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Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) constitute a large and important sector of the US and UK economies and e-commerce platforms have evolved that are designed specifically to help small business owners and entrepreneurs. Despite the popularity and importance of these digital platforms, there is a paucity of research in this area. This paper contributes to theory by being the first study to map out the competitive landscape of SME ecommerce platforms in two markets using a theoretical framework and analysis that is based on business model and strategic group theories. In total, 144 platforms were analyzed using an online panel data methodology, which identified 32 leading SME e-commerce platforms in the UK and US. These leading platforms were analyzed at the market level using cluster analysis based on strategic group theory and website content analysis. A taxonomy is proposed based on theoretical constructs derived from business model theory: value proposition; Web 2.0 sophistication; and revenue model. Five distinctive strategic groups are identified: information laggards; basic networking; advanced networking; advanced networking mature and social media markets. The paper further outlines managerial implications for SMEs, SME e-commerce platform providers and external sponsors of the platforms, which are predominantly Government organizations and banks.

The research described in this paper builds on process theory and the resource-based view to examine the business value of process sharing in supply chains. Extending the two-stage model developed to define firm-level IT value, a measurement system is designed for assessing five business values resulting from process sharing: direct and indirect technological value, direct and indirect process value, and relationship value. To ensure that these business values can be fully realized on the firm level, the paper examines the relationship between them and firm performance and the moderating role of collaboration levels. An empirical study conducted in the context of the RosettaNet process-sharing initiative in the high-technology industry supply chain finds that (1) improving supply chain relationships can increase firm performance as much as business processes can; (2) improving indirect values can create greater firm performance than improving direct values, and (3) value conversion is more effective at high levels of collaboration. This valuation framework contributes to the literature by confirming the range of business values offered by process sharing and also by showing which value is of primary importance to firms in their business decisions. The findings will guide firms in identifying key value components, targeting those that can lead to higher firm performance, and enhancing collaboration levels to improve the value conversion.

The Internet presents an ever-shifting landscape for consumers to navigate. Links that exist one day may be gone the next, only to be replaced by new sets of connections among organizations. This study addresses the question of how an organization's positioning in a particular set of links on the Web might bias consumers' later judgment of its trustworthiness. The study suggests that the particular set of links a consumer faces in navigating toward an organization constitutes a context for the encounter with that organization and may have a significant impact on the way the consumer judges the company after interacting with its Web site. The paper develops and tests hypotheses that argue for the priming effect of context. Results of an experimental study provide evidence that unfamiliar companies may benefit from an overall assimilation effect when a link to their sites is surrounded by links to more familiar organizations, and familiar organizations may benefit from a contrast effect when inexperienced consumers see their company link surrounded by links to unfamiliar companies. The paper extends prior models on the determinants of consumers' on-line trust by examining concepts from priming theory. The conclusions suggest that practitioners should be aware of the context in which links to their sites are placed.

This paper addresses the problem of how to represent exception-handling provisions in automated knowledge-based e-contracts. In many natural language contracts, such provisions constitute the majority of the contract volume. The paper makes three novel contributions. (1) The rule-based SweetDeal e-contracting approach is extended to incorporate ontology knowledge (specifically, ontologies about business processes), and an application scenario about late delivery in manufacturing supply-chain management shows how it can be used to represent provisions for exception-handling. The contract rules are represented in the Situated Courteous Logic Programs knowledge representation encoded in RuleML, the leading approach to Semantic Web rules. The process ontologies are represented in description logic encoded in DAML+OIL, close predecessor of W3C's OWL, the leading approach to semantic Web ontologies. This system is the first to combine these emerging semantic Web standards with one another and for a practical e-business application domain. (2) A simple new technical mechanism for the semantic Web is presented that integrates ontology knowledge with rule knowledge: Rule predicates are defined by reference to ontological classes or properties. (3) Process ontology knowledge drawn from the MIT Process Handbook, a large repository used by practical industrial process designers, is represented in DAML+OIL/OWL, and some of this knowledge is formalized and used for the e-contracting application scenario. Stated more generally, the approach in this paper provides a foundation for representing and automating deals about services--in particular, for helping to search, select, and compose semantic Web services.

The trading of learning objects, with a specific focus on using rights information for e-commerce, is destined to provide the much-promised return-on-investment needs of the e-learning community. This paper proposes a rights-expression language for use in the e-commerce trading of learning materials and demonstrates it in a national project. The paper highlights the need for technology standards for learning object description, packaging, commerce, and digital rights management to enable the open and interoperable commerce of learning objects.

There has been a significant investment in e-business initiatives in recent years. Leveraging the growth of the Internet, worldwide commerce on the Internet topped $1.3 trillion in 2003. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, on-line spend ing was 35 percent higher during the 2003 holiday season than in 2002 [5]. Senior managers concerned about falling behind the technology curve are in terested in investing in information technology (IT) infrastructures to make their organizations e-business enabled. E-business initiatives, however, must compete with other business projects for funding. It is incumbent on the re search community to provide the business community with objective evidence that a well-planned and well-executed e-business initiative will provide ben efits to a business entity. Demonstrating the benefits of dynamic and unpre dictable e-business technology is, however, a challenging proposition. Research on the business value of IT investment has provided significant insights in the context of the traditional brick-and-mortar economy [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7], but the e-business investment and performance area is still nascent, and more progress is needed, especially with regard to tools, techniques, and ap proaches for evaluating e-business initiatives. This Special Issue of I/EC, con sisting of seven papers, taken together with the Special Section of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS, 21, 1 [summer 2004]), consisting of four papers, makes a significant contribution to the ongoing debate about the value of e-business investment by shedding new light on business experience with e-business initiatives. The research studies presented in these publica tions offer new insights that move this important research area to a new level of inquiry. They focus on critical dimensions of the e-business-investment payoff question. Selected from many manuscripts submitted by authors within and without the United States, these 11 papers collectively exemplify the study of this critical question. We believe that they will ignite further research in the area. We introduce below the research papers included in this Special Issue. Please also see the JMIS Special Section. Leading off the Special Issue is a paper by Mahmood, Bagchi, and Ford. As they observe, e-commerce is a worldwide phenomenon, but it is usually stud ied at the national level. Their research, they claim, is one of the first studies based on international data. Using data from 26 nations, they test the ways that on-line shopping behavior is affected by on-line shoppers' trust, techno logical savvy, demographics, and lifestyle characteristics. The paper identi fies the factors that predict global on-line shopping behavior. A structural

With the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, including mobile phones, PDAs, and handheld computers, mobile commerce is widely considered to be a driving force for next-generation e-commerce. Many attempted m-commerce applications have failed to meet expectations, however, with the notable exceptions of I-Mode in Japan and the explosive growth of Short Messaging Service in China. It is important to understand why promising technologies fail and what factors contribute to their failure. This paper proposes a fit-viabilit y framework for assessing the likely success or failure of m-commerce applications. For fit, criteria for measurement are identified based on task-technology fit theory. For viabilit y, financial and managerial criteria are identified. The papers in this Special Issue address factors related to the framework, and m-commerce applications in procurement and travel agencies, to demonstrate its value.

This paper aims to predict consumer acceptance of e-commerce by proposing a set of key drivers for engaging consumers in on-line transactions. The primary constructs for capturing consumer acceptance of e-commerce are intention to transact and on-line transaction behavior. Following the theory of reasoned action (TRA) as applied to a technology-driven environment, technology acceptance model (TAM) variables (perceived usefulness and ease of use) are posited as key drivers of e-commerce acceptance. The practical utility of TAM stems from the fact that e-commerce is technology-driven. The proposed model integrates trust and perceived risk, which are incorporated given the implicit uncertainty of the e-commerce environment. The proposed integration of the hypothesized independent variables is justified by placing all the variables under the nomological TRA structure and proposing their interrelationships. The resulting research model is tested using data from two empirical studies. The first, exploratory study comprises three experiential scenarios with 103 students. The second, confirmatory study uses a sample of 155 on-line consumers. Both studies strongly support the e-commerce acceptance model by validating the proposed hypotheses. The paper discusses the implications for e-commerce theory, research, and practice, and makes several suggestions for future research.

Customization and personalization services are a critical success factor for Internet stores and Web service providers. This paper studies personalized recommendation techniques that suggest products or services to the customers of Internet storefronts based on their demographics or past purchasing behavior. The underlining theories of recommendation techniques are statistics, data mining, artificial intelligence, and rule-based matching. In the rule-based approach to personalized recommendation, marketing rules for personalization are usually obtained from marketing experts and used to perform inferencing based on customer data. However, it is difficult to extract marketing rules from marketing experts, and to validate and maintain the constructed knowledge base. This paper proposes a marketing rule-extraction technique for personalized recommendation on Internet storefronts using machine learning techniques, and especially decisiontree induction techniques. Using tree induction techniques, data-mining tools can generate marketing rules that match customer demographics to product categories. The extracted rules provide personalized advertisement selection when a customer visits an Internet store. An experiment is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with preference scoring and random selection.

Many Internet applications do not fully utilize the unique nature of the Web, which in its purest form involves interactive, personalized information service. The true nature of the Web, here termed e-service, will be the key to marketing most effectively to the consumer, for it is the logical continuation of a 100-year trend toward information service in the economy. This paper examines the aspects of e-service that are critical in effectively interacting with consumers in interactive, networked information environments like the Internet. It discusses three central changes brought about by the advent of the Internet (true interactivity with the consumer, customer-specific, situational personalization, and the opportunity for real-time adjustments to a firm's offering to customers), as well as changes in consumer expectations regarding firm service strategies that flow from these developments. Based upon these changes in technology and consumer expectations, important elements of the e-service experience are defined. The paper concludes by showing how e-service strategies will play a significant role in growing the overall value of the firm. In each of these areas, a set of research questions is proposed that will lead to a stronger understanding of e-service and consumer behavior.

The conventional system of paper checkbooks with multiple checks carries a significant risk of default because no form of authorization is required when individual checks are written, although implicitly each checkbook is authorized when it is issued to the payer. Nonetheless, checks are a less expensive payment method than credit cards, so they are suitable for a high-credit business environment. To make up for the defect in the paper check system, whereby checks likely to default can be issued without authorization, the authors have devised an agent-based electronic check system known as SafeCheck that can monitor the situation and block the issuance of nonallowable checks in a distributed manner. Three types of service are allowed, depending upon the check issuer's credibility. Members of the top credit class require authorization only for each checkbook. Members of the second-level credit class require authorization for each check. Members of the third-level credit class are allowed to issue checks only within their checking account balance. The bank can dynamically adjust the credit level depending upon the record of defaults. The SafeCheck System consists of three agents: Checkbook Agent at the check issuer's site, Check-Receipt Agent at the check receiver's site, and the bank's Control Agents at the check issuer's and receiver's banks respectively. For security purposes, SafeCheck has public key cryptography, digital signatures, and certificate schemes like those of the SET protocol for credit cards. The essence of a checkbook agent can be stored in the IC card.

The development in the late 1980s of two-dimensional bar code symbols capable of storing kilobytes of information in a single symbol and unlimited data in multiple symbols has led to the suggestion that the bar code could be used as a medium for transmitting electronic data interchange (EDI) messages. This paper considers whether this suggestion targets any real business problem and whether such a system would work in practice. The transmission of shipment information between suppliers and customers was identified as a potential application of bar code EDI. Problems arising from lack of synchrony between the electronic message and physical delivery are encountered with conventional EDI approaches, and these problems become especially acute in a just-in-time replenishment environment. This paper reports the results of three studies to address the organizational, technical, and practical feasibility of bar code EDI.

Information technology (IT) has been able to transform the way many business transactions are organized. Mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing, and divestitures are all well-known changes that have resulted from the ability of IT to change the way organizations monitor and coordinate activities. This paper investigates actual and potential changes at the interface between the private and public sectors due to the introduction of IT. Governments, finding themselves with commercially valuable stores of data and software, are beginning to exhibit entrepreneurial characteristics. In other cases, the introduction of IT has created pressures for the privatization of activities previously operated by governments. The introduction of IT has the potential to change the way citizens participate in governments at all levels. This paper surveys these issues and identifies the pressures that would, in the absence of constraints, lead to the conduct of activities in the private or public sector. Finally, the paper examines factors that impede the natural progression toward more desirable organizational forms through the application of IT.

The recent financial network analysis approach reveals that the topologies of financial markets have an important influence on market dynamics. However, the majority of existing Finance Big Data networks are built as undirected networks without information on the influence directions among prices. Rather than understanding the correlations, this research applies the Granger causality test to build the Granger Causality Directed Network for 33 global major stock market indices. The paper further analyzes how the markets influence one another by investigating the directed edges in the different filtered networks. The network topology that evolves in different market periods is analyzed via a sliding window approach and Finance Big Data visualization. By quantifying the influences of market indices, 33 global major stock markets from the Granger causality network are ranked in comparison with the result based on PageRank centrality algorithm. Results reveal that the ranking lists are similar in both approaches where the U.S. indices dominate the top position followed by other American, European, and Asian indices. The lead-lag analysis reveals that there is lag effects among the global indices. The result sheds new insights on the influences among global stock markets with implications for trading strategy design, global portfolio management, risk management, and markets regulation.

The Seybold Group suggests that customer relationship management is more than the quality management of the past. It has become the framework for establishing and building relationships with customers. The six papers accepted for this minitrack provide frameworks and models to analyze and build better customer relationships. N. Jukic, B. Jukic, L. Meamber, and G. Nezlek in their paper Improving E-Business Customer Relationship Management Systems with Multilevel Secure Data Models suggest that customer relationship management systems are characterized by many shortcomings. Multilevel secure data models can be used to address sharing and managing these large information systems. Several advantages of such implementations are addressed along with examples. M. Khalifa and V. Liu in their paper Satisfaction with Internet-based Services integrate satisfaction as studied by IS and marketing researchers and apply it to the Internet in contrast to the traditional channels. The developed model was tested empirically through a longitudinal survey study. The results suggest that the three major constructs are significant predictors of customer satisfaction of online services. K Kimery and M. McCord in Third-Party Assurances: the Road to Trust in Online Retailing develop a model describing the relationship between trust, perceived risk and the intent to purchase online. A study was then conducted using an online survey with 164 university business students. The results support the basic model.

Virtually all sources on service recovery stress the importance of offering an apology to complaining customers. To date, however, our understanding of who should offer the apology, and how to offer the apology is still limited. Taking a cross-cultural perspective, Study 1 shows that Eastern customers attach more value to a manager (vis-à-vis a frontline employee) offering an apology than Western customers in an offline retailing context, but not in an online retailing context. In an online setting, study 2 further extends these insights by showing that the status of service personnel matters for Eastern customers, but only if the apology is provided publicly on social media and not if the apology is provided online privately. Global e-commerce managers can benefit from these findings when developing their service recovery strategies. By demonstrating that recovery strategies that are proposed and tested in offline are non- transferrable to online, this paper provides a clearer understanding of service recovery across online and offline channels. Based on face theory, this research highlights the public versus private nature of an apology in a global, online retailing context thus contributing to the emerging research in online service recovery. ispartof: International Journal of Electronic Commerce vol:22 issue:3 pages:419-445 status: published

Adoption of B2B e-commerce is a powerful driver of economic success in developed and developing countries. However, adoption rates in developing countries lag far behind. This paper draws on the Perceived eReadiness Model and research on the influence of inter-organizational relationships and economic-cultural contexts to explain the importance of three factors—inter-organizational power dependence, cooperativeness, and regional economic-cultural differences—for achieving higher levels of Internet-based Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) in the developing country of China. We employ survey data to empirically test both the individual and joint influence of these factors. The findings suggest that beyond intra-organizational and external factors, managers and policy makers wanting to promote Internet-based EDI adoption in developing countries must also account for the inter-organizational relationships of firms and the economic and cultural circumstances of the regions in which they operate.

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between performance and use of brand terms in the key phrases that link advertisements to searcher queries. We use data that consist of more than 2.5 million daily records from a key word advertising campaign of a major U.S. retailer. The campaign spanned nearly four years, involved approximately $8 million in advertising cost, and generated more than $23 million in sales. We categorize key phrases and advertisements as either brand focused or non-brand focused. Using analysis of variance in a 2 ii¾? 2 design, we analyze use of branded terms on the critical key word advertising metrics of number of clicks, cost per click, sales revenue generated, number of orders, number of items ordered, and return on advertising cost, as well as number of impressions triggered by these key phrases. Therefore, we investigate a significant spectrum of user actions and consumer behaviors in a sponsored search campaign. Our findings show that there is a significant advantage to matching branding terms in key phrases and advertisements relative to any other combination of key phrase or advertisement for all the metrics examined. A combination of a branded phrase and a branded advertisement generated 15 times more sales revenue than any other combination of phrase and advertisement. Therefore, a focus by key word advertisers on branded terms for search engine ads could be quite beneficial for both the effectiveness and efficiency of key word advertising. The implication for online advertising and key word search in the e-commerce domain, especially for large retailers, is that brand mentions in both key phrase and advertisements correlate with higher conversions.

Effective consumer participation (CP) may greatly determine the success of an online community of consumption (OCC). Drawing on theories of organizational citizenship behavior, this paper offers a conceptualization of CP and classifies participation into in-role and extra-role types. An integrated framework based on the concept of customer participation and online community management is proposed and tested with a survey of 469 respondents to explore the antecedents of CP in OCCs. The results show that the effectiveness of online community management, cooperative norms, technology readiness, and perceived benefits of participation all significantly affect in-role and extra-role CP. The findings also reveal that in-role participation is primarily determined by the effectiveness of online community management, whereas extra-role participation is mainly affected by perceived benefits of participation. In addition, effectiveness of online community management positively influences cooperative norms and perceived benefits of participation. This study sheds some new light on the characteristics of CP in OCCs by demonstrating that the OCC users differentiate their in-role participation from extra-role participation. The findings pertaining to the drivers of CP also offer guidelines for managing the two types of participative behavior, which are both vital for the sustainability and success of OCCs.

The virtual community (VC) delivers an intangible service for social interactivity among its members. In many instances, social interaction is a key determinant of members' continual patronage of the VC, but until now VC loyalty has been studied mostly from a managerial perspective. This paper investigates VC loyalty from the perspective of interpersonal interaction among group members, treating interpersonal attraction and influence as antecedents to loyalty. It finds that the three interpersonal attraction factors (perceived familiarity, perceived similarity, perceived expertise) have a positive effect, direct or indirect, on VC loyalty via the mediation of normative influence. In addition to their implications for the academic study of VC loyalty, the results help explain the success of VCs like Facebook, because the design of these successful social media is consistent with the principles studied in this research. Interpersonal interaction factors also provide insights into the design and branding strategies of social media. VC managers are advised to design and brand the community site by facilitating member interaction because frequent member interaction promotes interpersonal attraction and influence, which in turn enhances member loyalty and ultimately builds the brand.

The paper presents a factorization-based approach to make predictions in recommender systems. These systems are widely used in electronic commerce to help customers find products according to their preferences. Taking into account the customer's ratings of some products available in the system, the recommender system tries to predict the ratings the customer would give to other products in the system. The proposed factorization-based approach uses all the information provided to compute the predicted ratings, in the same way as approaches based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The main advantage of this technique versus SVD-based approaches is that it can deal with missing data. It also has a smaller computational cost. Experimental results with public data sets are provided to show that the proposed adapted factorization approach gives better predicted ratings than a widely used SVD-based approach.

Active interactions and relationships among members are crucial to the success of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce. Prior studies have rarely articulated the relationship between the social interactions among members and their loyalty to the C2C platform provider. This paper differentiates two types of trust in C2C e-commerce-mutual trust among members and members' trust in the platform provider-and then proposes that trust in the platform provider mediates the relation between mutual trust and loyalty to the platform provider. A study using a sample from Chinese C2C Web sites shows that information interaction and emotional interaction both boost mutual trust among members, which in turn boosts their trust in and loyalty to the platform provider. For platform providers, the findings suggest a strategic route to building members' loyalty in a competitive market.

A Web site's conversion rate (the proportion of visitors who complete a desired action) is an important competitive metric. Web retailers invest significant effort in managing functionalities that can attract and convert visitors. Retailers' decisions are often based on tradition or simply follow competitors' efforts. The absence of an informed decision-making process usually leads to significant overlap in marketing efforts and investment in functionalities. This paper uses the two-step clustering algorithm to profile Web retailers in terms of Web site functionalities and Web performance metrics using data on the top 500 U. S. Web retailers ranked by their 2006 annual sales. The study finds an essential set of functionalities and indicates the presence of complementarities among sets of functionalities associated with significantly different rates of conversion and monthly visitation. It also finds different profiles for Web-only retailers versus those that have traditional channels in addition to the Web. These results may be useful for retailers in their decisions on providing Web site functionalities and in managing their conversion rates and other related metrics.

As a community-based innovation, the open source software (OSS) development phenomenon has received great attention from researchers and practitioners. Understanding the factors that affect the involvement and contributions of participants in OSS projects is of significance to facilitate project success. This paper investigates the effects of motivation on participant performance in OSS projects, drawing upon self-determination theory to examine how task effort (i. e., effort intensity and goal commitment) mediates the relationships between a spectrum of motivations and individual performance. The research model is supported by survey data from 204 participants in OSS projects. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed.

Many firms are transforming themselves from vertically integrated organizations into digitally enabled organizations. As firms become more innovative in their technical infrastructures and more competitive in their respective industries/verticals, their extended enterprise models include using their previous enterprise resource planning (ERP) investments as foundations for prioritizing additions and for longer-term strategies. The key issue for many firms is how to leverage their ERP implementation to become better partners and collaborators by enabling digital options to exploit business opportunities. This paper ascertains the contextual conditions under which ERP system implementations have the greatest impact on intention to adopt digital options. Using empirical data, it finds that the impact of ERP implementation on digital-options adoption intention is moderated by a firm's digital-resource readiness. For information systems (IS) practice, the study suggests that firms should view ERP divisibility as an option value generator for supporting new customers and revenue opportunities. For IS research, it relates digital-options theory to specific measurable constructs and to the firm's digital-resource readiness. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Benchmarking is a critical activity in Web site development and has been employed for requirement analysis in a variety of Web site renewal and development projects. By comparing their current Web site with competitors' cutting-edge sites, managers can attain improvement in quality. Despite the importance and popularity of benchmarking, however, the literature sheds little light on the incorporation of its techniques into Web site improvement methodologies. This paper proposes a benchmarking-based requirement analysis methodology coupled with a goal-driven approach. The methodology works through three phases-elicitation, analysis, and specification-to seamlessly link business requirements to implementation details. Use cases are employed to capture functional requirements. Web sites are investigated in terms of usability to sharpen nonfunctional requirements. The usefulness of the methodology is demonstrated by applying it to improve a real-life Web site.

The on-line advertising industry is based on two dominant business models: pay-per-impression and pay-per-click. The growth of sponsored search has fostered a move to the pay-per-click model because it is less risky for small advertisers. An alternative model, discussed but not widely used in the advertising industry, is pay-per-conversion, or more generally, pay-per-action. This paper discusses the challenges of designing mechanisms for the pay-per-action model and approaches to tackle some of them.

Click fraud occurs when a Web user clicks on a sponsored link with the malicious intent of hurting a competitor or gaining undue monetary benefits. Advertisers and the media accuse search engines of not doing enough to curb this practice. This paper develops a game-theoretical model of click fraud in a publisher network that sheds light on the economic trade-offs search engines face. On the supply side, search engines try to create incentives for publishers to generate clicks honestly and to reward honest publishers who generate legitimate clicks. The negative strategic effect of undercounting invalid clicks deters the search engine from undercounting. Since better filtering is beneficial to search engines, publishers, and advertisers, search engines have an incentive to invest in filtering technology.

It is important for electronic transactions to be fair because customers and merchants cannot interact face-to-face. Several proposed fair transaction protocols deal adequately with the fairness issue but not with the equally critical matters of customer anonymity and privacy. This paper proposes a novel fair transaction protocol based on electronic cash that achieves both anonymity and fairness. Utilizing an off-line trusted third party (TTP), the protocol is efficient and practical. The customer's anonymity and privacy are protected because payment information is not revealed to anyone, including the TTP. The proposed method is independent of the underlying electronic cash scheme and thus can be realized with any e-cash system based on blind signatures. It also offers anonymity revocation to prevent crime and solves the unlimited-growth problem of the bank's e-cash database.

This paper examines the behavioral aspects of bidder conduct in on-line auctions. It utilizes price data from 113 on-line auctions, surveys of winning bidders, and draws upon the consumer behavior and auctions' literature to examine individual trait differences in shopping preferences that predict a buyer's decision to use "strategic exit," the fixed-price Buy-It-Now (BIN) functionality. It argues that impulse-buying tendencies, trait competitiveness, and hedonic need fulfillment are antecedents of strategic exit, and that hedonic need fulfillment moderates the effect of impulse-buying tendencies on strategic exit. Buyers who exit an auction early by using the BIN feature end up paying a higher than average price. Theoretical and practical implications for the design of electronic auctions and the process of selling goods are offered.

Single-item composite indices gauge ICT readiness at the country level but do not represent the direct impact of ICTs on a country's development. This paper describes a new approach to measuring the macrolevel impacts of ICTs across a range of development areas. The indirect effects of one area on others is taken into consideration by a simultaneous equation model that permits the inclusion of multiple development areas. The model is applied to data pertaining to four development areas in 64 countries: trade flows, agricultural productivity, R&D, and quality of life. ICT readiness is found to have a positive association with trade flows and R&D, but the impact depends on the country's development level. The strengths and limitations of this modeling approach, and the implications of the results, are assessed.

Contracts coordinate the interactions between organizations in a business network. Conventional frame contracts often result in ambiguous agreements with operational details unspecified, making it hard to coordinate the network effectively and efficiently. This paper suggests a structured method for designing agreements and ensuring that their terms are observed in business transactions. Based on the assumption that governing a business network means managing the workflow between the member organizations, the contract consists primarily of process models at different levels of detail. A method is proposed for negotiating these models between the member organizations of the network and enacting them with the help of an interorganizational workflow system.

This study evaluates the current state of electronic commerce (EC) research by focusing on its diversity. The authors examined 846 EC articles published in six EC specialty journals, 196 in four major IS journals, and 61 in four major marketing journals over the 10 years from 1996 to 2005. The EC specialty and major IS journals show a trend toward multidisciplinary authorship. All three groups of journals display an increasing level of interest in consumer-related issues. The IS and marketing journals prefer mathematical modeling, while the EC specialty journals favor conceptual research. Most important, the major and EC specialty journals play different roles in EC research. EC articles published in the major journals, by and large, display not only more diversified research methods but a growing trend toward economics as a common paradigm. EC specialty journals exhibit great diversity in researchers' backgrounds and units of analysis, expanding and redefining the domain of EC research. The findings summarized in this paper are a roadmap toward better understanding of the dynamics of EC research and for authors seeking to identify the best journal for their EC research.

The Internet can make markets more competitive, but whether this holds for on-line price levels and price dispersion is unclear, perhaps because the maturity, or level of development, of Internet markets has not been widely studied. This paper explores how the maturity of an Internet market affects on-line market pricing in relation to types of products and retailers. It analyzes the pricing differences between pure on-line retailers (e-tailers) and hybrid retailers (multichannel retailers) for three categories of products (books, CDs, digital cameras) in two countries with different levels of Internet maturity (China and the United States). The results show that (1) e-tailer price dispersion is lower in the United States than in China, (2) price levels in the two countries vary with product types, and (3) in both countries, e-tailers have lower price levels and price dispersion than hybrid retailers. These findings suggest that the maturation of Internet markets may lead to lower prices and price dispersion, but with variations dependent on type of product and retailer.

This paper explores the problem of designing a Web site that meets the needs of both an evolving community and an evolving business. It reports a case study of a business that introduced an e-tail site and an associated on-line community. The site development used an existing community-centered development method. The study found that participants had different motivations for visiting the site-some only wanted product information and purchase, some were seeking social support and information, others sought a more intense experience and greater social involvement. Failure to recognize the separate needs of these clusters resulted in not fully achieving business-and community-building goals. The analysis of the relationship between Web site design, cluster needs, and business goals offers a conceptual framework for co-evolving community and business.

On-line consumer reviews, functioning both as informants and as recommenders, are important in making purchase decisions and for product sales. Their persuasive impact depends on both their quality and their quantity. This paper uses the elaboration likelihood model to explain how level of involvement with a product moderates these relationships. The study produces three major findings: (1) the quality of on-line reviews has a positive effect on consumers' purchasing intention, (2) purchasing intention increases as the number of reviews increases, and (3) low-involvement consumers are affected by the quantity rather than the quality of reviews, but high-involvement consumers are affected by review quantity mainly when the review quality is high. These findings have implications for on-line sellers in terms of how to manage on-line consumer reviews.

Interorganizational systems (IOS)-distributed computing systems that support processes shared by two or more firms-have become fundamental to business operations, opening avenues to unprecedented collaborative linkages, even among competitors, and to growing "co-opetition." As the role of IOS expands, electronic networks have become more complex and dense. This paper introduces competitive dynamics research and social network analysis into the study of IOS. A model of the associations between the constructs of IOS use, competitive action, and network structure is developed, and hypotheses are advanced about the relationships among the constructs. As a step toward external validation, measures are devised for operationalizing the constructs and examining the linkages suggested by the hypotheses in the context of an IOS-intensive network consisting of sports car makers and their value/supply-chain partners. The study (1) addresses interactive firm behaviors in e-business and highlights the value of competitor analysis, (2) provides new operational measures that can be generalized and thus enables systematic analysis of IOS use, and (3) identifies new roles of IOS in influencing firm behavior and performance beyond its traditional focus on efficiency and power functions.

This paper considers the interaction between investment to increase Web site stickiness (consumer switching costs) and competition. A duopoly model is used to examine investment by a superior firm to increase consumer switching costs and competition for customer acquisition and customer retention between the investing firm and a noninvesting firm. Gaining a competitive advantage in customer retention is the purpose of strategic technology investment, but the model shows that where consumers are myopic about the benefits they will derive from the technology investment, aggressive price competition by a non-investing firm can prevent the investing firm from acquiring a larger market share and consequently reduce its incentive to invest. However, an investing firm that can persuade consumers of the benefits of the technology investment will have an advantage in customer acquisition and thus may have an incentive to invest.

Customer relationship management is an integral component of business strategy for on-line service providers. This paper investigates the aspects of on-line transactions in electronic retailing that are most likely to satisfy or dissatisfy customers, thereby increasing or decreasing the likelihood of building and maintaining relationships with them. For this study, 513 respondents reported behaviors, perceptions, beliefs, events, features, characteristics, attributes, and situations that expressed their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with electronic service encounters. Content analysis of these encounters yielded three meta-categories, six categories, and 33 subcategories of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction with on-line service providers. The findings suggested that three major categories are robust even in the electronic context of the Internet. The antecedents identified were relevant both to product-related services (e.g., books, apparel) and to pure services (e.g., on-line banking, on-line stock trading). The study found that the characteristics and behaviors of customer-contact employees play an important role in on-line service encounters. It also revealed a percentage decrease in satisfactory incidents, a percentage increase in unsatisfactory incidents, and a percentage increase in unsatisfactory incidents involving employee characteristics and behaviors as service encounters move from a bricks-and-mortar environment to an electronic context. This suggests that customer-contact employees may not be well equipped to deal with on-line customers.

Product sampling is an important marketing strategy for experience goods like music, but on-line digital music sampling has not been explored in the literature. Based on an experimental study, this paper investigates some regularities of digital music sampling and identifies the factors that govern its effectiveness. Four digital music sampling strategies are modeled: segment sampling, low-quality sampling, stingy sampling, and double-sampling. Stingy sampling, now widely used in the music industry, is the least effective of the four. Segment sampling or low-quality sampling would be the best choice for music vendors under certain conditions. Double-sampling, proposed for the first time in this study, holds a great deal of promise as search costs get lower. The analysis confirms the importance of an effective digital music sampling strategy and sheds light on digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry.