The Study of Factors on the Small and Medium Enterprises' Adoption of Mobile Payment: Implications for the COVID-19 Era

A novel multi-attribute decision-making for ranking mobile payment services using online consumer reviews

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed consumer usage behavior towards mobile payment (m-payment) services. Consumer usage behavior towards m-payment services continues to increase due to access to usage experiences shared through online consumer reviews (OCRs). The proliferation of massive OCRs, coupled with quick and effective decisions concerning the evaluation and selection of m-payment services, is a practical issue for research. This paper develops a novel decision evaluation model that integrates OCRs and multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) with probabilistic linguistic information to identify m-payment usage attributes and utilize these attributes to evaluate and rank m-payment services. First and foremost, the attributes of m-payment usage discussed by consumers in OCRs are extracted using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach. These key attributes are used as the evaluation scales in the MADM. Based on an unsupervised sentiment algorithm, the sentiment scores of the text reviews regarding the attributes are calculated. We convert the sentiment scores into probabilistic linguistic elements based on the probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) theory and statistical analysis. Furthermore, we construct a novel technique known as probabilistic linguistic indifference threshold-based attribute ratio analysis (PL-ITARA) to discover the weight importance of the usage attributes. Subsequently, the positive and negative ideal-based PL-ELECTRE I methodology is proposed to evaluate and rank m-payment services. Finally, a case study on selecting appropriate m-payment services in Ghana is examined to authenticate the validity and applicability of our proposed decision evaluation methodology.

When to become an electronic business venture after the COVID-19 pandemic? The role of strategic orientation and perceived environmental turbulence in determining online market entry timing

After the COVID-19 epidemic, a growing number of commercial entities have decided to enter the online platform and operated as an electronic business venture. However, the timing of entering the online market is a strategically important issue. On the basis of social capital theory and resource-based view, this study attempts to understand the different impacts of two strategic orientations (i.e., Guanxi orientation and entrepreneurial orientation) and perceived environmental turbulence (i.e., market turbulence and political turbulence) on online market entry timing. We test four hypotheses using data collected from 174 Chinese companies. Our results confirm that entrepreneurial orientation negatively impacts online market entry timing, and this effect is moderated by perceived market turbulence such that the negative relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and online market entry timing will be strengthened in higher market turbulence. By contrast, Guanxi orientation positively impacts online market entry timing, and the positive relationship between Guanxi orientation and online market entry timing will be weakened in higher political turbulence. Implications and future research directions are discussed.