Investigation of the Impact of User Contexts on the Utility of Mobile Commerce Services

The primary difference between mobile commerce (m-Commerce) and electronic commerce is its use in various contexts. Electronic commerce is mostly used in the predetermined environment of the Internet. Delivering relevant things to the right people at the right time in the right way becomes a key issue for m-Commerce: user information and context information are critical to the success of m-Commerce. However, few studies have been conducted to explore the relationship between the two and their influence on users’ mobile commerce usage behaviour. It is far from clear the situations under which m-Commerce is used most frequently and the impact of context information on its users’ m-Commerce usage behaviour. This paper proposes a framework for studying the impact of user contexts on m-Commerce services consumption. Firstly, the Back-Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) is adopted to build a model to study the relationship between users’ profile information and the context information. After that, a two-level Bayesian Metanetwork is employed for modelling the causal relationships between the user contexts and the user preferences in the mobile information environment. All special requirements of the mobile information environment have been taken into account for this framework building.