Resource Dependence,Relationship Quality And Opportunism Behavior In E-commerce Platform

In recent years,with the rapid development of internet economy,e-commerce has increasingly become a new economic growth pole.The rapid development makes the network platform enterprise scale expansion.The e-commerce platform is faced with both opportunities and challenges which includes opportunism behavior between merchants.In view of the potential harm and widespread existence of opportunism behavior on platform relations,how to effectively control the opportunism behavior in the process of platform transaction has aroused widespread concern in academia and business.Scholars have done a lot of research on below-the-line opportunism behavior,and discuss the governance mechanism of opportunism behavior form relationship and transaction.However,e-commerce platform has many different characteristics of offline channels,such as the characteristics of bilateral market.This emerging market characteristics determines the difference between governance mechanisms of e-commerce platform and unilateral market's.Most of the existing opportunism behavior studies only proceed from the unilateral market,which neglects the cause and mechanism of e-commerce platform opportunism behavior in Two-Sided Markets.Based on resource dependence and relational governance theory,this study explores the intrinsic relationship between resource dependence?relational governance and opportunism behavior in e-commerce platform.With 122 businesses samples from Taobao.Tmall,this paper use the structural equation to test the model.The results show that the resource dependence on the e-commerce platform will affect the options of relationship governance.In particular,the stronger the platform merchants rely on tangible resources such as personnel,the more inclined the merchants to compete.The stronger the platform merchants rely on intangible resources such as knowledge and technology,the more inclined the merchants to cooperate.In addition,this study also demonstrates that the quality of the relationship between merchants,including the intensity of competition and cooperation,will affect opportunism behavior.Specifically,the intensity of competition between e-commerce platform merchants strengthens opportunism behavior and the intensity of cooperation is on the contrary.