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To explore an emerging area in internet practice that has implication for consumer marketers.

The paper integrates concepts including a range of recently published (1993‐2004) theoretical works and ongoing case developments in internet practice.

Provides information and action approaches to consumer marketers that may increase the success, providing want‐satisfying market offerings. Outlines the market research benefits of monitoring and participating in internet community forums and offers practical suggestions for maximizing their value in the marketing and marketing research. It also provides a series of tactics that consumer marketers may use to maximize the value of internet community forums for their firms.

The theoretical concepts that form the foundation of the paper appear to have a significant application to consumer marketing, but have not been tested empirically.

Uncovers a previously unrecognized source of direct consumer input and cooperation in the design and valuation of new products and the identification of emerging consumer wants.

This paper describes the nature and application of internet community forums to an important marketing process. It offers the potential of increasing marketing success by clearly and accurately identifying the wants of specific market segments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse dynamics amongst members to better understand in what terms and to what extent marketplace forums can be seen as new forms of harm reduction.

This is a qualitative analysis focused on conversations about psychoactive substances on the forum community of AlphaBay Market. A sample consists of 100 online threads. The data, collected in July 2016, were analysed by applying the grounded theory approach with the support of Atlas.ti.

Conversations in the marketplace forum focus mostly on the purchase. Concerns and disputes are voiced in a significant proportion of them, and interactions are affected by a climate of distrust where stigmatisation processes can emerge between users of different drug categories. This casts a certain amount of doubt on the thesis that marketplace forums – like online forums – are new forms of harm reduction and peer-led communities.

The study focuses on only one marketplace forum. Other such forums should be analysed to corroborate its findings.

Harm reduction interventions in the online environment should take different form according to the forum type, and take the differences and boundaries that separate users of different substances into account.

Thanks to its infrequently used qualitative approach, the study provides a more thorough understanding of the relationships on marketplace forums.

This chapter explores collective information processing among black-hat hackers during their crises events. The chapter presents a preliminary study on one of Tor-based darknet market forums, during the shutdowns of two cryptomarkets. Content and network analysis of forum conversations showed that black-hat users mostly engaged with rational information processing and were adept at reaching collective solutions by sharing security advices, new market information, and alternative routes for economic activities. At the same time, the study also found that anti-social and distrustful interactions were aggravated during the marketplace shutdowns. Communication network analysis showed that not all members were affected by the crisis events, alluding to a fragmented network structure of black-hat markets. The chapter concludes that, while darknet forums may constitute resilient, solution-oriented users, market crises potentially make the community vulnerable by engendering internal distrust.

Despite the growing popularity of internet based social media on e-commerce platforms, systematic examination of the emerging phenomenon is scarce. This paper aims to study whether online retailers ' social activity on e-commerce platforms improves their business performance, and if it does, what are the underlying mechanisms.

The paper proposes a typology of online retailers ' social activities on e-commerce platforms. Then drawing on social capital theory and social network theory, the authors develop hypotheses that relate online retailers ' social activities to their business performance. The hypotheses are tested using a large dataset collected from an e-commerce platform in China.

The paper shows that: online retailers ' social activities for friend-making improve their business performance, regardless of the directional attribute of the activities; social activities for advice-seeking decrease online retailers ' business performance; and social activities for advice-giving increase online retailers ' business performance.

The data in the empirical study are from an e-commerce platform in China, hence the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed hypotheses further.

The paper includes implications for e-commerce market makers and online retailers operating on e-commerce platforms. The authors show that online retailers ' social activities on e-commerce platforms can be an important source of business value. However certain types of social activities may hurt online retailers ' business performance, implying the necessity of a thoughtful social activity strategy in online marketplaces.

This paper represents an early effort to study whether online retailers ' social activities on e-commerce platforms improve their business performance and the underlying mechanisms of the effect.

Recent decade has witnessed exponential growth in e-commerce segment, leading to emergence of various online selling platforms catering to diverse product requirements of customers. Such a development has provided impetus to both existing businesses and newly established ventures to make available their offerings through online selling platforms with a view to improve the reach of their products. This study is an attempt to identify the experience of registered vendors with the online marketplaces. It aims to develop and validate a scale to measure vendor's experience with e-commerce platforms.

As a part of the scale development process, relevant literature sources were scanned to spot the precise knowledge gap and to put in place a sound theoretical background for the study. Thereafter, a scientific approach was adopted for scale creation. First, the scale items were identified through interviews of vendors registered with major online selling platforms and other academic experts pertaining to the marketing domain. Subsequently, major dimensions of seller experience were identified through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) applied on data collected from active vendors by the means of a structured survey instrument. The final data set was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in a bid to validate the scale.

The study’s outcomes reveal that seller experience in an online marketplace can be best captured by a multidimensional scale characterized by six major dimensions. These are “Registration,”; “Product Listing”; “Pricing Autonomy”; “Ease of Pick-up and Delivery”; “Credit of Receivables” and “Vendor Assistance.” A proper emphasis to continually improve upon these dimensions by the e-commerce platforms is expected to enhance the utility and overall experience of vendors from such platforms. Existence of a mutually beneficial relationship between vendors and online marketplaces will help marketplaces to mitigate concerns like nonfulfillment of orders and dispatch of substandard products.

Sustainable long-term relations between vendors and online marketplaces hold the key for such marketplaces to render error-free and delightful service on each individual order received. Seller experience of registering and operating on such e-marketplaces inspite of playing a defining role in vendor–marketplace relations has received scant attention of researchers, both in academia and industry till date. The present research is a seminal attempt to address this gap in marketing literature and offer additional know-how.

Representatives of five prominent library integrated system vendors—M.E.L. Jacob (OCLC), Joe Matthews (Inlex), Mike Monahan (Geac), Gene Robinson (CLSI), and Steve Salmon (Carlyle)—express their views on ethics and the marketplace. The need for ethical behavior by all sectors of the marketplace—librarians, consultants, and vendors—is emphasized and illustrated. Four sidebars are included: one addresses the need for customer data rights standards; others contain the code of ethics/practice issued by three professional organizations for consultants.

After completing the case study, the students will be able to explore, create and capture the dilemmas of a platform strategy; compare, contrast and configure strategies for successful platform adoption; develop fitting configurations for marketplace design; and use temple framework to evaluate the dilemma of the element of time (do it sooner, delay for later or dismiss forever) in launching a new marketplace.

Shoppre was a parcel-forwarding firm established in 2017. In a short period, Shoppre turned out to be one of the best parcel forwarding and cross-border commerce companies in India, thanks to the first-mover advantage it enjoyed. Shoppre had offerings of shopping and shipping of cross-border e-commerce. As a new firm looking forward to increasing its market power, Shoppre faced the dilemma of whether to launch the marketplace, and if yes, whether to do it soon or delay it for the future. There was also confusion in the marketplace’s design and implementation. Nikkitha Shankar’s (she/her) worry was that if Shoppre did not decide quickly on this, there would be possible crises in managing the partners and their financial performance. Shankar was brainstorming the issues with the founding partner and was gauging the dimensions. This case study presented new marketplaces’ dilemmas along with managing sellers, customers, markets, finance, logistics and digital transformation.

The case study is suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level students pursuing courses in business programmes and senior management professionals participating in executive education programmes. The case study will also fit well for courses such as the “Platform strategy: building and thriving in a vibrant ecosystem” course [1], digital business models [2] and digital business strategy [3].

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to advance information systems, research and strategies to manage global human resources. The influx of diversity candidates into the marketplace is driving the wheels of change. With an increase in minorities and international workforce in advanced education and professional positions, employers are choosing to embrace diversity. Those that successfully make this transition will prosper in this new century and beyond. A culturally diverse workforce provides an enriched environment for the development of new ideas, fresh perspectives and innovative methodologies.

The paper discusses the fact that the increasing prevalence of globalization is driven by a number of factors, including shortage of talent in developed countries, availability of low‐cost labor, growing consumers in developing countries, technological progress and worldwide workforce diversity. Human Resources (HR) departments of global companies must assemble global databases that obtain information such as employee's attrition and hiring, compensation and benefits, ethnic, gender, cultural, and nationality distributions. By applying advanced analytical techniques on the global database, HR professionals will get intelligent business insight, predict changes and make informed decisions at operational and strategic levels.

The global supply of talent is short of its long‐term demand, and the gap is a challenge for employers everywhere. The shortage between the demand and supply of talent is likely to continue to increase notably for high skilled workers and for the next generation of business executives.

Only those multinational enterprises willing to adapt their HR practices to the changing global labor market conditions will be able to attract and retain high performing employees. Organizations need to place greater emphasis on attracting human capital in addition to financial capital. Global staffing and management of a workforce diverse in culture and language skills and dispersed in different countries are the key goals of global human resources.

The paper tackles one of the most critical problems of educating multinational enterprises to adapt their HR practices to the changing global labor market conditions. In so doing multinational enterprises will attract, develop and retain high performing employees in order to survive and succeed in the global competition. Management of culturally diverse and geographically dispersed workforce is a key goal of global human resources. It is also critical that businesses not only familiarize with local ways of doing business and understand needs of the local consumers, but also to develop a global mindset, global HR information systems and global HR databases. Global HR will play roles and responsibilities in leading organizations towards openness to cultural diversity.

Collaborative consumption firms leverage networked peers, communicating, collaborating and even delivering services to one another through a central marketplace channel. This raises questions as to the nature of this new form of digital channel strategy and deployment from a firm’s perspective. As a first step, this research seeks to help bridge the gap in knowledge by establishing an understanding of the digital channel usage of collaborative consumption firms.

A qualitative content analysis of 30 collaborative consumption firms was conducted using multiple data sources and coded into typologies against a predetermined coding scheme. These results were then compared against existing literature on digital channel usage in regards to a wider company usage.

This study identifies the digital channel usage and digital channel typology of each of the 30 firms associated within the collaborative consumption domain. The study shows a distinct increase in the use of social and community digital channels between traditional firms and collaborative consumption firms. As a result of this study, a concise definition of a collaborative consumption firm is provided, the digital channel usage of collaborative consumption firms is detailed and insights are provided for each sub-type of collaborative consumption.

This study contributes to the understanding of the collaborative consumption phenomena, the business model of collaborative consumption firms and digital channels. This study assists in describing the shift from traditional firms to peer-to-peer systems. Finally, a theoretical model is provided that demonstrates the nuance of collaborative consumption channel choice within each subcategory for future researchers to test and reflect upon.

This study demonstrates how collaborative consumption firms are allowing customers to drive interaction rather than traditional business-to-customer messages. A theoretical model is provided which shows contemporary marketers how to best dictate a digital channel strategy for a collaborative consumption style initiative.

Contributions include: a definition of what a collaborative consumption firm and its channels pertain to and how to design a collaborative consumption digital channel strategy. This study presents a digital channel comparison between collaborative consumption firms and traditional organisations.

The role of nostalgia in consumers’ lives and its application in the design of marketing strategies has been highlighted in prior research. However, the role of nostalgia as well as the consumers’ nostalgic inclination in the development of new products has not been investigated yet, either for existing products or new ones. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to underline and understand the collaborative process of value co-creation for both actors (companies and consumers) in the development of nostalgic new products.

A double methodology was used through a netnographic study (which is inspired by ethnography) and semi-directed interviews. Concerning the netnographic approach, the data collection were conducted on both general and specialized social networks, web sites and forums. The semi-directed interviews were conducted among 12 individuals. The verbatim were analyzed through a content thematic analysis. The use of both methodologies helped to underline recurrent and complementary findings.

The analysis highlights four main results: first, the main criteria for selection and purchase of products and services; second, the perception and dimensions of nostalgia; third, the link between nostalgia and consumption; and finally, the relationship between nostalgic experiences and the co-creation process.

This research is the first to study the value of the co-creation process for the development of nostalgic new products.