Search

Individual decision-makers consume information revealed by the previous decision makers, and produce information that may help in future decision makers. This phenomenon is common in a wide range of scenarios in the Internet economy, as well as elsewhere, such as medical decisions. Each decision maker when required to select an action, would individually prefer to exploit, select the highest expected reward action conditional on her information. At the same time, each decision maker would prefer previous decision makers to explore, producing information about the rewards of various actions. A social planner, by means of carefully designed information disclosure, can incentivize the agents to balance the exploration and ex-ploitation, and maximize social welfare. We formulate this problem as a multiarm bandit problem (and various generalizations thereof) under incentive-compatibility constraints induced by agents' Bayesian priors. We design an incentive-compatible bandit algorithm for the social planner with asymptotically optimal regret. Further, we provide a black-box reduction from an arbitrary multiarm bandit algorithm to an incentive-compatible one, with only a constant multiplicative increase in regret. This reduction works for very general bandit settings, even ones that incorporate contexts and arbitrary partial feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last years, the topic of knowledge management has gathered a lot of interest in the corporate sectors, most of the interpretations of knowledge management being relevant in the world of business. Due to this interest, and because of the changes that occurred in the world lately, knowledge management is proposed to be seen from a new perspective, being implemented in the e-business enterprises. For the purpose of this article, the focus of the discussion is on e-business enterprises, and how knowledge management is implemented by managers in this "new world" of e-business, but also it consists in the presentation of the relationship between ecommerce and e-business, with detailed information about e-commerce in particular. Based on this discussion, a new perspective of knowledge management is proposed, and it is also presented the importance of the Internet in the nowadays enterprises, and its contribution to success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes theory and empirical evidence that shows the Internet spurs real private investment expenditure among larger regional communities by enabling agglomeration among areas with a pre-existing cluster of entrepreneurial activities. For small and more remote rural communities, the Internet enables consumption of items not produced locally, and discourages entrepreneurship among communities that lack a preexisting entrepreneurial cluster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper is introduced a high-level model called SIMIII (System Integrate Model by three views) that analyses and simulates the information systems in all kind of organizations (from public sector to small private companies). The main goal of IT (Information Technology) managers is to know the quality and the improve areas of the systems in their organizations and with the New Economy and Internet this is not an easy task. The SIMIII model analyses the organization systems, in a tidy way, under three views: systems, supply / demand and analysis / valuation. The SIMIII model starts with a complete list of systems and matches this list with every part of our organization (following a spiral supply / demand structure). For every part (system) of the organization, the SIMIII model gives recommendations about the creation of value under the analysis of innovation and management and the subcategories of business, technology and human considerations. The SIMIII model is not only a technology model; it is a system view driven model that supports a simulating tool and a methodology. The goal of the SIMIII model is to be an essential practical help to consultants and IT managers to improve their organizations. The model has been checked against a detail analysis of the IT history and against the experience achieved in twenty-five large real projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technological advance and the internet have favoured the appearance of a great diversity of web applications through which organizations develop their businesses in a more and more competitive environment. A decisive factor for this competitiveness is the assurance of data quality of the web applications used. In the last years, several research works on Data Quality have been developed. In this paper, we will present a systematic review of those researches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Questions The prevalence of the Internet has led firms and entrepreneurs to a new era of new product development. It allows them to reach out to the general public outside of the organizational boundary to obtain additional support, including innovative ideas (known as crowdsourcing) and financial resources (known as crowdfunding). In this research, we base our study on the context of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is defined as an open call over the Internet for financial resources in the form of monetary contribution, and those who offer project creators financial support are called backers. The conceptualization of crowdfunding suggests that such a behavior relies on the backer's voluntary funding decision on new projects either as donation or in exchange for rewards. Due to the voluntary nature, prior research has predominantly assumed that the intrinsic motivation of backers is to help others (e.g. the project creators), which is inherently rooted in altruism. However, in this research we contend that the backer's pledge to a new product development project does not necessarily rely on his or her altruistic intention to help others, but also is catalyzed by his or her self-interest, which is rooted in egoism. We suggest that such self-interest as feeling the power as a backer and gaining personal satisfaction also plays a key role in the backer's funding decision. In line with the altruism vs. egoism contrast in the literature, this research investigates two dimensions of intrinsic motivation: other-oriented and selforiented. Furthermore, we examine the relationship difference between men and women. H1: The backer's other-oriented motivation is positively related to likelihood of pledging money to a crowdfunding project. H2: The backer's self-oriented motivation is positively related to likelihood of pledging money to a crowdfunding project. H3: The backer's self-oriented motivation has a stronger positive effect than his or her other-oriented motivation on likelihood of pledging money to a crowdfunding project. H4: The relationship between other-oriented motivation and likelihood of pledging money to a crowdfunding project is stronger for women than men. H5: The relationship between self-oriented motivation and likelihood of pledging money to a crowdfunding project is stronger for men than women. Method and Data The authors conducted three studies to examine the hypotheses. Summary of Findings Results show that while other-oriented motivation was not related to likelihood of backing, the effect of self-oriented motivation was significant. Thus, H1 is not supported but H2 is supported. We ran a t-test to compare the two coefficients. Results show that the two coefficients were significantly different, supporting H3. Furthermore, the interaction of otheroriented motivation and sex was positively associated with likelihood of backing; the interaction of self-oriented motivation and sex was negatively associated with likelihood of backing. Hence, H4 and H5 are supported. Key Contributions A main function of marketing is segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Using this concept, project creators on crowdfunding platforms should learn to recognize potential targets and attract backers, and position projects in an effective way to obtain financial resources. To explore this phenomenon, our research emphasizes the importance of motivational differences between men and women in the backing behavior. Most prior innovation literature focuses on personality-motivation effects in new product development. When considering the crowdfunding industry and motivation studies, existing studies have been limited. This research attempts to investigate the emerging crowdfunding industry by examining intrinsic motivation and the moderating role of sex. Our results confirm and extend the theoretical concept of the effectiveness of self-benefit and other-benefit marketing appeals. Furthermore, this research explores motivation in a gender-specific norm in crowdfunding practice. In contrast to some findings that other-benefit appeals are more effective than self-benefit appeals for certain consumer behavior, this research leads to an opposite perspective that selforiented motivation is much more effective in crowdfunding practice. Applying to marketing tactics in crowdfunding practice, a notable implication of this research is the importance of messages delivered to potential backers. To attract more visitors and backers, a male-preferred (e.g., sports and video game) can use more self-oriented appeal to arouse psychological need for self-recognition. On the other hand, female-preferred projects (e.g., cooking and fashion) can rely on more other-oriented motivation by reinforcing the need of helping others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way tradeoff between exploration (trying out insufficiently explored alternatives to help others in the future), exploitation (making optimal decisions given the information discovered by other agents), and incentives of the agents (who are myopically interested in exploitation, while preferring the others to explore). We posit a principal who controls the flow of information from agents that came before to the ones that arrive later, and strives to coordinate the agents towards a socially optimal balance between exploration and exploitation, not using any monetary transfers. The goal is to design a recommendation policy for the principal which respects agents' incentives and minimizes a suitable notion of regret. We extend prior work in this direction to allow the agents to interact with one another in a shared environment: at each time step, multiple agents arrive to play a Bayesian game, receive recommendations, choose their actions, receive their payoffs, and then leave the game forever. The agents now face two sources of uncertainty: the actions of the other agents and the parameters of the uncertain game environment. Our main contribution is to show that the principal can achieve constant regret when the utilities are deterministic (where the constant depends on the prior distribution, but not on the time horizon), and logarithmic regret when the utilities are stochastic. As a key technical tool, we introduce the concept of explorable actions, the actions which some incentive-compatible policy can recommend with non-zero probability. We show how the principal can identify (and explore) all explorable actions, and use the revealed information to perform optimally. In particular, our results significantly improve over the prior work on the special case of a single agent per round, which relies on assumptions to guarantee that all actions are explorable. Interestingly, we do not require the principal's utility to be aligned with the cumulative utility of the agents; instead, the principal can optimize an arbitrary notion of per-round reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effect of the Internet on consumers' expenditures for video rentals consists of the balance of a negative effect due to substitution for existing demand and a positive effect due to the diffusion of information (e.g., advertising effects). In this paper, I estimate the overall effect of the Internet on expenditures for video rentals using ordinary least square, two-stage least squares, and fixed-effects analyses of data on video rental expenditures in whole U.S. area from 2006 to 2008. The results show that the 1 % increase of household Internet penetration leads to an increase in video rental expenditures by $0.68 from 2006 to 2008 implying the positive effect of Internet on the video rentals. However, potential substitutability between Internet and video rentals (i.e., the negative effect of Internet on the video rentals) were also found. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the article "Does Technology Matter: An Analysis of Computer and Internet Usage on Economic Growth," by Christopher J. Surfield is presented.

Now that internet has become widely available in the Netherlands, some people have taken the step to a broadband connection at home whereas others have not. The goal of this research is to obtain insights into the reasons why people adopt or reject broadband in the residential context. This investigation is done from a user perspective. Using online questionnaires, a longitudinal (2001, 2003, 2005) study was performed. Results show that three features of broadband have been reasons to adopt it over the years: high speed, always on and flat rate. Furthermore, results show that for long the most important threshold was the financial one and paradoxically financial aspects are also a trigger for adoption. This financial bottleneck has largely disappeared, as well as the physical accessibility threshold. Cognitive and technical thresholds have shown less important over the years. What remains are the internet users who are quite satisfied with their current narrowband connection. It is probably hard to convince those people of the usefulness of broadband, unless for example alternatives are no longer available. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the use of the Internet for retail front. Discussion on marketing and communication; Information on repurchase using paradigm for net supports; Description on the commercial web for catalog site in shopping and specialty products.