Editor’s Introduction 29(4)
Vladimir Zwass
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 29, Number 4, 2025, pp. 497-499.
The Internet has created a potent means of collective action, with all its varieties and all its effects. The power of massive access, coordination of action, aggregation of outputs, and access to decision-making tools (including AI chatbots and agents) all result in the potential for effectiveness of the goal-oriented action of the collectives of various nature. Specialized platforms furnish the appropriate app tools, proprietary data for AI training, uniform adaptability, and exclusive connectivity. The ability to reduce or nullify the impacts of geographic distances, linguistic barriers, and some of the cultural distinctions creates a potential for diversity. This, in turn, may lead to the richness of the decision repertoires, creative scenarios for the implementation, and the quality of the actions. Not all the collective actions are worthy, of course. Our research visits the dark side as well.
A significant positive example of collective action is open collaboration, a co-creation of value by extra-organizational individuals along with the members of an organization (if the latter is desired), can significantly contribute to the performance of a firm—if conducted properly. In the characterization of this broad swath of activities [3], this is one of many and various phenomena of sponsored co-creation. More elaborate open projects are handled by teams, and their performance is stimulated by contests. Since numerous contests have attracted competing underperformers or an aggregation of inappropriate composition, much study has been devoted to prevent such fates. One of the major factors in obtaining favorable result is, quite obviously, the team size.
In the leading paper of this issue, the effects of the team size in open collaboration are investigated by Qianzhou Du, Chenwei Li, Shixuan Fu, Zhaozhao Chang, and Weiguo Fan. The countervailing positive effects of larger team size, such as the availability of broader knowledge, experience, and perhaps diversity, versus the negative impacts of more complex coordination needs are studied here in the specific context of open collaboration. The contexts add an additional variable of time pressure. The openness of the contests brings in the factors of the drag from underperformers or the propellant of star performers. Du et al., apply the lens of utility maximization theory to the empirics conducted within a well-known collaboration platform. They offer important results regarding the curvilinear dependence of team performance on team size, robust with respect to the team diversity and star participation.
It is salient to note that with the advent of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and with its infusion into open collaboration, the optimal size of the teams may be expected to shrink. GAI agents may be treated as team members, bringing a radical diversity of approach to the teamwork [2]. Recent research results point to the largely salutary effects of the human-AI collaboration. In a large crowdsourcing context, incorporating the large language models of GAI as partners to the human solvers has been found to lead to problem solutions of superior quality compared to the purely human collaboration, exhibiting superior strategic viability among other advantages (however, with lower novelty) [1]. Collective action with the participation of the GAI agents is the reality of the very near future and requires intensive research attention.
Wide-ranging research work, published in the International Journal of Electronic Commerce and other leading journals, has investigated the helpfulness of online consumer reviews. However, the traits of the readers of these reviews that would condition their receptivity have not been studied closely. A major regulating trait here is skepticism. Here, Murilo Carrazedo Marques da Costa Filho and José Mauro da Costa Hernandez address the influence of this consumer receptivity. Basing themselves in the attribution theory, the authors show that skeptical consumers (some of them shading into overall suspiciousness of the reviewers’ motives) tend to reject the valence of the reviews. As we all know, such posture may be justified when facing the proliferation of fake reviews of various motivations. However, when the entire review corpus of a product or a company may be rejected, the authors suggest implementing mechanisms enhancing review credibility. Foremost among these is of course the policing of fake reviews, but then there are others as the paper will tell you.
The next paper, by Ruyu Yun and Jie Meng, pursues a similar research question in the context of live-streaming shopping. Streamers promote products; potential customers react by buying or not, influenced also by the social cues from the audience. In a theory-grounded set of experiments, the authors show the overriding power of negative comments, in agreement with the well-established psychological scholarship. The results garnered here go well beyond this fact, offering new knowledge regarding the effects of initial impression, domain knowledge, the attractiveness of the streamer, and other factors. Considering the growing importance of selling via live streaming in e-retail, particularly in some national markets, the results are salient and of importance to theory development.
We know full well the thriving of the dark side of e-commerce. Anonymity, encryption, cryptos, and the organized darknet markets that employ all these contribute to this dubious success. We need to understand its enablers—and sometimes we can learn from them. In the next paper, Federica Ceci, Paolo Spagnoletti, and Andrea Prencipe investigate the gatekeeping on the darknet platforms as a means to ensure their survival as marketplaces. The learnings are shown to apply to the legal market platforms. The researchers identify the IT-based gatekeeping mechanisms that control access to the platforms in the face of both the interventions of legal authorities and the fellow miscreants. The ways the criminal platforms enact the rules of access and delegate them to the IT mechanisms carry lessons for the general platform governance—as well as for the legal authorities.
Auctions are uniquely compatible with the reach and vanishing transaction costs of the Internet, and they proliferate there in their great diversity. Charity auctions, with their special designation on the platforms, are one of the categories. In the concluding paper of the issue, Kuo-Liang Chen, Juan Roeschmann, Crystal Han-Huei Tsai, and Joe Chih-Hao Chang investigate the effectiveness of such auctions, interpreting them as a means of creating a shared value between business and society—or a seller and a bidder. Indeed, the bidders on eBay, whose eBay for Charity is the locus of this research, have contributed over $1 billion since the initiation of the program. The authors’ research aims to establish whether the bidders bid higher in charity auctions, and further do they bid differently in pure charity auctions compared to cause-related auctions where a part of the successful bid is allocated to the cause and another part pays the seller for a product. The results are a contribution to the auction theory—as well as to the fulfillment of our desire to live in a society of inclusive well-being.
References
- Boussioux, L., Lane, J. N., Zhang, M., Jacimovic, V., and Lakhani, K. R. The crowdless future? Generative AI and creative problem-solving. Organization Science, 35, 5, (2024), 1571–1955. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18430
- Dennis, A. R., Lakhiwal, A., and Sachdeva, A. AI agents as team members: Effects on satisfaction, conflict, trustworthiness, and willingness to work with. Journal of Management Information Systems, 40, 2 (2023), 307–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2196773
- Zwass, V. Co-creation: Toward a taxonomy and an integrated research perspective. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 15, 1 (2010), 11–48. https://doi.org/10.2753/JEC1086-4415150101