While e-Commerce has proliferated with the growth of the Internet, there have been insufficient research efforts concerning its status in Korea. The United States, in contrast, has made significant efforts in making empirical research on the consumer's adoption of e-Commerce. This paper validates the e-Commerce Adoption Model (e-CAM) on the two countries. e-CAM integrates the technology acceptance model with the theories of perceived risk to explain the eCommerce adoption. The study findings not only provide interim support for the generalizability of e-CAM, but also suggest that online firms should consider these contextual factors in order to facilitate consumers' adoption behavior.

Despite the average daily commuting time of commuters increasing by the day, the way marketers can benefit from our commuting behaviors has not yet been thoroughly examined.In collaboration with one of the largest global mobile service platform providers, this study investigates how contextual targeting with commuting is associated with responses to mobile coupons. The analysis is based on a field study in which 14,741 mobile coupons were sent to 9,928 public transit app users on commuting routes or routes other than commuting routes (i.e. commuters or non-commuters). The key findings indicate that commuters are about three times as likely to redeem their first mobile coupon compared to non-commuters. Further analyses allowing users to receive multiple coupons provide useful insight into an effective distribution strategy for mobile coupons. The findings suggest that enhanced receptiveness to mobile coupons is more perceivable when users obtain multiple coupons. Additionally, multiple-coupon distribution strategy increases response rates more effectively among non-commuters than commuters. Moreover, coupons with short expiration dates more successfully improve the response rates of commuters than do coupons with long expiration dates. For non-commuters, however, the reverse holds true; their response rates are higher for coupons with long expiration. Finally, commuters redeem coupons not only more frequently but also at a faster rate. Both dynamic and static matching methods are adopted to address possible selection biases. By carefully exploiting commuting, which is easily identifiable and occurs throughout the world, managers may improve their mobile marketing effectiveness.

Although the existing literature in economics and marketing offers growing evidence on the use of price points, there is a lack of direct evidence on the link between price points and price rigidity. We examine this issue in the retail setting using two datasets. One is a large weekly transaction price dataset, covering 29 product categories over an eight-year period from a large US supermarket chain. The other is from the Internet, and includes daily prices over a two-year period for hundreds of consumer electronic products with a wide range of prices. Across the two datasets, we find that 9 is the most frequently used price-ending for the penny, dime, dollar and the ten-dollar digits. Exploring the relationship between price points and price rigidity in these datasets, we find that the most common price changes are in multiples of dimes, dollars, and tendollar increments. When we econometrically estimate the probability of a price change, we find that 9-ending prices are at least 24 percent (and as much as 73 percent) less likely to change in comparison to prices ending with other digits. We also find that the average size of change of 9-ending prices are systematically larger when they do change, in comparison to non 9-ending prices. This link between price points and price rigidity is remarkably robust across the wide variety of price levels, product categories, and retailers examined in this study. To make sense of these findings, we offer a behavioral explanation building on the emerging literature on rational inattention. We argue that consumers may find it rational to be inattentive to the rightmost digits of retail prices because of the costs of processing price information. In response, firms may find it profitable to set the rightmost digits at 9, and therefore, be rigid in their pricing around these price points. We conclude that price points are a significant source of retail price rigidity in our datasets, and that rational inattention can offer a plausible explanation for their presence.

The frequency of occurrence of certain price points in Internet-based selling is investigated in order to determine what drives the observed regularities and variations. Theories based on consumer perceptions of price and quality images, and on rational inattention to price-endings are explored by specifying and testing empirical models for price-endings using more than 1.5 million daily observations on multiple product categories sold by 90 Internet-based retailers collected over a two-year period. The results show that a fi rm's on-line reputation and relative price levels affect the price-endings chosen in different product categories, and that 9-ending prices increase consumer purchases. These fi ndings support an image theory of store quality and price. The use of 9-ending prices varies across Internet selling formats in a way consistent with differences in the rational attentiveness these channels engender in consumers. This research on the role of information technology in price-setting provides insights for marketers who wish to optimize price-setting decisions in the competitive environment of Internet retailing.