Editor’s Introduction 30(1)
Vladimir Zwass
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 30, Number 1, 2026, pp. 1-2.
This issue of the International Journal of Electronic Commerce (IJEC) opens its fourth decade as the first and leading scholarly journal in the field. From the outset, the journal’s mission has been to lead the research field in a multidisciplinary study of the broad domain of e-commerce, including the business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and intraorganizational activities conducted over networks. I believe this mission has been executed successfully as our authors have been contributing impactful research to this burgeoning and evolving field.
The two papers opening the issue present the work studying crowdsourcing. The Internet has provided the capability to billions of people to have their contributions to value creation aggregated selectively. This capability is, of course, not the outcome. The “crowd” phenomena require incentives, organization, guidance, shared goals, and—above all—the participation of the right people (with AI agents looming in the future). There are several generic forms of these pursuits. The nodal aspects of two of them, innovation crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, are studied in the works you will read presently.
Expanding the always limited resources of the organizational knowledge with the knowledge of external contributors, a virtually unlimited pool of solvers, expands the capability for innovation, yet requires the skills needed to organize the seeking of innovative solutions. The common way of this organizing is the running of solution contests, either on the firm’s internal platform or on the one of numerous third-party crowdsourcing platforms. The existing research has shown that the large volume of submitted solutions underpins the success of the contest, defined as finding an innovative and practicable solution to the problem stated by the seeking firm. What happens to the submission volume if well-known solvers, i.e., top contestants, enter the contest early? What role may be played by the feedback of the seeker company during the contest? Here, Mengmeng Wang, Chun Zhang, and Bo Wang study the issue empirically with the data from a large platform. They find, as may be expected, the crowding-out effect of the early entry of top contestants. However, they also show that the seekers feedback during the contest can successfully
attenuate this effect and increase the number of submissions. Aside from being a pragmatic contribution to the contest organization, the work contributes to signaling theory.
An analogous issue is studied in the next paper in the context of charitable crowdfunding. A more limited pursuit than the innovation crowdsourcing, it may be of great societal impact, particularly in the cases of emergency actions. Parallel to the top-contributor distinctions, here the platforms assign to the top donors hierarchical virtual badges. Their role is studied empirically and in the context of signaling theory by Xiaobing Wu, Tianshi Wu, Xitong Guo, and Hongze Yang. The disclosure of the badges increases the performance of the fundraising drive; the disclosure of their average level in the campaign has more
nuanced effects. As does the preceding work, this paper contributes to our understanding of the role of signaling and can help in the difficult task of charitable fundraising.
User privacy and consequential security have been in the forefront of e-commerce concerns. The design of the systems’ front end, where the interaction with the users takes place, is fraught with the opportunities to invade this privacy. In the next paper, Naama Ilany-Tzur and Lior Fink demonstrate empirically how the foot-in-the-door strategy of inducing a system’s user to progressively disclose personal information during the sign-up can lead to deleterious effects. The authors develop their
work guided both by normative and descriptive privacy theories, and conduct field experiments in the context of two different settings. The robust results are certainly of the moment.
Large selling platforms offer an opportunity to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to acquire access to large numbers of users (competing, of course, with large numbers of other SMEs). As is often the case, these companies may require credit to operate, and many platforms provide such facilities. Competition ensues for platform access, platform’s SME customers, and loan terms. In this setting, Jun Liu, Tong Li, Long Ren, and Meryem Duygun use a game-theoretic model to surface the alternatives. The authors compare the market outcomes for both sides in the case of a monopolistic platform with that of several competing platforms. Rather surprisingly, the monopoly platform offers the best market outcomes to SMEs (as well as, obviously, to the platform). The authors also show the advantages and drawbacks in the case of the competing platforms. With further tests for robustness under various heterogeneous SME characteristics, the researchers present a comprehensive study of the trade-offs among the platform-SME
configurations.
The recent emergence of the hyperlocal, community-based selling platforms has brought out a set of specific customer and seller behaviors, and is the subject of the study by Jung-hyun Hong, Hangjung Zo, and Hyeon Jo, appearing as the concluding paper of the issue. The authors ground their empirics in a large hyperlocal marketplace. The local activity of the sellers, such as philanthropy and giveaways, comes to the fore, as does buyer engagement, such as reviews and recommendations. Trustbuilding is identified as crucial to the market success. It is to be noted that, reciprocally, successful hyperlocal e-commerce can strengthen community ties and promote societal well-being.