Platform For E-commerce Ecosystem And Its Research, Self-organization Mechanism

As the rapid growth of Electronic business (E-business) in China, it presents new features of ecological clusters. Organizations and companies have been emerging an aggregation through the Internet to serve the same market, by gathering together around the e-business third-party platform, with a significant increase of E-commerce transactions, the number of netizens shopping online, and the variety of e-business websites. E-business is no longer the simple electronicalization of the transaction process between sellers and buyers. Other relevant institutions, such as banks, logistics, certification organizations, telecommunications, have also aggregated according to the customers'needs, which has formed a new industry environment with a wider range of resource integration. The characteristics of e-business's industrial integration posed a new challenge for us to study e-business domain, but previous literatures are lack of complete and in-depth research regarding this issue. Alibaba Group is China's most representative e-business company. Its ecological characteristics and growth pattern is the best case to explore the phenomenon of e-business ecological cluster. The research applied the research methodology of explorative embedded single case study, by adopting e-business ecosystem centered with Alibaba Group (Alibaba Ecosystem) as the case, to explore its evolution path and the characteristics of self-organization in order to gain a general conclusion of e-business ecological cluster in China, which has both significant theoretical and practical implicationsFirst of all, the dissertation analyzed the phenomenon of e-business ecological cluster, by applying the framework of business ecosystem theory, and proposed the concept of platform-type e-business ecosystem and the relationship among its three main components, i.e. lead species, key species, and supportive species.Secondly, the study explored the process that Alibaba Ecosystem, a typical platform-type e-business ecosystem in China, got shape, developed, and matured, and forecasted the possibility of its recession in the future. By analyzing the findings from the case study, four stages of e-business ecosystem's evolutionary path are identified, i.e. birth, expansion, coordination, and decline, and the characteristics of key species' self-organization was emphasized. Besides, the study adopted the network theory to analyze the network infrastructure of each stage. In addition, the game theory was applied to analyze the relationship among key species of birth stage with subordinate network infrastructure, expansion stage with dependent network infrastructure, and coordination stage with self-organization network infrastructure, with the conclusion that self-organization network infrastructure could bring better trust environment.Thirdly, the dissertation laid the emphasis on the characteristics of e-traders' self-organized alliance in platform-type e-business ecosystem. According to the research on the growth path of key species, the conclusion was made that collaboration meets the needs of e-traders'growth, so as to prove the inevitability of self-organized alliance. Moreover, co-opetition theory was adopted as a lens to explore contents and value of e-traders'self-organized alliance, and identify different types of the alliance according to its different characteristics. Futhermore, based on the theoretical analysis, empirical data were collected and analyzed to explore the value and operation model of two typical type of e-traders'self-organized allianceLast but not least, the study pointed out the governance issues and regulations of platform-type e-business ecosystem, including relationship governance, interest governance, information governance, collaboration governance.