Groupon is a popular group-buying website where they act as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. The company has grown rapidly and was established in Sweden in the year of 2010. The aim of this study is to investigate if businesses that have been marketed in Stockholm and that have been co-operating with Groupon have been affected in terms of customer loyalty and profitability. Furthermore the study also examines consumer’s opinions, purchase behavior and loyalty against Groupons business partners. The results showed that salon/spa in comparison with other industries received very high added sales (67 %) and had a large number of loyal customers (42 %). For the retail industry, 33 % did not receive additional sales and 67 % have not received customer loyalty. Tourism/travel and other industries believe the campaigns to be very successful and they have received good customer loyalty and sales. The companies who did not consider their campaigns successful had problems with the communication between themselves and Groupon. Finally, 49 % of the consumers turned out to be loyal to the businesses of which they had used daily deals.

The research objects are Tickets Group Buying Websites, to explore the correlation between Perceived Risk and Purchase Intention, including website trust and perception of price. The main purpose is to investigate consumers' tickets group buying behavior, and to understand the consumers' perceived risk interactions with perceived price, trust in tickets group buying, and the impact of people¡¦s purchase intention. This research takes the questionnaire survey; we collect total 301 available samples. Use percentage, average, correlation analysis and regression analysis. The study result indicated that main consumer in ticket group buying are women; the major consumer age groups is 19-29 years old, their income per month is bellow fifty thousand; and most of consumer who lives in northern area in Taiwan. The main reasons that people who willing to use ticket group buying are cheapest price and easy to buy. The key reasons people who do not buy ticket group buying are using time limit and lower service quality. In this research, we found that when consumer has higher website trust, the perceived risk will be weaken; besides the purchase intention will be strengthen. The trust has significant effects on consumer¡¦s purchase decision in ticket group buying. This study also founds that consumer have lower perceived price having higher perceived risk and having lower purchase intention.

Usually, consumers will collect market information about the product before they decide to buy it or not. In other words, the market information is a critical factor to affect consumers¡¦ purchasing intensions and behavior. Previous research points out that when consumers encounter a wider dispersion of price, they will expect to find cheaper stores. Besides, future price is often considered by consumers too. Kauffman et al. (2002) mentioned that the market price information might affect the recruiting of group buying. In a competitive market, if consumers are unable to perceive the utility of discounts provided by group-buying mechanism, they may shop at other retailers¡¦ stores. Further, because the final price of group buying will not be known until the transaction is closed, consumers¡¦ decisions might be up to their prediction about the final price. This study explores how price dispersion and price volatility affect consumers¡¦ internal reference price and expectation of final price of group buying. The difference between the internal reference and expectation of final price of group-buying indicates the consumers¡¦ transaction utility. How transaction utility affects consumers¡¦ intentions to join group buying is another issue being studied. In addition, if there is interference effect of consumers¡¦ risk attitude on final price forecast of group-buying, it¡¦s investigated, too. The result indicates that price dispersion has significant effects on consumers¡¦ all kinds of internal reference prices and predictions about the final price of group buying. However, the price volatility only has significant effects on consumers¡¦ perceived fair price, aspiration price, and reservation price. Neither significant effect of price volatility on consumers¡¦ price prediction of group buying nor interference effect of risk attitude is found. As expected, there is a significant positive causal relationship between transaction utility and intention to join group-buying. It shows that the transaction utility resulting from the comparison between the lowest market price and the most possible final price of group buying has the most explanatory power to predict consumers¡¦ participating intension to join group-buying.

The feature of group buying is that the price will go down as the accumulated orders are increasing. However, consumers will not know the final price until the end. As a result, consumers can only make decision based on the final price forecast of group buying. The final price forecast might be different depending on different pricing strategies of group-buying models and if there are competitions from posted-price stores. The purpose of this research is to understand how consumers¡¦ internal reference price and final price prediction of group buying would be influenced when facing different price curves in different market competition environment. The difference between the internal reference price and final price prediction of group-buying indicates the consumers¡¦ transaction utility. In addition, if consumers¡¦ perceived transaction utilities affect their intentions and behavior of joining group buying is another research purpose. In this research, there are three different pricing strategies, decreasing, neutral, and increasing based on the initial price, discount size and final price. For the market competition environment, it manipulated by if there are other posted-price stores to be chosen or not. The research result indicates that increasing price curve, which has higher final price, make consumers¡¦ final price prediction of group buying higher than the others under the best condition. On the other hand, it indicates that decreasing price curve, which has higher initial price, make consumers¡¦ final price prediction of group buying higher than the others under the worst condition. Consumers¡¦ internal reference prices are mainly influenced by market price information. When there are other posted-price stores to be chosen, consumers¡¦ internal reference price are higher averagely. In addition, the higher consumers¡¦ perceived transaction utilities are, the higher consumers¡¦ intentions to join group buying are. Finally, it shows consumers¡¦ intentions to join group buying have significant effect on their actual behavior.

Abstract The main idea of group buying is to recruit larger number of orders in order to cut down price. In order words, the larger the number of orders is, the more consumers will join due to the resulted lower price. This positive feedback is as the phenomenon of demand externalities found by Kauffman and Wand (2001, 2002). However, from the other viewpoint, there is a phenomenon of death spiral at the beginning of group buying. It indicates that, due to the few orders in the beginning of group buying, consumers are inclined to wait until the price is acceptable. Unfortunately, it results in that consumers will wait for each other¡¦s joining and therefore, the orders will not increase quickly. In order to solve the problem of death spiral, Lai and Zhuang (2004) proposed three incentive mechanisms, sequential-based, time-based and quantity-based models, on purpose of encouraging consumer to participate in group-buying. The experimental result demonstrated the expected performance of the three incentive mechanisms in terms of removing the phenomenon of death spiral. However, we find these incentive mechanisms didn¡¦t stimulate the phenomenon of demand externalities. Based on previous literature and practical experience, price differentiation usually causes customers¡¦ negative emotion and unfairness cognition. The incentive mechanisms designed for solving the problem of death spiral make consumers pay different price. We wonder if it causes unfairness cognition and therefore could not result in the phenomenon of demand externality. The purpose of this research is to understand whether the incentive mechanisms cause consumers unfairness cognition via experiment. The result shows consumers having opportunity to have extra discounts have higher cognition of price fairness than the consumers without chance to have extra discounts. Further, compared with other incentive mechanisms, sequential-based incentive mechanism makes consumers perceive lower cognition of procedural fairness. Finally, we also found that consumers¡¦ fairness cognition has positive effect on their price satisfaction and purchase intention as well. Keywords: Group buying, Fairness cognition, Consumer behavior, Consumer satisfaction

Traditionally, group buying is a way to lower down the price due to the group based collective bargaining power. In the Internet age, because the Internet provides more efficient communication tools, it is much easier to recruit more participants to join the group buying to increase the bargaining power and then to lower down the buying price. Hence, in 1998, Mercata proposed an innovative website using group buying as its business model. Since then, there is more and more group buying websites with different group buying models. For single product group buying, there are two most often used models, price acceptance model and free pricing model. The purpose of this thesis is to probe the performance of these two models. First, whether there is difference between the final transaction volumes of these two models and how the difference will be intervened by different price level of product are explored. The next concern is to find what kinds of personal factors of participants will affect their choice of group buying model. The result is that the performance and participants¡¦ satisfaction of free pricing model are better than those of price acceptance model. In addition, the choice of group buying models will be influenced by the ideal price, group size expected by the participants and their motivations.

Online group-buying is one of popular and innovative business models in the Internet age. Its essence is that the price will go down as the accumulated orders are increasing. A challenge is how to design the price curve, i.e., the relation between price and volume. Researchers have observed the consumer behavior phenomena of demand externalities, price-drop effect, and cycle ending effect in online group-buying transactions. All are related to the design of price curve. Therefore, if the price curve design can attract consumers and make profit as well, it will make the group-buying more successful. Based on above background, the purpose of this study is to explore the impact of price reduction frequency on consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility and then in turn on consumers¡¦ intention. In addition, this study also explores how the consumers¡¦ price sensitivity mediate the impact of price reduction frequency on consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility. A field experiment was done first. Then, an online experiment was designed and implemented based on the observation of the field experiment. The research result indicates that price reduction frequency will positively affect the consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility. Further, both consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility will affect the consumers¡¦ intention. In addition, the consumers¡¦ price sensitivity modulates the impact of price reduction frequency on consumers¡¦ perceived value and perceived transaction utility. Finally, the observations of field experiment and lab experiment demonstrate the phenomena of demand externalities, price-drop effect, and cycle ending effect proposed by previous researches.

Recently, online group-buying has been a popular business model. It was observed that many characteristics of online group-buying are potential stimuli of impulse buying. Therefore, we target traditional online group-buying and e-coupon group-buying and try to explore the characteristics of online group-buying stimulating impulse buying. Based on the literature review and empirical data collection, we identified five characteristics of online group-buying which may stimulate impulse buying. They are group-buying discount, time pressure, social interaction, perceived shopping convenience and consumption deadline. The data were collected through online questionnaire. The analysis result shows that the five characteristics of online group-buying indeed cause impulse buying. Further, we also explored whether the impulse buying behavior will be moderated in different situations. These moderators include group-buying model (traditional online group-buying vs. e-coupon group-buying), transaction price level, relationship with the group-buying initiator, product type and group-buying experience. The result indicates that the impulse buying behaviors are easier to be stimulated in the following situations: traditional online group-buying, lower transaction price, familiar with the traditional online group-buying initiator, non-food product and more experienced consumers of online group-buying.

Group buying is one dynamic pricing application and it is a mechanism permitting consumers to gather bargaining power in order to get a volume discount or other premiums. In group-buying, the price depends on the number of collected orders. Given a price curve shows the existing orders and current price, the consumer will have some expectation of value and uncertainty for future price. Previous literatures found both the positive participation externality effect and price-drop effect from the field data (Kauffman and Wang, 2001; 2002). Because there are no variable controls from the field study, we can not really know what reasons cause these phenomena in group-buying. Thus, this study will use experimental methodology to the existence of these two effects and understand why they happen. The purpose of this research is to investigate whether positive participation externality effect and price-drop effect exists in group-buying and to explore whether the two effects are related to consumers¡¦ perceived risk and perceived value, whether the intention to join group-buying is influenced by perceived risk and perceived value. The study shows that the two effects really happen in group-buying. Participation externality effect is caused by financial risk, time risk and perceived value. However, price-drop effect is generated from financial risk. Additionally, consumers have higher intentions to join group-buying when they perceive lower financial risk and more perceived value.

Online group-buying means that a crowd of consumers combine with each other and massively purchase a certain object, and therefore can attain to a lower price(Kauffman et al. 2002). In group-buying transaction model, consumers usually recognized the risks specially. Therefore, the feedback mechanisms were used to reduce the risks and increase the trust. In general electronic shopping, many past studies especially explore the use of feedback mechanisms(Dellarocas 2003; Singh et al. 1991). However, there are few studies about the effect of feedback mechanisms on online group-buying. Compare to general electronic shopping, shopping in group-buying will include more uncertainty and risk. Thus, this study will use experimental methodology to explore the feedback mechanisms that how to impact the behavior of group-buying consumers with forum and rating feedback mechanisms. Our study mainly explores whether the feedback mechanisms affect the consumers¡¦ trust in seller¡¦s credibility and perceived risk in group-buying, and whether the intention to join group-buying is influenced by the trust in seller¡¦s credibility and perceived risk. The study shows that the online group-buying consumer behavior is influenced by the feedback mechanisms exactly. The ratings affect consumers¡¦ perceived financial risk, perceived time risk and perceived psychological risk. The forum affect consumer¡¦s psychological risk perceived, and the experience of the initiator who initiates group-buying also affect the consumer¡¦s time risk perceived. The intention to join group-buying is influenced by the trust in seller¡¦s credibility and perceived risk.