Mitigating Product Uncertainty in Online Markets: IT and Business Solutions and Research Implications

摘要

Despite an enormous amount of IS research on mitigating seller uncertainty that has established a real hegemony in research on online markets, there is a dearth of work on understanding the possibilities and consequences of using IT and business solutions to mitigate product uncertainty in online markets. Product uncertainty deals with the intangible nature of many products, such as the fit of clothes, the feel of driving a car, and interacting with electronic devices. It relates to the difficulty in adequately assessing product characteristics (description uncertainty), the future performance of the product (performance uncertainty), and the fit between the consumer's requirements and the product's attributes (product-fit uncertainty). Recognizing the importance of product uncertainty and its negative effects on prices, transaction activity, and product returns, online firms have sought to reduce product uncertainty by offering visual product demonstrations, textual product descriptions, multimedia technologies, lower prices, and lenient return policies. Mitigating product uncertainty is at the core of IS research since it deals with both IT solutions (e.g., multimedia technologies and virtual reality tools), and IT-enabled business interventions (e.g., pricing, product returns, reverse supply-chain capabilities). The purpose of this panel is to challenge the hegemony of mitigating seller uncertainty in IS research and help define a research agenda for mitigating product uncertainty in online markets. After formally establishing the hegemony of seller uncertainty in IS research in online markets, the panelists will debate the most effective IT and business interventions that online firms can use, and also their implications on consumers, retailers and the economy as a whole. Given that research on product uncertainty is still at its infancy, this panel would both help guide IS researchers to pursue the most promising paths for research, and promote the IS discipline as the leader in academic and practitioner research on the role of IT solutions in mitigating product uncertainty. This panel will debate the means bv which IT and business solutions can contribute to reducing product uncertainty by focusing on integrating the various IT and business interventions that online firms can employ to achieve a cost-effective blend that minimizes product uncertainty while achieving desired outcomes relative such as higher sales, better prices, and fewer product returns. The panel will also debate additional parameters that must be accounted for to better understand how the IT and business solutions achieve favorable outcomes by mitigating product uncertainty. IT solutions, such as product recommendation agents to support customer identification needs will also be debated. The panel will debate how product uncertainty should be studied in IS research, such as what are the most likely outcomes of product uncertainty, what conditions would make product uncertainty more or less influential, where should future research on product uncertainty focus its efforts, what research methods should be used to study product uncertainty, and how the most knowledge accumulation can be achieved in the study of product uncertainty.