An awareness-based meta-mechanism for e-commerce buyer coalitions

Abstract

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.

Appendix ‘A’

1.1 Summary of the awareness net modeling language (adopted from Danbeshgar and Wang 2007)

Awareness net is a conceptual process map for collaborative business processes. Its aim is to identify awareness and knowledge sharing requirements of collaborating actors in collaborative processes. It is made of a set of collaborative semantic concepts namely, roles, tasks, role artefacts, and task artefacts and are explained below. An Awareness Net can be represented by a connected graph with at least two role vertices that perform at least one collaborative tasks and zero or more individual tasks. The nodes and links of the connected graph constitute various semantic concepts for the collaborative process. A hypothetical awareness net is shown in the top section of the Fig. 7, and includes four roles, V, X, Y and T. The graph shown on the bottom part of Fig. 1 however is not a representative of an awareness net because there is only one role within the process labeled as ‘Z’.

The collaborative semantic concepts of the awareness net are described below:

• Role = Role is a human actor that perform a set of tasks within the process. An actor may play several roles within the process, but a role is played by one actor at any given time. In Fig. 7, the four roles are shown by filled circles labelled ‘V’, ‘X’, ‘Y’, and ‘T’.

• Task = A sequence of actions or steps performed by a role. Some tasks are performed individually using a role artefact, and some are performed in collaboration with one or more other roles, in which case a task artefact is used/shared/exchanged by the collaborating roles. In Fig. 7, the three tasks corresponding to the role V are shown by plain circles labelled ‘f’, ‘e’ and ‘d’.

• Role Artefact = It is a knowledge asset/artefact that a role uses personally (non-collaboratively) in order to perform one of his/her individual tasks within the process. In Fig. 7, the role artefacts corresponding to the role ‘V’ are {V-f}, {V-e}, and {V, d}.

• Task Artefact = It is an organisational/shared knowledge asset/artefact that two or more roles ‘use/share/produce/act upon’ in order to perform a collaborative task. In Fig. 7, the two task artefacts used by the roles X and V are {{1-d} and {2-d}.

  Fig. 7

  

  An Awareness Net with four collaborating roles

1.2 Awareness levels

Under the Awareness Net modeling language, the human-bound psychological approach of awareness initiated by the interactionist researchers in the field of social psychology, has been extended to a process-bound context of business organizations where individuals perform collaborative tasks in order to achieve certain process goals. Five levels of (process) awareness have been identified by the original author of the Awareness Net and are listed below:

• Level-0 awareness: is the role’s awareness about his/her role within the collaborative process, the relevant role artifacts, and the tasks that s/he performs within the process. In Fig. 7 the level-0 awareness for the role ‘T’ consists of the following set of objects:

  $$ \mathrm{Level}-0\left(\mathrm{T}\right) = \left\{\mathrm{T},\left\{\mathrm{T},\mathrm{c}\right\},\mathrm{c},\left\{\mathrm{T},\mathrm{b},\ \mathrm{b},\left\{\mathrm{T},\mathrm{a}\right\},\ \mathrm{a}\right\}\right. $$

• Level-1 awareness: is about the awareness of the context of the collaborating roles. It is the role’s level 0 awareness, PLUS all the concepts/objects on the process map of Fig. 7 that correspond to the tasks that are performed by other collaborating roles within the process. The Level-1 awareness for the role ‘V’ is:

  $$ \mathrm{Level}-1\left(\mathrm{V}\right) = \left\{\mathrm{Level}-0\left(\mathrm{V}\right),\left\{\mathrm{d},1\right\},1,\left\{1,\mathrm{X}\right\},\mathrm{X},\left\{\mathrm{d},2\right\},2,\left\{2,\mathrm{X}\right\}\right\} $$

• Level-2 awareness: is about having awareness about all the process roles. It extends level 1 by including additional remaining roles within the process.

• Level-3 awareness: extends level 2 by including all the remaining task artifacts that exist within the process.

• Level-4 awareness: extends level 3 by including all remaining concepts within the process; that is, everybody else’s personal tasks, as well as their related role artifacts that have not been known to the role at previous levels of awareness. A role’s level-4 awareness corresponds to his/her full awareness about all the concepts that exist on the process map in Fig. 7 .