Government Policies & Regulations: Impact on Mobile Commerce in Indian Context

Sharma, D., Murthy, R., and Sundar, K.

Mobile Commerce is the subset of e-commerce, which includes all e-commerce transactions, carried out using a mobile (hand held) device. This paper attempts at figuring out the relevance and potential role that m-commerce can play in the development of Indian business environment, in particular rural India. M-Commerce in India is at its infancy, with significant uncertainties and complexities due to evolving business and regulatory models, which are further complicated by the involvement of large number of interrelated players in it. Timely and correct public policy interventions are needed to allow it to unravel its potential and help the country to reap the benefits. The traditional tools and techniques of analysis and forecasting (for e.g., econometric models and regression analysis approaches) seem to be inadequate to study the dynamic nature of interrelatedness among the entities in the m-commerce domain to draft a policy framework.  System Dynamics based modeling approach will help in dealing with the complex interrelatedness and to develop a policy model. In this paper, the authors developed a causal loop diagram based on the analysis of various players and their interests who are the stakeholders in the M-commerce space to facilitate the policy makers to infer the impact of various policy options to decide on policies that can foster both technology and business in India for public good.

Keywords: M-commerce, Policies & Regulations, System dynamics, Causal loop diagrams, Delphi Technique.