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The nature of sellers’ cyber credit in C2C e-commerce: the perspective of social capital

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Abstract

With the fast evolution of e-commerce, it is getting harder for traditional credit management systems to service online businesses with diversified needs in dynamic scenarios. This paper studies the nature of cyber credit from the perspective of social capital. We propose the credit assessment model using social capital variables extracted from the reputation system of an e-commerce platform and the associated online social network. In addition, we consider the dynamic and diversified effects of online reputation on sellers’ cyber credit, and we verify the rationality of the credit assessment model through analyzing the relationship between cyber credit and social network variables. We take Alibaba C2C e-commerce market as our experimental study platform and use the social networking information from Sina’s microblogging services. We find that social capital variables can be used to effectively measure the cyber credit of online sellers in C2C businesses.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by 2012 Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (91218301), and 2015 Summer Research Grant of the Rawls College, Texas Tech University. The authors thank for the involvement of Siming Li and Zhiyi Wang in initial data collection and processing, and Shixi Liu, Rui Duan, Yao Liu and Xiaozhong Lv in reference summarizations, case studies, and discussions.

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Correspondence to Zhangxi Lin.

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Liang, K., Jiang, C., Lin, Z. et al. The nature of sellers’ cyber credit in C2C e-commerce: the perspective of social capital. Electron Commer Res 17, 133–147 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-016-9231-x

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