Abstract

Research of risk factors measurement of mobile commerce based on delphi sorting method

Author(s): Feiming Chen, Yuqing Liu

Mobile commerce is currently experiencing massive growth as demonstrated by its rapid spread and upgrades in data transfer speeds throughout China and worldwide. However, the development of mobile commerce is dependent on many unpredictable risk factors that have the potential to create/destroy the flourishing 3G service in China. This paper reports the results from a study using the ranking-type Delphi method to examine the responses from professionals in the mobile commerce industry to gain their insights. The top 10 risk factors, such as the decline in average revenue per user (ARPU) caused by the price war among the mobile network owners (MNOs), the lack of 3G consumption capacity and the stability of the government communications policy, were captured after three phases of the Delphi study. Finally, the risk factors are compared for Chinese and global data. It was found that the cooperation risks in the value chain and the risk factors involving 3G should be given more attention in China.