Publication Date:
2014-12-12
Description:
Many of the existing theories in e-Commerce and Buyer Coalition assume that all persons involved adopt self-interested strategies by seeking their own gains using environmental/market information. In reality however, such information may not be complete. Also, each person’s knowledge may differ from others. By adopting a collaborative perspective towards the buyer coalition process, this study introduces and validates an awareness-based mechanism for buyer coalitions that generates various outcomes corresponding to different levels of awareness of the collaborating roles within the process, where ‘awareness’ is defined in terms of the knowledge of the collaboration context of the coalition. The theoretical foundation of the study is an overlapping space of Game Theory (Hassan et al. Information Systems Frontiers 16(4):523–542, 2014 ), e-Commerce (Yang et al. Information Systems Frontiers 16(1):7–18, 2014 ), and Knowledge Management (Daneshgar & Wang Knowledge Based Systems 20(8):736–744, 2007 ). The research methodology is design science using simulation software for demonstration and proof of concept. Results indicate that higher levels of awareness of buyers do not necessarily increase total coalition discount but it enables individual buyers to make more opportunistic and calculated decisions to protect their personal interests.
Print ISSN:
1387-3326
Electronic ISSN:
1572-9419
Topics:
Computer Science
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