Digitalization began to find a place in every industry faster than expected with COVID-19. Although terms such as Blockchain, NFT, Web 3.0, and Metaverse, which entered our lives with digitalization, are still very new, they will create a paradigm shift from standard business models. Blockchain technologies, especially NFTs, are creating a new opportunity for brands and creative industries as the frontrunner of digitalization with the innovative approach that is driven by scarcity, a new medium to connect with fans, and decentralized distribution power. This paper aims examine the effects of perceived value -with its predecessors scarcity, ownership & uniqueness- and trust in blockchain on the purchase intention of NFTs, considering the technology adoption. In this regard, data was collected via questionnaire from NFT owners with different nations in Discord channels using convenience sampling technique. SEM was performed as statistical analysis, and the results indicated technology adoption is a significant variable on trust in blockchain, which has a direct effect on purchase intention. On the hand, even though scarcity and ownership were positively associated with perceived value, this construct had no statistically significant effect on purchase intention.
Although the cryptocurrency market has grown significantly in recent years, few studies have been done on socio-demographic features and not influencing the degree of consumer knowledge about cryptocurrencies. Based on a survey submitted to 774 subjects representative of the Italian population, we find that 89% of Italians know cryptocurrencies and 39% of them have a good or thorough knowledge. The aptitude for knowledge and use of cryptocurrencies is greater for male and well-educated subjects and also increases as the propensity to invest in cryptocurrencies increases. 41% invest or want to invest in cryptocurrencies and the investment is particularly attractive for those who mainly aim at portfolio diversification and obtaining high returns. The findings have important implications for regulators and supervisors who are interested in understanding the social relevance of the phenomenon.
The blockchain ecosystem has undergone three distinct periods of exponential growth â the ICO boom of 2017, the Defi summer of 2020, and most recently the NFT wave of 2021.However, it was not yet seen a âweb3-nativeâ approach towards NFTs from any major brand. By that, we mean that no brand has upended its Web 2.0 architecture and replaced it entirely with a web3 stack. Instead, brands have taken a more measured approach, exploring NFT drops, integrations, and community growth developed separately from their core offerings. This phase can be described as Web 2.5. In this article, the author attempts to define what Web 2.5 is concerning informatology, along with identifying the potential future challenges of information management in this area and the new iteration of digital development, namely Web 3.0 or web3.
Aim . The presented study aims to assess the impact of modern development trends on the sharing economy. Tasks. The authors analyze the development of the sharing economy across different periods; formulate and test hypotheses about the impact of technological and social trends on the development of the sharing economy; substantiate the division of the examined period into four stages; describe the revealed patterns using single factor regression models. Methods. The study includes four stages: data selection and processing, trend elimination and division of the analyzed stage into periods, verification of the formulated hypotheses for each of the periods, and quality control of the obtained models. The information basis of the study includes a list of thematic indexes calculated by the Indxx agency (USA). Results. During the identification of periods of development of the sharing economy, the influence of global events on the dynamics of the sharing economy is determined, which is confirmed by the dynamics of the values of the sharing economy index during the pandemic and postpandemic period. Testing of the hypothesis shows that the most significant factor for the development of the sharing economy is the development of fintech and decentralized finance. That said, in the period from October 2018 to December 2019, there is a correlation between the development of the sharing economy and companies whose activity is focused on generation Y. Conclusions. The revealed patterns confirm the leading role of digital technologies in the development of the sharing economy.
Iikka Paajala, Jesse NyyssÜlä, Juho Mattila, Pasi Karppinen
The blockchain is an emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize the gaming industry among a wide range of different business fields. So far, only a few studies have been conducted about blockchain gaming. This study introduces a mobile game utilizing blockchain asset tokens and smart contracts. It was developed for research purposes and used to demonstrate blockchain-based games using semi-structured interviews. This study follows the exploratory research paradigm, which aims to map research of little-known areas. This study focuses on how participants perceived blockchain attributes such as trust, transparency, and user-generated content and how this affected engagement and their willingness to play the game again. Based on our evaluation, generating blockchain assets positively impacted player retention. According to the results, providing genuine asset ownership through the blockchain contributes to environmental engagement and self-engagement, as well as player retention. Another positive blockchain feature discovered from the interview data is user-generated content implementation into games.
Christian Nedu Osakwe, Michael D. Dzandu, Hayford Amegbe, Mohammed Hersi Warsame ¡ 5 authors
This study seeks to investigate the psychological antecedents toward cryptocurrency investment decision-making. Using extended planned behavior model, data were collected from 517 sample respondents in Kenya and Ghana to test the proposed model. Specifically, we find that skepticism undermines willingness to invest in cryptocurrency via attitude toward cryptocurrency across the two countries studied. We also find that subjective norm and perceived self-efficacy positively influence attitude toward cryptocurrency that, in turn, positively influences willingness to invest in cryptocurrency. The positive relationship between trust disposition and attitude toward cryptocurrency and in turn willingness to invest in cryptocurrency is statistically valid in Kenya but not in Ghana. Contrary to expectations, no negative statistical effect of risk disposition on attitude toward cryptocurrency was found in the Kenya and Ghana sample. Overall, the presented findings in this study enrich empirical understanding about the psychological factors influencing attitude and individualsâ intentions to invest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin.
Mehdi Daryaei, Reza Radfar, Javad Jassbi, Abbass Khamseh
While travelers' desire to visit the world's most remote places has grown, the inefficiency of global payments indicates a significant barrier to tourism growth. As an emerging, decentralized, and borderless digital innovation, Bitcoin technology seems to have the ability to serve as a payment alternative and address such fundamental inefficiencies. On the other hand, bitcoin adoption can only happen when tourists and business owners choose to operate bitcoin simultaneously. The study has developed a novel Bitcoin Collaborative Network and Tourism Collaborative Network model to examine Bitcoin adoption factors. Then a fuzzy DEMATEL method was applied to the factors influencing the adoption domain, as identified based on an extensive literature review, in-depth interviews, and an international Delphi process. The study offered a model for the heterogeneous collaborative network of Bitcoin and Tourism (BCN and TCN), revealing that Perceived Usefulness is the most influencing criterion and the most prominent variable in Bitcoin Adoption. Bitcoin Technological Complexity, Government Regulatory, and Bitcoin Awareness are the factors that give the highest impacts. Also, Bitcoin's Technological Complexity is the most significant factor in bitcoin adoption. The findings might assist businesses in adopting a new market expansion strategy and benefiting from technological spillover, while government officials can explore new supporting legislation.
Cryptocurrency has gained in popularity in emerging markets, however the knowledge accumulation pertaining to factors contributing to intention to use cryptocurrency has been limited. To address this gap, we meta-analyzed 42 samples from multiple theoretical approaches. Seven common antecedents to intention to use cryptocurrency were assessed, as well as six moderators via meta-regression. A regression model to explain the intention to use cryptocurrency was calculated, and relative importance analysis determined the weight of each variable in predicting cryptocurrency use intention. The findings highlight factors influencing intention to use cryptocurrency in emerging markets and refine theoretical models for future research.
Sep 11, 2022¡15th International Baltic Conference on Digital Business and Intelligent Systems (DB&IS), July 03-06, 2022, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia
Web 3.0 is considered as future of Internet where decentralization, user personalization and privacy protection would be the main aspects of Internet. Aim of this research work is to elucidate the adoption behavior of Web 3.0through a multi-analytical approach based on Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and Twitter sentiment analysis. A theoretical framework centered on Performance Expectancy (PE), Electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and Digital Dexterity (DD), was hypothesized towards Behavioral Intention (INT) of the Web 3.0 adoption. Surveyed data were collected through online questionnaires and 167 responses were analyzed through PLS-SEM. While 3,989 tweets of Web3 were analyzed by VADER sentiment analysis tool in RapidMiner. PLS-SEM results showed that DD and eWOM had significant impact while PE had no effect on INT. Moreover, these results were also validated by PLS-Predict method. While sentiment analysis explored that 56% tweets on Web 3.0 were positive in sense and 7% depicted negative sentiment while remaining were neutral. Such inferences are novel in nature and an innovative addition to web informatics and could support the stakeholders towards web technology integration
The blockchain-based traceability in agri-food marketing has brought a disruptive paradigm shift by removing the inherent information asymmetry problem. Likewise, revealing sufficient product quality and attributes information could break agricultural markets' âLemon Marketâ dilemma. This study takes the fresh fruit with blockchain traceability QR label as a case and systematically investigates the influence of consumers' food control risk attitude on information-seeking intentions. We utilized online survey data of 1,058 fresh fruit buyers and simultaneously applied ordinary least square (OLS), ordered logit model (Ologit), and propensity score matching (PSM) approaches to overcome the potential self-selection biases and confounding factors. The results show that risk attitude significantly negatively impacts consumers' information seeking fresh fruits. The stronger consumers' risk preference, the lower the probability of information seeking. Furthermore, we used PSM to overcome potential sample selectivity bias; therefore, PSM reinforces the significance of OLS and Ologit results. The sub-sample estimation results show that young individuals with high school and below education have stronger blockchain information-seeking intentions. The study provides new insights into the role of food control risk attitude and agri-food information traceability and offers several measures for policy and practice to realize a border trajectory in agri-food information disclosure.
Cryptocurrencies are highly speculative assets with large price volatility. If one could forecast their behavior, this would make them more attractive to investors. In this work we study the problem of predicting the future performance of cryptocurrencies using social media data. We propose a new model to measure the engagement of users with topics discussed on social media based on interactions with social media posts. This model overcomes the limitations of previous volume and sentiment based approaches. We use this model to estimate engagement coefficients for 48 cryptocurrencies created between 2019 and 2021 using data from Twitter from the first month of the cryptocurrencies' existence. We find that the future returns of the cryptocurrencies are dependent on the engagement coefficients. Cryptocurrencies whose engagement coefficients have extreme values have lower returns. Low engagement coefficients signal a lack of interest, while high engagement coefficients signal artificial activity which is likely from automated accounts known as bots. We measure the amount of bot posts for the cryptocurrencies and find that generally, cryptocurrencies with more bot posts have lower future returns. While future returns are dependent on both the bot activity and engagement coefficient, the dependence is strongest for the engagement coefficient, especially for short-term returns. We show that simple investment strategies which select cryptocurrencies with engagement coefficients exceeding a fixed threshold perform well for holding times of a few months.
While blockchain is considered to have many unprecedented characteristics, and its application is recognized as another new opportunity for the development of e-commerce, there is limited evidence on the factors affecting the adoption of blockchain in the commercial e-commerce sector. This study aims to identify determinants influencing consumers' intention to adopt blockchain technology in e-commerce. /methodology/approachDrawing on the classic technology acceptance model (TAM), a conceptual framework is developed and empirically assessed to present the relationships between the core characteristics of blockchain and consumers' adoption intention. Survey data were collected from 228 users of the blockchain e-commerce system in China. The structural equation modeling (SEM) approach is used to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that cost saving and traceability have a positive effect on perceived usefulness while insignificant associations are found between data privacy security and perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use and consumers' adoption intention. The research only examined Chinese users, which may affect the generalizability of the findings. Future research is encouraged to conduct comparative studies beyond this region, e.g., emerging markets versus developed economies. It would also be useful to explore mediating and moderating effects of other new technologies that complement the application and adoption of blockchain. The research results also bring managerial implications with the ways of attracting customers via blockchain technology, including improving system ability to reduce cost and enhance traceability. This paper is one of the early empirical endeavors that examines determinant factors affecting individual users towards the adoption of blockchain technology in e-commerce that is absent in the extant research. This study further contributes to the development of the knowledge bank of blockchain via the conceptual framework of its adoption under the e-commerce context, in particular considering its technical features.
Abstract The present study adopts a qualitative approach to explore the nature and sources of consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) in the cryptocurrency market. Drawing on thirty-two semi-structured interviews with crypto investors in the UK, our findings reveal three main sources of CBBE for crypto brands (i.e. blockchain-based features, crypto brand identity, psychological factors). Also, we supply insights into how the nature and features of blockchain technology shape consumersâ attitude towards crypto brands. Our findings also reveal the key elements of cryptosâ brand identity (i.e. white papers, brand purpose, ICOs) as well as various psychological factors (i.e. psychological distance, escapism, curiosity) that shape consumer perceptions of crypto brands. Our work extends the cryptocurrency and branding literatures in identifying the main sources of CBBE in the crypto market.
Open access
Digital Marketing and Social Media
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
The purpose of this paper was to propose a model that examined a study adopting the technology acceptance model with additional constructs (i.e., innovativeness) and the mediating role of attitude and perceived risk to use the cryptocurrency platform in Thailand. The data were collected through a questionnaire-based survey (456 usable responses) from consumers in Thailand. A two-step SEM approach (i.e., a measurement model and a structural model) was used to analyze the data. The findings showed a significant positive influence of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, innovativeness, attitude, perceived risk, and cryptocurrency platform adoption. Moreover, attitude mediated the relationship between perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, innovativeness, and cryptocurrency platform adoption. Overall, our results showed that the model of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and innovativeness explained 62.9% of the variance in the intention to use the cryptocurrency platform in Thailand. Our study has contributed to the technology acceptance model and highlighted its effectiveness in explaining the adoption of the cryptocurrency platform in Thailand.
Nowadays, with the emergence of Web 3.0 and the metaverse, we collectively witnessed the explosive development of the decentralised autonomous organisation and the blockchain business model. Particularly, the advancement of technologies has further given birth to a novel form of social platform as blockchain-enabled social media (i.e., SocialFi), which is growing both in size and number of users. Accordingly, the rapid development of these blockchain-enabled social media firms illustrates the requirement to better understand the reasons behind this increase and the innovative practices and strategies of firms in this emerging field. Using the case of Pixie â the worldâs first fully functional decentralised photo and video sharing social network based on blockchain technology, this insight paper identifies a conceptual model of blockchain-enabled social media that is useful for illustrating the successful business strategy and operations of firms. Particularly, the identified model employs four pillars of innovation as fundamental technologies, governance and operations, incentive mechanism design, and organisational structure and performance. Based on this crypto economy social media model, the study further presents the main challenges, discusses the implications based on agency theory, as well as highlights several directions for future research associated with blockchain-enabled social media.
Cryptocurrencies are rising in importance as an investment option and alternative currency. Thus, investors are keen on finding timely market movement insights. One such source is Twitter due to its live feed of information on cryptocurrencies and emotional information from investors expressing their sentiments. This article examines the extent to which Twitter sentiments can be used to predict price and transaction volume changes for the nine largest cryptocurrencies for the period of June 2021 to September 2021. This study was conducted using a lexicon-based approach through the VADER algorithm for sentiment analysis, while applying the Granger causality method to analyze the two-way predictive capabilities of each cryptocurrency&s;s sentiments toward their respective price and transaction volume changes. Past studies have shown that sentiment analysis may work for several cryptocurrencies, while this study only found predictive capabilities in transaction volume changes and not in price movement.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have registered tremendous growth in the past year, and their importance is expected to increase with the expected development of Web3. From a brand perspective, NFTs can be seen as representations of the brand components, such as the product, the logo, or the image. I argue that NFTs have immense potential to become standalone brand assets. I illustrate how this can be achieved by relating the brand's NFT strategies to the marketing funnel stages. Brands can turn into an NFT their physical products such as shoes, shirts, or art to attract brand awareness, generate cross-selling opportunities, and spark stronger perceived ownership of certain brand elements. Importantly, NFTs can allow brands to form a highly engaging brand community that can support the brand, blend online and offline product ownership, and potentially create a bond between the brand and consumers. These exciting possibilities generate a rich research agenda I present in this paper.
Open access
2 source records
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Without the need for third-party authorization, cryptocurrency allows for anonymous, secure, rapid, and low-cost financial transactions. Cryptocurrencies are becoming more widely acknowledged around the world, but their uses remain limited. The present study investigated the factors that propel behavioral intention of individuals to use cryptocurrency in Jordan using the extended Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) model. Survey questionnaires were sent to 1000 active Facebook users to gather data, and the entire 600 valid responses were evaluated utilizing Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Subjected norm, perceived risk, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use and trust, all impacted intention to use cryptocurrency positively, while attitude towards cryptocurrency affected intention to use cryptocurrency. Additionally, attitude towards cryptocurrency was influenced by perceived risk, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and perceived ease of use; while facilitating condition did not show influence. Also, attitude towards cryptocurrency had a mediating influence on the association between subjected norm, perceived risk, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and intention to use cryptocurrency.
This paper aims to identify the factors affecting the investment decision of retail investors to add crypto assets to their portfolios. The personality theory and the innovation diffusion theory are used in this study to understand the characteristics that influence investors' buying intentions. The study results show that the retail investors' purchase intentions are influenced by familiarity with the asset, trust, risk and return profile of the asset class, and the perceived security of the investor. The study also examines the role of innovativeness as a moderating variable in the relationship between purchase intentions and the primary variables. The study confirms that innovativeness has a significant mediating role in the relationship between purchase intentions and trust and also in the relationship between purchase intentions and perceived security. The results indicate that innovativeness has no significant moderating impact on the relationship between purchase intentions and familiarity and also on the relationship between purchase intentions and risk and return consciousness.
Abstract Prior research typically positions blockchain technology as enabling a trustless exchange environment without specifically investigating how blockchain technology provides trust and what makes the data in a blockchain âtamperproofâ and âimmutable.â This article serves to address these research gaps by conducting semi-structured interviews with 18 informants who have had at least three years of project experience with blockchain-enabled exchanges. Our findings uncover three unique aspects of blockchain that enable trust in exchange vs. a traditional exchange: (1) trust in exchange actors: mathematics and cryptography vs. human guardians within institutions, (2) trust in exchange actions: information transparency enabling tamperproof and immutable data vs. information asymmetry, and (3) trust in exchange assets: digital vs. manual escrows for verifying ownership of valuable goods. This research is vital for marketing scholars and practitioners who seek to understand the rise of threats to trust regarding online advertising, customer trust, privacy, and digital rights.
In this article we provide a primer for blockchain technology (BT) and explain ways that it has been applied (or can be applied) to the field of advertising research and practice. We situate this primer inside a critical look at the evolution of digital advertising that has been driven largely by immediate technological need for the maximization of profit rather than considerations for societal well-being. We discuss arenas in which the current state of digital advertising is not well positioned to maximize societal well-being and has built a consumer distrust of digital advertising, specifically with regard to the areas of privacy invasion, value to consumers, technology companiesâ power, inaccuracies of personalizations, and misinformation spread. Throughout this article we discuss how blockchain technologies can be used as a research environment for testing new paths for digital advertising that could tackle these issues and be more beneficial to society. We also provide an overview of avenues for future research on BT application in the digital advertising ecosystem.