Best Paper Award and Presentation of three Research Papers @ICE-B 2021

At the 18th „International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B)“, Thomas Neifer, Dennis Lawo, Gunnar Stevens, Alexander Boden, and Andreas Gadatsch were honored with the Best Paper Award. The awarded paper is titled Recommender Systems in Food Retail: Modeling Repeat Purchase Decisions on Transaction Data of a Stationary Food Retailer and was already presented by Thomas Neifer at the conference on July 8, 2021.

The paper deals with the development and validation of a time-based recommender system for repeat purchase decisions in food retail. For this purpose, an introduction to recommender systems was given at the beginning and classical problems for grocery retail transaction data were derived. By looking at state-of-the-art solutions for integrating a temporal component into recommendations, a transition to current models in the literature was created. Two specific models were identified that deal specifically with repeat purchase decisions. These were applied to a real data set of a stationary German food retailer and discussed with respect to the previously derived problems of recommender systems. It is shown that a Bayesian Hierarchical Model with Gamma Prior and the assumption of a Poisson process following purchase events is well suited for the sparse data situation at hand.

The second paper is Decoding IPaaS: Investigation of User Requirements for Integration Platforms as a Service written by Thomas Neifer, Dennis Lawo, Paul Bossauer, and Andreas Gadatsch – Due to ongoing digitalization, more and more cloud services are finding their way into companies. In this context, data integration from the various software solutions, which are provided both on-premise (local use or licensing for local use of software) and as a service, is of great importance. In this regard, Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) models aim to support companies as well as software providers in the context of data integration by providing connectors to enable data flow between different applications and systems and other integration services. Since previous research has mostly focused on technical or legal aspects of IPaaS, this article focuses on deriving integration practices and design-related barriers and drivers regarding the adoption of IPaaS. Therefore, we conducted 10 interviews with experts from different software as a services vendors. Our results show that the main factors regarding the adoption of IPaaS are the standardization of data models, the usability and variety of connectors provided, and the issues regarding data privacy, security, and transparency.

The third paper is Scan&Go: Understanding Adoption and Design of Smartphone-based Self-checkout written by Dennis Lawo, Thomas Neifer, Margarita Esau, Philip Engelbutzeder, and Gunnar Stevens – Since stationary self-checkout is widely introduced and well understood, previous research barely examined newer generations of smartphone-based Scan&Go. Especially from a design perspective, we know little about the factors contributing to the adoption of Scan&Go solutions and how design enables consumers to take full advantage of this development rather than being burdened with using complex and unenjoyable systems. To understand the influencing factors and the design from a consumer perspective, we conducted a mixed-methods study where we triangulated data of an online survey with 103 participants and a qualitative study with 20 participants. Based on the results, our study presents a refined and nuanced understanding of technology as well as infrastructure-related factors that influence adoption. Moreover, we present several implications for designing and implementing of Scan&Go in retail environments.

ICE-B 2021: http://www.ice-business.org/