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Background: This systematic review contributes to the understanding of the characteristics of built food environments that may be associated with choices of alternative protein foods (APF). Using the built food environment typology proposed by Downs et al., we investigated various environmental structures (e.g., supermarkets, other retailers, farmers' markets, restaurants, schools, and online vendors) and the characteristics that may facilitate or hinder consumers' choices. For example, facilitators and barriers may refer to the physical characteristics of environmental structures, food presentation practices, the organizational strategies or policies operating in the setting, or the actions that retailers or consumers engage in while selling, serving, choosing, trying, or purchasing APF in these environmental structures. Methods: A systematic review (PROSPERO database preregistration; no. CRD42023388700) was conducted by searching 13 databases for peer-reviewed journals focusing on the fields of economics and business, agriculture, medical sciences, and social sciences. Data searches, coding, and quality evaluations were conducted by at least 2 researchers. A total of 31 papers (36 original studies) were included. The risk of bias was evaluated with the Joanna Briggs Institute quality evaluation tool, with 24 publications presenting low risk of bias. Results: The findings indicate that perceived and actual availability facilitate consumers' APF choices across a built food environment. Several barriers/facilitators were associated with APF choices in specific types of built food environments: the way food is presented in produce sections (supermarkets), consumer habits in terms of green and specialty shopping (grocery stores), and mismatches among retailer actions in regard to making APF available in one type of food environment structure (e-commerce) and consumers' preferences for APF being available in other food environment structures (supermarkets, grocery stores). The effect of a barrier/facilitator may depend on the APF type; for example, social norms regarding masculinity were a barrier affecting plant-based APF choices in restaurants, but these norms were not a barrier affecting the choice of insect-based APF in restaurants. Conclusions: Addressing barriers/facilitators identified in this review will help in developing environment-matching interventions that aim to make alternative proteins mainstream. Trial registration: PROSPERO database registration: #CRD42023388700. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the main areas and latest developments of logistics service quality (LSQ) in the context of business to consumer (B2C) online shopping and proposes future research directions. More specifically, this paper has three objectives: What is the status of research of LSQ in B2C e-tailing? Which themes involving the field are the most popular among scholars? What are the possibilities for future research? This study examined a sample of 177 papers from the Scopus and ISI Web of Science databases to find research activity on LSQ in B2C online shopping between 2001 and early 2021 using bibliometric analysis. The methodology involves selecting, analyzing, and classifying 177 papers into authors, journals, time, focus areas, keywords, country, citation, co-citation, and thematic distribution analysis. Four major themes have emerged, LSQ for integrating traditional retail with omnichannel retail; LSQ and inventory management; LSQ and supply chain collaboration and LSQ transformation to E-LSQ. It gives researchers and scholars information to help them work on new developments of LSQ in B2C e-tailing and create strategies, models, and structures for increasing firm performance and customer satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online retail market shows a sharp increase in traffic during holiday sales. The ability to distinguish customers who will likely purchase is critical for provisioning traffic and for providing cost-effective promotions. This paper uniquely studies the browsing and purchasing behaviors of online shoppers during a yearly sale event in China, the world’s largest online marketplace. Based on 31 million action logs gathered from wide residential areas, we characterize the steps leading to purchases and determine their precursors. We investigate the effect of time (e.g., date, time of date), environment (e.g., platform, viewed category), and action (e.g., session time, clicks, sequence) on purchases. Action cues from shopping behaviors can be used for early detection. While most shoppers start with strong intentions to purchase, yet the moment of ordering comes rather impulsively within 30 seconds to several minutes of browsing. The predictive accuracy reaches as a high AUC of 0.924. The findings in this paper provide an understanding of traffic during mega sale events that can help online shops plan and provide a better user experience for upcoming shopping festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce consists of the purchase, sale, distribution, marketing, and supply of information about products or services through the internet so that any client can access the products or services from anywhere and at any time. It constitutes a negotiation model that acquires more and more followers, generating great economic benefits for those who use it. To make ecommerce successful, it is necessary to be present in large marketplaces, by increasing visibility. A marketplace has a very large flow of users who already trust the brand. Therefore every detail of the consumer's shopping experience must be taken care of, the customer service system perfected, and business promoted with the practice of marketing. In this paper, the main effects that influence the pillars and the success of e-commerce were determined and it is identified that customer service constitutes the factor with the greatest incidence in the growth of e-commerce, based on the analysis of the neutrosophic statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richer forms of online reviews such as videos or follow‐on reviews convey 'additional information and can attract consumers' attention. However, prior studies focused mostly on the relationship between aggregated online reviews and sales. This paper investigates the impact of online review richness (i.e., reviews containing videos or follow‐on reviews) on sales. Leveraging attribute substitution theory, we conjecture that online review richness can provide heuristic cues in the online shopping environment to help consumers make better purchase decisions. Using data from JD.com, we found that reviews containing either videos or follow‐on reviews positively affect sales. In addition, different product types can also serve as heuristic cues to replace target cues, which can further affect how different forms of online review richness affect sales. We found that the impact of online review richness on sales is stronger for utilitarian products than for hedonic products, and stronger for negatively commented products than for positively commented products. Moreover, we conducted two online experiments and confirmed that the causal relationship is from online review richness to sales. The research findings offer practical implications for online retailers and constitute one of the first steps toward a better understanding of the relationship between online review richness and sales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present dynamic environment, manufacture are required to reduce product development cycle time and enhance product quality. To meet such challenges many business are developing closer relationships with their business partner through application of interorganisational system. Electronic data interchange (EDI) providing a structured form of communication and has become very popular vehicle for electronic communication. Since the EDI concept was popularised in 1990, there is a growing recognition by practitioners and academics. The aim of this study is to perform an analysis of EDI research, give the current discussion regarding the trends and note the suggestions for the future directions of EDI research in the manufacture. In this paper, we provide a wide coverage of excessively citations on EDI from 1990 to 2017 from good references in this area. The papers are classified into EDI implementation strategy, EDI adoption, EDI integration, EDI in supply chain and EDI in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The study results of this literature review are expected to assist development of EDI research especially the implementation of EDI on production outsourcing as one of supply chain activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an exhaustive review of literature on the current developments in internet banking. It provides an overview of the changes as well as the ongoing research on internet banking. To identify relevant works, research databases were searched using 11 keywords. Only research papers on internet banking published in the last 15 years (2002-2016) were selected. The selected articles were further refined on the basis of country of origin, journal type, and research methods used for data analysis. Finally, 51 papers were selected on the basis of specific inclusion criteria for further analysis. These papers were grouped by research themes, and customer satisfaction with internet banking was identified as the most common theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diasporas are some of the determinants leading to the contemporary economic ties between host countries and countries of origin, and among the main forces contributing to the expansion of e-commerce. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact that diaspora communities have on the production and exportation of Baklava, one of the most popular desserts in Lebanon, and illustrating how immigrants are a means by which Lebanese Baklava is now being sold or sent as gifts to the countries of migration. Furthermore, this paper will investigate how the Lebanese pastry sector has tapped into the various Lebanese diaspora communities around the world by creating websites and by employing e-commerce to create a diaspora-market niche. It will also examine how this interrelationship between e-commerce and the Lebanese diaspora, has changed the way of doing business within the pastry sector, exploring its impact on taste, presentation, packaging and various other similar concerns. It will also examine the obstacles faced by the sector in terms of infrastructure cost, as well as shipping cost. Several research methods form the foundation of this paper including: surveys of the top Baklava, exporting patisseries in Lebanon, an analysis of the ecommerce approach of these patisseries, interviews with business owners, legal and ICT experts, as well as government officials regarding the laws that govern the exporting of Lebanese food products and the legal framework involved in such business. The study will contribute to the discourse on the roles that various diasporas play in the development of their countries of origin, and in the global economy as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces how to infer trust relationships from billion-scale networked data to benefit Alibaba E-Commerce business. To effectively leverage the network correlations between labeled and unlabeled relationships to predict trust relationships, we formalize trust into multiple types and propose a graphical model to incorporate type-based dyadic and triadic correlations, namely eTrust. We also present a fast learning algorithm in order to handle billion-scale networks. Systematically, we evaluate the proposed methods on four different genres of datasets with labeled trust relationships: Alibaba, Epinions, Ciao, and Advogato. Experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve significantly better performance than several comparison methods (+1.7-32.3% by accuracy; $p<<0.01$ p < < 0. 01 , with $t$ t -test). Most importantly, when handling the real large networked data with over 1,200,000,000 edges (Ali-large), our method achieves 2,000× speedup to infer trust relationships, comparing with the traditional graph learning algorithms. Finally, we have applied the inferred trust relationships to Alibaba E-commerce platform: Taobao, and achieved 2.75 percent improvement on gross merchandise volume (GMV). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet technology has flourished in India keeping pace with other developing countries. In keeping pace with this advancement, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is also spreading in India. Government of India (GOI) has realised IoT's business prospect and published draft policy on IoT in 2015. To achieve a better result, the prospective users are required to be kept aware regarding the prospect of IoT and for this, social media is expected to play a pivotal role. Social media can highlight advantages of IoT and in turn, these advantages would be made known to other potential users through Word of Month (WOM). This would bring in projection of a new business paradigm as contemplated by GOI. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting actual use of IoT by the potential users of India and to develop a conceptual model. The model has been verified through survey with inputs from 208 participants identified from three metropolitan cities of India. The responses have been quantified through 5-Point Likert scale. The result shows the implication that social media and WOM almost equally influence Indians to use IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-commerce business process nets (EBPNs) are a novel formal model for describing and validating e-commerce systems including interactive parties such as shopper, merchant, and third-party payment platform. Data errors and nondeterminacy of the data states during the trading process can be depicted with the help of EBPNs. However, the problem about how to analyze EBPNs remains largely open. To analyze their data-liveness, data-boundedness, and reachability, this paper presents two analysis methods. For EBPNs, reachability analysis is proposed based on a 3-D incidence matrix method. Additionally, reduction methods are proposed for a special EBPN. Finally, the validity and reliability of the proposed methods are illustrated via the examples of e-commerce systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The opportunity to capture the opinions of the general public about multiple topics such as social events, marketing campaigns, and product preferences has raised more and more interest in the business world. This paper aims to find the users' level of expectation associated with multiple types of opinion. In addition, the study also aims to find the effect of sentiment words on customer satisfaction at the post-purchase stage. In this work, the positive, negative and neutral sentiment words relating to the users' satisfaction were analysed. Firstly, the questionnaire comprising seven sections was proposed to collect data. The study used the expectancy disconfirmation theory (EDT), and a set of seven hypotheses. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM) were used to analyse the data and evaluate the research model. The findings of this study imply that regular, comparative and suggestive opinions have a positive effect in raising users’ expectations. This study also predicted a strong relationship between expectation, performance and disconfirmation. In addition, sentiment words proved to be a full mediator in predicting user satisfaction with a purchased item. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In any competitive business, success is based on the ability to make an item more appealing to customers than the competition. A number of questions arise in the context of this task: how do we formalize and quantify the competitiveness between two items? Who are the main competitors of a given item? What are the features of an item that most affect its competitiveness? Despite the impact and relevance of this problem to many domains, only a limited amount of work has been devoted toward an effective solution. In this paper, we present a formal definition of the competitiveness between two items, based on the market segments that they can both cover. Our evaluation of competitiveness utilizes customer reviews, an abundant source of information that is available in a wide range of domains. We present efficient methods for evaluating competitiveness in large review datasets and address the natural problem of finding the top-k competitors of a given item. Finally, we evaluate the quality of our results and the scalability of our approach using multiple datasets from different domains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Security and privacy policies address consumer concerns related to security and privacy in e-commerce websites. As these policies represent only the vendor’s perspective, often there exists a mismatch between the stated and desired policy. Based on transaction cost theory, we speculate that business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce customers use their transaction cost savings in order to obtain varying levels of security and privacy. These differences are bound to be reflected in the security and privacy policies of e-commerce companies. Therefore, in this paper, we perform a comparative content analysis of the security and privacy policies in B2C and B2B e-commerce. Results show that B2B vendors are more concerned about security than their B2C counterparts, while B2C vendors are anxious about intimacy and restriction privacy. Our findings have important implications for e-commerce consumers and vendors as individual and corporate consumers have varying concerns while transacting online. Individual consumers are concerned about maintaining security and intimacy privacy, whereas corporate users are anxious about regulatory issues. Therefore, B2C vendors should incorporate stringent measures dedicated to confidentiality and protection of consumer data as well as enhance intimacy privacy in their security policies, while their B2B counterparts should focus on enhancing restriction privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper revisited the role of trust in Business to Business Electronic Commerce (B2B EC) settings in Jordan, using an alternative view on trust suggesting that this variable has a moderating effect rather than having a direct impact on the intentions of firms to adopt B2B EC. An interactionist model among trust and technological, organizational, and environmental factors was developed. A survey of 239 supply chain managers in Jordan was used to test the proposed model. Analyzed data shows that the moderating impact of trust was significant in one path, which was perceived desirability (stemming from the diffusion of innovation theory and representing the technological view). Trust did not moderate the impacts of organizational and environmental variables. The findings provided insights into how existing relationships between trading partners may not be flexible enough to absorb new technology. In a context in which trust beliefs are well established and critical such as Jordan, the flexibility of firms in responding to adoption motivations may be hampered rather than enabled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been considered to be fundamental in determining the acceptance of new technology in the past decades. The two beliefs, ease of use and usefulness, in the model may not, however, fully explain the consumers’ behavior in an emerging environment, such as mobile commerce (m-commerce). This paper aims to develop a framework for m-commerce adoption in consumer decision-making processes. In this paper TAM has been adopted and extended to analyze successful m-commerce adoption. The key elements of the proposed confidence-based framework for B2C m-commerce adoption include psychological and behavioral factors. Psychological factors include history-based confidence, institution-based confidence and personality-based confidence. Behavioral factors include perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the mobile application and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to present the initial phase of a study on e-business infusion among SMEs. Currently organisations, in particular Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are in the midst of change. The use of the internet for e-business could be a medium for SMEs to respond to changes in the marketplace. Meanwhile, the adoption of internet by SMEs as a tool to enhance the business process has been slow. This paper provides an overview of the state of SMEs' infusion and a brief description by continent: Africa, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe, North America, and South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic commerce and the Internet have enabled businesses to reduce costs, attain greater market reach, and develop closer partner and customer relationships. However, using the Internet has led to new risks and concerns. This paper provides a management perspective on the issues confronting CIO’s and IT managers: it outlines the current state of the art for security in e-commerce, the important issues confronting managers, security enforcement measure/techniques, and potential threats and attacks. It develops a scheme for probabilistic evaluation of the impact of security threats with some illustrative examples. This methodology may be used to assess the probability of success of attacks on information assets in organizations, and to evaluate the expected damages of these attacks. The paper also outlines some possible remedies, suggested controls and countermeasures. Finally, it proposes the development of cost models which quantify damages of these attacks and the effort of confronting these attacks. The construction of one such cost model for security risk assessment is also outlined. It helps decision makers to select the appropriate choice of countermeasure(s) to minimize damages/losses due to security incidents. Finally, some recommendations for future work are provided to improve the management of security in organizations on the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose reputation oriented reinforcement learning algorithms for buying and selling agents in electronic marketplaces. We consider the fact that the quality of a good offered by multiple selling agents may not be the same, and a selling agent may alter the quality of its goods. In our approach, buying agents learn to avoid the risk of purchasing low quality goods and to maximize their expected value of goods by dynamically maintaining sets of reputable and disreputable sellers. Selling agents learn to maximize their expected profits by adjusting product prices and optionally altering the quality of their goods. This paper focusses on preseining results from experiments investigating the behaviour of an e-market populated with our buying and selling agents. Our results show that such a market can reach an equilibrium state where the agent population remains stable, and this equilibrium is optimal for the participant agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As businesses move to establish closer links with their customers and suppliers in the global marketplace, a new set of requirements is being placed on businesses in sub-Saharan Africa. The rules of commerce are being turned upside down, and for sub-Saharan African businesses to compete, local governments would have to create an enabling Internet and information infrastructure. This paper examines the Internet environment in sub-Saharan Africa and explores what the Internet can do for businesses. It investigates the public policy challenges and implications of the Internet and the emerging e-commerce for sub-Saharan Africa. The paper ends with a discussion and conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the e-Commerce policies developed and implemented in the USA, Canada, Australia, Victoria, Finland, Norway, the UK, Ireland, the EU (by the OECD), Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong (Special Administrative Region). The paper shows that e-Commerce policy adopted is generally trying to achieve two fundamental aims: 1. to minimize regulatory environments for e-Commerce; and 2. to ease logistical problems in doing e-Commerce - i.e. in paying electronically, in delivery of goods and in customs, tariffs and duties. These strategies are designed to create an environment where e-Commerce is adopted by business and government in these countries to achieve 'best practice', to become 'modern', to gain 'efficiencies', because 'it is the way to go', because 'we must have it, because everybody has it', and because they 'perceive the benefits of it'. In essence it is being used to gain hegemony in the economic competitiveness of the geopolitical environment created by the Internet. This paper argues that differentiating types of policy is related to ideology and hegemony in the various countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, online shopping integrating third-party payment platforms (TPPs) introduces new security challenges due to complex interactions between Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of Merchants and TPPs. Malicious clients may exploit security vulnerabilities by calling APIs in an arbitrary order or playing various roles. To deal with the security issue in the early stages of system development, this paper presents a formal method for modeling and verification of online shopping business processes with malicious behavior patterns considered based on Petri nets. We propose a formal model called E-commerce Business Process Net to model a normal online shopping business process that represent intended functions, and malicious behavior patterns representing a potential attack that violates the security goals at the requirement analysis phase. Then, we synthesize the normal business process and malicious behavior patterns by an incremental modeling method. According to the synthetic model, we analyze whether an online shopping business process is resistant to the known malicious behavior patterns. As a result, our approach can make the software design provably secured from the malicious attacks at process design time and, thus, reduces the difficulty and cost of modification for imperfect systems at the release phase. We demonstrate our approach through a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of businesses and consumers talk about, invest, and engage in social commerce, which is a form of commerce mediated by social media. Despite the growing recognition and adoption of social commerce, its practice is often driven by fast-paced technological evolutions, hype, and ad-hoc business cases. In parallel, social commerce has been the target of limited scientific inquiries, and it remains ill conceived, which constitutes an obstacle to theory development and cumulative research. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a focus on social commerce networks (SCNs). SCNs refer to the digital network ties created and leveraged by consumers and business entities as they connect and interact among and between each other. Based on this definition, the paper develops a typology of key SCN structures, and it proposes a framework depicting the value that consumers and businesses can gain from creating and exploiting them. We explain how the proposed SCN concept, typology, and framework can guide future conversations on the topic of social commerce, and how they can provide researchers and practitioners with a better understanding of social commerce and its considerable value potential. • Social commerce involves digital networks composed of consumers and business entities. • Social commerce networks (SCNs) are proposed as a new anchor to study social commerce. • Social commerce value relies on consumers and businesses developing and exploiting SCNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As technology further expands, the relationship between customers and organizations becomes even more idiomatic, as witnessed by personalized recommendations on websites and applications such as Amazon, Google, and Netflix. Through a service-dominant logic lens, this paper examines the effects of perceived personalization when using augmented reality (AR) and web-based stores on customers' intentions to co-create value. We utilize an experimental design whereby participants would either use the IKEA Place AR application or visit the IKEA website. This is then followed by a survey to a) compare AR and website-based shopping attitudes, b) explore the role of personalization on intentions to co-create as well as the moderating influence of perceived value and c) investigate the mediating influence of customer perceived trust and risk on the relationship between perceived personalization and intention to co-create. Employing SEM, our findings show that perceived personalization significantly predicts value co-creation intention for website-based shopping, but not for AR-powered shopping. Additionally, the results show that trust and risk mediate the relationship between perceived personalization and intention to co-create value within the AR group with perceived value moderating the relationship between perceived personalization and risk, but not between personalization and trust. Our study is one of the first to explore the impact of personalization on intentions to co-create value and to compare perceptions of personalization between shopping through web-based stores and AR technology. Moreover, the results of this study highlight the importance of perceived risk, perceived trust, and perceived value, on customer intention to co-create. The practical implications for these findings assist managers in developing omnichannel marketing strategies while the theoretical implications contribute to the AR, technology, and co-creation literature by offering insights into the unique role of perceived personalization on AR technology and web-based store shopping via website-based retailing. • Perceived personalization leads to heightened perceptions of risk and trust in both AR, and online environments. • Perceived trust and risk fully mediate perceived personalization and intention to co-create within AR shopping. • Perceived trust partially mediates perceived personalization and intention to co-create within online shopping. • Perceived value moderates the relationship between perceived personalization and risk but not trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to their rapid development, services are increasing rapidly in quantity. The consequence is that there are so many services that share the same or similar functions. Therefore, it is important to select a credible and optimal service. Reputation as one of the important parameters of services plays a significant role in the decision support for service selection. This paper proposes a novel two-phase method to calculate service reputation. The first phase uses a dynamic weight formula to calculate reputation such that it can reflect the latest tendency of a service. The second one uses an olfactory response formula to mitigate the negative effect of unfair ratings. Some experiments are conducted and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet has become integral part of day-to-day business to almost everybody, this result in diversified interests of customers. So as to catering to this intrinsic need, any E-Commerce firm to survive must be of cutting edge and competitive edge. The providers should not only to stay abreast with technologies where the life cycle of a technology is at its bare minimum and further dwindling They should also entertain the customers through inventively fine tuning the delicate parameters of website. This involves evaluating the usage pattern and trails of the customer left as a log, deriving pattern from click stream etc. However, the cutting edge technology applied by the big healthcare E-Commerce industries like private Cloud utilization (John et al., Optimization and Computing, 2012), web content mining enables them to attract and retain innumerable number of customers even during peak hours. According to the research carried out in this paper, there are two distinct types of online business based on web content promoted towards buy, they are classified as exhaustive promote and partial promote. Typically exhaustive promote website perform even complex web mining operations for identifying and enticing the potential customers to buy various healthcare products based on various factors such as buying habits, interests etc. However for the partial promote in the observed cases, they are not even aware of the existence of such techniques. Based on the analysis performed on various renounced online websites, if 60% and above of the web content leads the customer to perform the 'buy, then it is exhaustive promote the rest is considered as partial promote. Moreover a huge gap is observed between Partial and exhaustive promote when it comes to the deployment of the web mining techniques. Consequently to understand the varying role of web mining in the online business successes, this paper models the web mining as a Game in Cournot Model. The results show that the model suits the economics behind the online businesses in both the cases and thus helps to identify or enhance the underlying web mining techniques towards business success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rotterdam Rules is the first international maritime carriage of goods Convention that officially acknowledges electronic records of contracts of carriage and has devoted a sep-arate chapter to their regulation. This paper aims to assess the impact of the Rotterdam Rules on facilitating the conclusion of maritime contracts electronically. Whether articles 8 and 10 of the Rotterdam Rules provide an effective mechanism for electronic cargo doc-umentation, and in which ways will be investigated. Where the impact of these provisions of the Rotterdam Rules on electronic commerce is judged unsatisfactory more efficient and trustworthy ways of transforming the Rules to make them a more effective springboard for paperless trade will be suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service is about value cocreation between customers and providers. Cocreation builds on human networking: people connecting fluidly with each other as customers, providers, and resources to pursue common values. This paper develops a new analysis of service value networks, building on a previously presented hypernetwork model to study how people can scale their value cocreation up to span the entire population (domain), down to meet individual needs, and transformationally to breed new business designs. The new analysis reflects the convergence of social networks and e-commerce, and the evolution of physical products toward incorporating services to users into them (such as the apps and digital resources on the iPod, iPhone, and iPad). The hypernetwork model analyzes human networks that overlay multidimensionally, such as the Internet community itself. These properties extend the previous research results on random graphs and semiregular networks. A simulation study helps verify the hypernetworking analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines some of the impacts of the widespread adoption and use of the Internet in advanced countries on business, consumers and the media. It is argued that while capital costs of entry into Internet-based businesses may be very low, this does not guarantee that markets in which such firms operate will necessarily be hotly contested, for success may require substantial sunk costs to be incurred in development. It explores the changing nature of market institutions associated with the rise of e-commerce (including the advent of what are labelled 'portal' firms) and associated changes in the division of labour between buyers, sellers and intermediaries. The authors provide behavioural, evolutionary, and information theoretic perspectives on these dynamic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisations are now turning their attention to business-to-employee (B2E) e-business systems upon exploiting the potentials of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) aspects of e-business. The business literature and IT vendors-owned publications both contain many stories highlighting the benefits that organisations are likely to receive as a result of embracing B2E e-business systems. However, little is reported in the scholarly academic literature about the adoption of such systems. More specifically, it is not clearly known how organisations experience benefits, what impediments they encounter, and how they resolve those impediments associated with B2E systems adoption. To address this gap in the literature, this paper presents the experiences of two large Australian universities in introducing two different types of B2E e-business systems, and reports on the findings about their views on benefits experienced and impediments encountered. The implications of the findings are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the recent years, the use of e-commerce tools in construction has been on the increase. The benefits of using these tools on construction projects have been well documented in research and industry publications. Studies have shown that the construction industry recognises the potential for the use of e-commerce. However, the use of these tools is still not common within the industry and the uptake of e-commerce technology in the UK construction industry has been relatively slow. Implementation of any new technology such as e-commerce for achieving business targets requires major changes in an organisation, its current practices, systems, processes and workflows. Taking this into account, construction companies who are currently using, and those who have yet to use e-commerce tools need to take measures to successfully adopt and use this technology. It is important for companies that seek to adopt e-commerce tools to analyse their businesses to ensure a productive and beneficial implementation of these tools (i.e. measure their ‘e-readiness’ for adopting e-commerce tools). To address this need an e-readiness assessment model and a prototype application were developed. This paper describes the development and implementation of VERDICT, an e-readiness assessment prototype application for construction companies. VERDICT assesses the e-readiness of construction companies in terms of their management, people, processes and technology, and presents the readiness results in both textual and graphical formats. It also provides companies with the potential to compare their e-readiness against that of the ‘best-of-breed’. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Virtual negotiations are expected to differ from face-to-face negotiations in terms of both negotiator behavior and outcomes. Nonetheless, competing theories and mixed results characterize this literature. This paper meta-analytically reviews studies that compared face-to-face negotiation with virtual negotiation (e.g., audio, email/text, video-conferencing). Competing predictions from psychological distance theory and the barrier effect perspective were tested. Overall, results supported the psychological distance theory in that face-to-face negotiations were less hostile and resulted in higher profit than virtual negotiations. Three moderators (negotiation mode, anonymity in virtual negotiation, and further interaction within the experiment) were hypothesized to impact virtual negotiation. While some moderators were significant, they did not completely account for findings across all studies. Results and discussion provide a note of caution for individuals embracing e-business and conducting Internet negotiations as well as suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a neo­Gramscian perspective can provide useful explanatory insights into the recent commercialization of the Internet. Governments, notably in the USA and Europe, have taken action to shape and smooth this transition in response to the desire of business to exploit a new commercial opportunity. A series of measures has been enacted in relatively new international fora whose general aim is to promote the development of international production and trade. There is evidence of concerted efforts aimed at designing an interconnected regulatory framework within which global electronic commerce might evolve. Governmental interests have attempted to promote the ethos of a new liberalized, self-regulatory system that prioritizes commercial and trademark interests of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many E-commerce systems for construction material procurement were developed to improve business process, to cut administration cost, and to provide more comprehensive information. Currently these E-commerce systems are owned and operated by many different parties like manufacturers, suppliers, agents and application services providers. These E-commerce systems are non-interoperable which create problems and difficulties for the buyers who use these systems to purchase construction materials. This paper first introduces the application of E-commerce in construction material procurement and then discusses problems of non-interoperable E-commerce systems and benefits of information sharing between them. Two state-of-the-art information technologies, mobile agent and Web services, for enabling information sharing between E-commerce systems are introduced. The system architecture and functions of a prototype system (named E-Union), which utilizes Web services technology to provide information sharing between construction material E-commerce systems, are presented. System evaluation and future works are discussed in the last part. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The corporate Web site is an indispensable part of any e-commerce venture. If users find it difficult to do electronic transactions, they will visit another online source, or go to a physical source instead. Evaluating the performance of e-commerce Web sites has received some attention in the past few years, but there is still a pressing need for a more comprehensive approach. This paper attempts to address this need by providing an e-commerce Web site evaluation framework and method built on solid business principles, and using multidimensional scaling to analyse evaluation data and present the results in a graphic manner for easy interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Churn management is a fundamental concern for businesses and the emergence of the digital economy has made the problem even more acute. Companies' initiatives to handle churn and customers' profitability issues have been directed to more customer-oriented strategies. In this paper, we present a customer relationship management framework based on the integration of the electronic channel. This framework is constituted of four tools that should provide an appropriate collection, treatment and analysis of data. From this perspective, we pay special attention to some of the latest data mining developments which, we believe, are destined to play a central role in churn management. Relying on sensitivity analysis, we propose an analysis framework able to prefigure the possible impact induced by the ongoing data mining enhancements on churn management and on the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power has become an important contextual factor in electronic commerce adoption. Persuading trading partners can mean using persuasive power. Hence, the way power is used to influence trading partners will determine the extent to which trust is encouraged during the adoption and integration process. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the impact of power in EDI adoption. The findings of a case study within an automotive manufacturer indicate that negative (coercive) power left smaller suppliers in a situation of uncertainty, and even conflict, whereas positive (persuasive) power resulted in open communications between smaller suppliers and their buyers, thus building trading partner trust and long-term trading relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approach and avoidance are typical behavioral tendencies of consumers when exposed to a new environment. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, this study investigates the effects of atmospheric cues on consumers' approach and avoidance intentions in social commerce environments. We elucidate the interaction mechanisms between atmospheric cues (task, aesthetic and social cues) and consumers' evaluations through the lens of perceived affordances. Then we investigate how three types of perceived affordances (utilitarian, hedonic and connective) influence consumers' approach and avoidance behavioral intentions. A three-way factorial experiment provides strong evidence that task cues, aesthetic cues and social cues elicit perceived utilitarian, hedonic and connective affordances, respectively. Approach behavioral intentions were affected by all three types of perceived affordances, yet avoidance intentions were only affected by perceived utilitarian and hedonic affordances. This paper discusses both theoretical and practical implications for social commerce research. • Different types of atmospheric cues stimulate perceived affordances differently. • More task cues induces a higher level of perceived utilitarian affordances. • The presence of aesthetic cues induces perceive hedonic affordances. • The presence of social cues induces perceive connective affordances. • Approach and avoidance intentions are influenced by different perceived affordances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses the papers in the issue addressing website quality and usability.