جمع آوری در حال حاضر؛ مصرف بعد در محصولات نوآورانه در تجارت الکترونیک

In our paper, we develop the idea that in the future electronic commerce will increasingly involve customers whose lack of time for consumption forces them to collect the products they purchase for later consumption. The peculiarity of these conditions at the point of sale will be discussed in detail from the perspective of economic theory. The analysis will elaborate how certain characteristics of utility functions as well as other characteristics of this consumer segment contribute to these peculiarities. As a result some lessons for the timing of innovations in the supply of information commodoities are derived. In particular, it is shown why it might be profitable for suppliers in electronic commerce to produce waves of technological fashions. From a theoretical point of view, it seems to be reasonable to use chaotic dynamics to describe this highly volatile market behavior.

Consumer behavior and its implications for the supply side have been studied extensively though from rather diverse perspectives in several sub-disciplines of economic theory. Standard microeconomics lays its emphasis on the investigation of the logical implications of certain axiomatic assumptions on given preference orders. Though some of these implications have been tested by experimental economists—with varying results—the thrust of theory building in this area remains in the realm of abstract theorems of decision logic (see e.g. Ref. [3]). More applied economic theory of consumer behavior tended to differentiate between the different approaches that have been taken to study it (see e.g. Ref. [1]). In particular, a motivation approach, a single-concept approach, a grand theory approach, an information-processing approach, an affective approach and an experiential approach are distinguished and discussed by different scholars in the field. What is especially important in applied economic theory is that the demand side behavior of consumers is seen as part of an interdependent system which involves supply side actions and the development of macro-variables that feed back into micro-decisions too. Nevertheless applied economic theory—at least in its academic reputation—still suffers from the missing of some more unifying concepts that some researchers feel to be necessary to structure the existing set of aspects. Finally research rooted in managerial economics has contributed to the study of consumer behavior. From the point of view of a single firm consumer behavior is of utmost importance for its marketing strategy (see e.g. Ref. [2]). Two ideas figure prominent in this literature. First, some products seem to follow a so-called product cycle, i.e. demand for these products emerges, grows and finally vanishes again. Second, demand can be influenced massively by the use of information policy, i.e. consumers use mental models to determine their product choices—and these models are open to manipulation. Managerial economics has also produced a more algorithmic view to describe consumer behavior as a sequence of actions, the so-called stages of consumer buying behavior: need identification, product brokering, merchant brokering, negotiation, purchase and delivery, product service and evaluation. This sequence is particularly useful to identify the place of a certain theoretical contribution in this sequence. Given this largely diverse strands of theories of consumer behavior, what follows focusses on a special part of consumer–supplier interaction, a part that seems to be of particular interest for electronic commerce—and uses bits and pieces of the mentioned schools, wherever it seems to be appropriate. In this eclectic way, the next section uses microeconomic techniques to formulate something analogous to a product cycle, while the succeeding chapter lays emphasis on expectation formation to introduce demand–supply interaction. Finally some empirical evidence for the relevance of our model will be given. As will be noted, our model in principle covers all stages of consumer buying behavior though it does not go into the details of brokering and negotiation. In this respect, our particular interest is the challenge to cope with a special type of needs and the reaction this type induces on the supply side.

For the analysis of electronic commerce, the lessons from our approach appear to be threefold. First, the standard model of microeconomic theory as well as the standard marketing model seem to miss an essential part of what is going on in this field. It needs a new approach, and what we propose is our best guess. Second, for an ever larger part of effective demand in industrialized countries the needs directly related to the physical metabolism become less and less important. Economic psychology, sophisticated expectation models and the like become more and more relevant. Discovering these mechanisms is vital for any successful EC-strategy of a supplier. Note also that the growing mass of households whose demand is not effective demand, i.e. they do not have money or just money in rapidly devaluating currencies, easily can transform the economic problems of EC into political problems—a broader approach, say ‘electronic political economy’ (EPE), might thus be wise. Third, the behavior of the mechanisms we study is highly volatile, and we regard this to be an adequate feature for the description of EC-markets. It results in waves of hypes and breakdowns—in the markets themselves as well as in the stock prices of the concerned firms. From a theoretical point of view the use of chaotic dynamics seems to be adequate to describe this highly volatile market behavior.