A new evolution model for B2C e-commerce market
- PDF / 948,620 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 99 Downloads / 218 Views
A new evolution model for B2C e-commerce market Zhihong Tian • Zhenji Zhang • Xiaolan Guan
Published online: 18 April 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract In order to explain the formation of the business to customer e-commerce market structure, we introduce two concepts—market trading volume and user penetration into the analytical framework for e-commerce market. Based on the modification of Barabasi–Albert (BA) model, a new model which is added with fitness parameters and more reasonable growth mechanism is proposed. The model reveals a ‘‘bubble-stable’’ evolutionary process which is correspondent with real e-commerce market from an initial network to a scale-free one. The simulation results show that the number of websites a buyer chooses could affect the evolutionary process of user penetration distribution, but almost not affect the stable trend of the market. In addition, the initial network scale almost does not affect the nature of network, but causes market fluctuation. The model also reveals that unfair competition among websites is the reason for the formation of structure. Hence, a new method which is calculating numbers of overlap users between each pair of websites is developed to measure the competitive strength. Then, three distinct components are found in the competitive network: a small nucleus, a secondary core and a huge bulk body. Keywords e-commerce Market share Scale-free network Evolution model Network science
Z. Tian (&) Z. Zhang Beijing Jiaotong University, No. 3 Shang Yuan Cun, Hai Dian, Beijing 100044, China e-mail: [email protected] X. Guan Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication, Beijing, China
1 Introduction With the popularity of the Internet, more and more enterprises and individuals are involved in e-commerce. Large numbers of buyers and sellers interact with each other through transactions on websites. These interactions promote the evolution and shape complex structures of e-commerce market. From 1997 to present, Chinese e-commerce has experienced three waves: in the first wave (1997–2003), e-commerce market experienced learning, growth and bubble phase; in the second wave (2003–2009), e-commerce market experienced restoration, popularization and crisis phase; in the third wave (from 2009 to now), applications of e-commerce have achieved lots of substantial progresses, and e-commerce is playing a very important role in national economy. Hence, going deeply insight into research of phenomenon, nature, structure and evolution mechanism of e-commerce market has a profound and lasting significance. Some particular characteristics of markets on web have been studied. While in traditional economics transaction, costs and geography conspire to segment the markets, so that they cater to a local consumer base. However, the global reach of the web could lead to different market share characteristics on the provider side. The web offers providers access to global markets without having to incur large entry costs or having to keep sizable inventori
Data Loading...
