the intense competition predicted by current theory. We find that fast competitor reaction to the price promotions of a firm minimizes any profit derived from increased market share that the firm hopes to achieve from the lower price. This short reaction time allows Stackelberg pricing, in contrast with Bertrand-Nash pricing, which is often discussed in research on pricing in Internet-based selling. _____________________________________________________________________________________

The development of modern information-communication technologies has enabled the development of electronic knowledge distribution channels that expand the effective level of general and specialist education. This trend is also present in higher education because higher education institutions and institutes increasingly rely on the use of modern information-communication technologies in their operations. The effects of the use of personal computers, the Internet and global social networks are multiple in the higher education system as well. In the process of acquiring new knowledge, developing creativity, as well as ensuring greater activity in the process of education, new learning technologies, with the use of multimedia systems, created the prerequisites for the engagement of all individual and collective resources. The most important source of the state’s competitive advantage is the ability to educate and retain highly educated personnel in the field of information technologies. From that aspect, the paper discusses information technologies as a scientific discipline and general conditions for education in the field of information technologies. The impact of technical and pedagogical changes on education in this area is analyzed with particular attention. It is known that information technologies are suitable for vocational education, and the modern environment sets specific requirements regarding the applicability of knowledge acquired in higher education institutions. The dynamic and turbulent market emphasizes the applicability of knowledge as a key requirement in the educational process. These short researches propose new educational modules that should structure teaching in the field of information technologies in accordance with the global demand in this sector. Every society strives for a more efficient and economical system of education, and therefore the issue of the use of new information technologies in education comes down to the problem of creating a theoretically ideal model of the use of these technologies at all levels of education and work.

The aim of this study is to explore the impact of intellectual capital on the achievement of competitive advantage in organizations. It also aims to explore the mediating impact of innovation on the relationship between intellectual capital and the achievement of competitive advantage. To meet the study’s goals, the researchers reviewed the relevant literature. The researchers also provide definitions for intellectual capital and innovation. They also identified the dimensions of intellectual capital (i.e. structural, human and relational capital). The study identified the types of innovation (incremental and radical innovation) and found that intellectual capital significantly influences on the achievement of competitive advantage. Moreover, the study found that innovation has a mediating influence on the relationship between intellectual capital and the achievement of a competitive advantage.

In a globalized economy, innovation is a priority of ensuring the competitive advantage and organizational performance of agile companies, competitiveness being the core of the development in any economic activity. Consequently, the purpose of this research is to provide an overview regarding the connections between four main constructs, respectively innovation management, competitive advantage, agility and organizational performance, through performing a bibliometric analysis by using the VOSviewer visualization tool. The information has been selected from the Web of Science Core Collection database (WoS) during February 2023. This preliminary study aims to grant relevance to the potential research areas prone to be exploited when discussing the matter of innovation management in relation to organizational performance, competitive advantage achievement and agility. The main premise is that every company has its particularities and acts accordingly to stay competitive through innovating its business model and through an articulate innovation management, also encompassing agility, with a view to reach organizational performance and strong competitive advantage. In terms of findings, the bibliometric analysis conducted confirms the existence of compelling relationships between constructs, thus supporting further scrutiny in this direction.

S: The first step to reach the E-commerce is to understand the environments in which trading would take place. Business Intelligence is an activity of gathering information about the environmental elements that interact with the company. E-commerce failure to achieve planned goals, because the understanding of the environmental conditions of trade faced by the company is not in accordance with E-commerce applications are implemented. This is due to the information collected can not provide a clear picture of environmental conditions. This study aims to describe the fields of information and categories that can be used as a starting point to describe the environmental conditions that affect the company globally. Global Business Intelligence System is used as a general framework, which can be developed according to specific company needs and objectives. In general, the system consists of six fields of information and 31 categories. The process of collecting information in this system using a Modus Scanning that has the characteristics of active and focused on the desired categories. Each information field with the categories that have described the different influences, both as a driving force, the power resistor, and by providing pressure to the company's business. Differences influence of environmental conditions provides an explanation of the level of preparedness organizations in the application of E-commerce, as a business strategy to gain competitive advantage.

To resolve network congestion and other problems in electronic commerce (e-commerce) applications, such as digital content distribution in e-commerce, the e-commerce applications distributed systems based on the traditional paradigm are nowadays replaced by peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. Peer to peer technology has a lot of advantages for e-commerce applications especially in digital content distribution field. For commerce applications, the security and P2P rights management become more and more urgent. New schemas and solutions for P2P e-commerce applications' security and right management, which are expected to function automatically or semi-automatically, should be proposed. In this paper, a secure digital content distribution scheme is presented, which can trace illegal distributors in Peer to Peer e-commerce applications. In this scheme, the encrypted content is decrypted into different copy under the control of a fingerprint and encryption key at the peer side. Thus, each decrypted media copy contains unique information that identifies the peer. For the decryption operation and fingerprint embedding operation are combined together, which avoids the leakage of clear media content. Additionally, these operations are implemented by the peer, which makes the scheme compliant with existing Peer to Peer Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems and very proper for P2P digital content distribution e-commerce applications, performance evaluation is also included.

With the development of new sequencing techniques, whole genomes of many species have become available. This huge amount of data gives rise to new opportunities and challenges. These new sequences provide valuable information on relationships among species, e.g. genome recombination and conservation. One of the principal ways to investigate such information is multiple sequence alignment (MSA). Currently, there is large amount of MSA data on the internet, such as the UCSC genome database, but how to effectively use this information to solve classical and new problems is still an area lacking of exploration. In this thesis, we explored how to use this information in four problems, i.e. sequence orthology search problem, multiple alignment improvement problem, short read mapping problem, and genome rearrangement inference problem. For the first problem, we developed a EM algorithm to iteratively align a query with a multiple alignment database with the information from a phylogeny relating the query species and the species in the multiple alignment. We also infer the query's location in the phylogeny. We showed that by doing alignment and phylogeny inference together, we can improve the accuracies for both problems. For the second problem, we developed an optimization algorithm to iteratively refine the multiple alignment quality. Experiment results showed our algorithm is very stable in term of resulting alignments. The results showed that our method is more accurate than existing methods, i.e. Mafft, Clustal-O, and Mavid, on test data from three sets of species from the UCSC genome database. For the third problem, we developed a model, PhyMap, to align a read to a multiple alignment allowing mismatches and indels. PhyMap computes local alignments of a query sequence against a fixed multiple-genome alignment of closely related species. PhyMap uses a known phylogenetic tree on the species in the multiple alignment to improve the quality of its computed alignments while also estimating the placement of the query on this tree. Both theoretical computation and experiment results show that our model can differentiate between orthologous and paralogous alignments better than other popular short read mapping tools (BWA, BOWTIE and BLAST). For the fourth problem, we gave a simple genome recombination model which can express insertions, deletions, inversions, translocations and inverted translocations on aligned genome segments. We also developed an MCMC algorithm to infer the order of the query segments. We proved that using any Euclidian metrics to measure distance between two sequence orders in the tree optimization goal function will lead to a degenerated solution where the inferred order will be the order of one of the leaf nodes. We also gave a graph-based formulation of the problem which can represent the probability distribution of the order of the query sequences.

Due to the increasing number of internet users worldwide and the development of e-commerce contracts, the idea of e-consumer protection has become more necessary and has got more attention at the international level. This research aims to examine the justifications of consumer protection in electronic commerce. The importance of this research appears in shadow of enacting the Iraqi Consumer Protection Law No. 1 of 2010, where it did not include any legal provisions for the protection of transactions conducted by through the Internet. We found that the justifications for consumer protection in e-commerce are legal and technical justifications. The most important legal justifications is the legal status of the consumer in relation to the profession, the latter is the strongest economically and cognitively, unlike the consumer who is in a weak position, which makes the relationship between the parties not balanced while, the most important technical justifications is the development in the field of information and communications technology, in addition to the issue of consumer confidence in e-commerce as one of the issues that can limit the size and development of e-commerce.

Blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative innovation in various sectors, including e-commerce. Effective blockchain governance plays a pivotal role in enhancing user satisfaction by ensuring security, transparency, and efficiency in online transactions. However, despite its growing adoption, many e-commerce platforms face challenges in implementing governance models that fully address user expectations and technological complexities, revealing a significant gap in the literature. This study investigates the impact of blockchain governance models on e-commerce user satisfaction, with a specific focus on mediating variables such as data privacy and system trust, and moderating variables such as user technology readiness. The study employs the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method using SmartPLS software to analyze relationships between variables. Data was collected through a survey of 135 respondents, consisting of e-commerce users familiar with blockchain technology. The Result reveals that blockchain governance significantly impacts data privacy and system trust, which, in turn, influence perceived ease of use and user satisfaction. Additionally, user technology readiness moderates the relationship between blockchain governance and perceived ease of use, highlighting its importance in adoption. The Novelty of this study lies in its integration of governance frameworks with mediating and moderating variables to holisticallyaddress e-commerce user satisfaction, an area underexplored in prior research. The conclusion emphasizes the need for e-commerce platforms to adopt robust blockchain governance frameworks to improve user satisfaction and gain a competitive advantage. This study contributes to the literature on blockchain applications in e-commerce and provides practical recommendations for enhancing governance and user experience.

Inter-organisational relations are viewed as sources of essential information, resources, and capabilities, improving the innovativeness and performance of small ventures. There is however a lack of research investigating inter-organisational cooperation among new ventures and its effect on firm competitiveness. This study investigates how new ventures achieve competitive advantages through network relations. The results, targeting a sample of 171 Swedish start-ups, highlight the significance of strong ties for new ventures' competitive advantages, especially among complex new ventures: the less familiar methods and the more task variety a new venture has, the stronger the link is between tie strength and achieved competitiveness.

Today, the understanding and the respect of electronic commerce law on the Internet is a need for corporations. A need that must be taken into account from the electronic commerce site design and organization in order to respect the law and to insure the security of transaction as the quality of customer relationship.

Climate-related concerns have drastically made companies realize the need for better environmental regulations and consolidate them in corporate business strategies such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR improves firm performance by valuing the stakeholders' interests and substantially achieving a competitive advantage over competitors. Recognising a firm's competitive advantage in the market indicates performance and might help the company perform better. The objective of this research is to provide concrete proof related to how CSR affects competitive advantage and its effects on company performance, especially financial performance in SMEs in Bali Province. This study uses primary data in the form of questionnaires distributed to SMEs both directly and online. The sample of this research is the manager / owner of SMEs in Bali Province. Data analysis tools using SmartPLS 4.0. The study's findings indicate that CSR has a direct impact on financial performance (SMEs) and CSR indirectly affects the financial performance (SMEs) through competitive advantage. Competitive advantage was found to partially mediate the impact of CSR and financial performance (SMEs). These findings will be used by SME managers in Bali Province in order to enhance the company's financial performance by considering the use of CSR strategies and strengthening competitive advantage. Implementing CSR can help a company become more competitive and separate itself from competitors by providing an innovative product or service. Finally, corporate social responsibility (CSR) can give a company a competitive advantage by strengthening its marketing abilities, which leads to improved performance.

In recent years, with the development of information technology and the transformation of China's online economy, a large number of e-commerce platforms have emerged rapidly. Xiaohongshu, a community + e-commerce platform that allows young internet users to share and exchange information as well as make purchases, was launched. Relying on a differentiated competitive strategy, the platform has managed to accumulate a large amount of user traffic in a short period. This paper uses Xiaohongshu as a case study to analyze the differentiated competitive strategy of this UGC+ e-commerce platform. Through a comprehensive survey, summary, and induction, this paper provides a fine analysis of Xiaohongshu's differentiated competition and current competitive advantages in China and makes reasonable recommendations. Through the study, it was found that Xiaohongshu is deeply engaged in the UGC shopping sharing community, continuously integrating content community and e-commerce modules, strong word-of-mouth marketing, and unique product positioning to pave the way for its sustainable competition in the later stage. In addition, for this paper also the platform made two recommendations to enhance its competitive advantage in the future: continuously maintain the platform's innovation capability; develop a de-feminization strategy.

Organizational learning is important in today’s dynamic and discontinuous environment of change.This study attempts to test the theoretical underpinning that organizational learning is related to competitive advantage. Through personal interviews and mailed surveys, 94 responses from employees of the petroleum industry were used in the regression analysis. Empirical findings show that theoretically assumed dimensions of the learning organization and organizational learning contribute significantly towards the achievement of competitive advantage. Multiple regression analysis showed the existence of significant relationships between seven independent variables and the dependent variable of competitive advantage. Strategic thinking and team learning explained 59.2% and 22.3% of variance respectively in achieving a competitive advantage. A discussion of the results along with implications and recommendations are provided.