Demand effects of product similarity network in e-commerce platform

Hong Jun Huang (), Jun Yang () and Benrong Zheng ()
Additional contact information
Hong Jun Huang: Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Jun Yang: Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Benrong Zheng: Huazhong Agriculture University

Electronic Commerce Research, 2021, vol. 21, issue 2, No 3, 297-327

Abstract: Abstract With the increasing popularity of product assortments by recommender system, it becomes increasingly important for online platform and sellers to investigate their economic impact and manage the links of products. Different from the previous product network, this study constructs and investigates the role of similarity product network from similar products’ recommender system by using data from Taobao.com. The characters of similarity product network exhibits influence on product demand. Mining of similar product’s link reveals that the more a product is being linked, the greater of the demand, the impact of product’s degree is different from type of products. In addition, the results show that the centralization of network has a negative impact on focal product’s demand. This study also examines the spillover effect of similar products’ reviews (UGC) as well as similar products’ description (MGC), especially focuses on the semantic similarity. The results reveal that the semantic similarity of recommended product’s reviews and products’ description have negative spillover effect on demand. The more similar of recommended product’s reviews and the product’s description, the stronger the effect. Specifically, similarity of MGC exhibits a stronger impact than that of UGC on focal product’s demand for search goods than for experience goods. The findings provide insights to marketing practitioners by helping understand the effects of similarity and link of product on the consumer’s decision.

Keywords: Product similarity network; Semantic similarity; User generated content; Market generated content; Spillover effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10660-019-09352-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:elcore:v:21:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s10660-019-09352-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10660

DOI: 10.1007/s10660-019-09352-9

Access Statistics for this article

Electronic Commerce Research is currently edited by James Westland

More articles in Electronic Commerce Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().