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How ESL Devices Transform into Connected Label Solutions: A Perspective of Actor Interaction and
Information Rebundling

digitizing price and product information; digitization refers to converting information into
digital format (Bloomberg, 2018).
During technology deployment, ESL technology is also evolving through the
collaborative actions of various actors in the retail ecosystem, not only the retail supply

chain network. Beyond digitization of the product price and information, ESL can also
overcome certain operational barriers to the implementation of specific computing
applications in real time. For instance, although merchants have used time-series data

to predict product prices (Purohit, Panigrahi, Sethy, and Behera, 2021; Ren, Chan, and
Siqin, 2020), they cannot adjust prices more quickly due to the time that in-store staff
members must spend on updating on-shelf price tags. In contrast, ESLs allow retailers
to change product prices and update price information on shelves in real time. Retailers
have thus learned that ESL should be neither overlooked nor undervalued, offering

them certain advantages in leveraging and reshaping existing business practices. In the
early phases of implementation, ESL can help reduce costs and boost store operation
efficiency. By inviting players from other industries to participate in cooperative actions,

ESL implementation actively encourages retailers to enhance features and functions
while maximizing their current benefits. ESL shifts a hardware solution into a “connected
labeling” one.
The evolution of ESL during the digital transformation motivates the present authors
to understand comprehensively how digital transformation can align with this technical

evolution. Technology can change through iterative and continual refinement, molding it to
a particular environment or business and altering related business models. Extant research
has revealed that the installation of ESL can increase gross margins (Stamatopoulos,

Bassamboo, and Moreno, 2021) and customer well-being (Ovani and Windasari, 2022).
Besides, prior research on digital transformation has identified certain benefits (Ferreira,
Moreira, Pereira, and Durão, 2020; Hokkanen, Walker, and Donnelly, 2020; Pereira et al.,
2022; Pereira and Frazzon, 2021), actors’ roles (Alaassar, Mention, and Aas, 2020; Audrin,
2020), and factors in digital transformation (Matarazzo et al., 2021; Solberg, Traavik, and

Wong, 2020). However, these studies fall short of how digital transformation can align
with the technical evolution of devices, particularly through actor-network interaction.
By answering the following research question, our study aims to fill this research

gap: how do retailers conduct collaborative actions with other actors in the ecosystem to

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