Electronic commerce

Despite increased internet usage, transactions conducted by consumers via ecommerce still constitute a very small percentage of total U.S. retail sales. To better understand what influences consumers' choices to shop for products or services on the internet versus local retail stores, this study tests the influence of consumers' transaction costs, coupled with the risk-bearing propensity of individuals (risk-taking or risk-averse attitude) in a shopping context, and the category of goods involved in the purchase process (such as search or experience goods), which will ultimately influence consumers' preference of shopping medium (such as online or traditional). This research study introduces the construct of consumers' transaction costs as an important predictor of consumers' preference of shopping medium, develops two segregated categories of consumers' transaction costs, namely the individual costs and the social costs, and implements a system of measurement of these costs with regard to how much they matter to individual consumers with regard to their preference of shopping medium. Several pretests were initially conducted to operationalize the variables and their measurement scales, and to validate the manipulation checks employed for the study. The data for the main study was then collected via four versions of the designed and pre-tested survey instrument, employing a between-subjects design, and subject to the appropriate statistical analyses. The results convey that individuals with higher risk-bearing propensity would prefer the online shopping medium, while individuals with lower risk-bearing propensity would prefer the traditional shopping medium. Further, search goods would have a greater tendency to be bought online, while experience goods would have a greater tendency to be bought in-store. These findings bear support to past literature wherein similar results have been found, and serve to strengthen these conjectures. With regard to the effects of consumers' transaction costs, the individual costs and the social costs tend to only influence consumers' reference of shopping medium without providing a sense of the actual choice of medium. Further, the nonsignificant interaction effects of individuals' risk-bearing propensity and goods' categories with consumers' transaction costs imply that these variables do not moderate the impact of transaction costs on consumers' preference of shopping medium. The study then discusses the analytical and theoretical reasoning pertaining to these results, along with the managerial implications which this research bears, and the limitations of this study which could warrant potential future research.

This study deals with the impact of electronic commerce (e-commerce) on sales tax revenues in Florida. It uses econometric modeling to forecast taxable retail sales and compares two models. Based on the separation of consumer sales (durables and nondurables) from total taxable sales, changes associated with sales suitable for electronic commerce are scrutinized. Results show that only the model that focuses on consumer sales, not the model for total sales, documents a substantial difference in forecast reliability. Forecasts for 1995--1999, the period of inception of electronic commerce, are compared to forecasts for 1989--1994. The errors in forecast increased three-fold both in terms of mean percentage error (M.P.E.) and mean absolute percentage error (M.A.P.E.). Forecasts for total taxable consumer sales and total taxable sales for 1995--1999 are based on data from 1964--1994. They are accurate to .2% in terms of M.P.E. during the 31 years before electronic commerce but declined to -13.7% during the e-commerce period. Modifications in the forecast model to include e-commerce variables are set forth. Potential variables for electronic commerce relate to growth in the Internet, high-tech jobs, Internet domain name registrations, college graduates, high-income households, residents 30--49, and metropolitan population. These trends are found to closely correlate with growth in the error of the sales forecast for 1995--1999 based on the earlier model. The impacts of electronic commerce on government revenues include equitable access to the Internet, inter-jurisdictional competition, fiscal disparities, public choice, globalization, proposals for a national sales tax, value added tax (VAT), use taxes, taxability of services, and the moratorium on Internet taxation. Legal issues regarding interstate commerce are included. The implications for government finance are summarized in the conclusions. A new theoretical concept, the "dual dilemma," is proposed. This is the paradox wherein the obligation of providing adequate fiscal resources, which fund programs with an equitable tax burden, is pitted against competing economic concerns. E-commerce challenges both sides. Economic development and tax expenditures policy forgo revenue to promote growth but may threaten fiscal health. The lack of favorable tax treatment may stifle growth and innovation but such policy may result in unfair competition.

With the increased importance of retailing through the Internet, or e-tailing, researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role that trust can play in intentions to transact online. However, influences of trust on intentions to provide personal information to complete the transaction, and influences of trust in the product category, and/or in the brand, on intentions to transact, have received little attention. This research fills the gap in the exiting literature by understanding the influence of product category trust, brand trust and vendor trust on intentions to transact online, a combination of intentions to purchase and intentions to provide personal information to complete the transaction. Hypotheses of the influence of the trust variables on intentions to transact were tested using a computer simulated Internet web-site and two products in a 2 (product trust) x 2 (brand trust) x 2 (vendor trust) between-subject factorial design with replication, and a sample of 422 subjects. Findings suggest that channel trust still influences online intentions to transact and that product category trust, particularly for product categories with low past experience, also influences online intentions to transact. Additionally, findings also suggest that brand trust may be as important as vendor trust in influencing online intentions to transact. Findings suggest that Internet vendors will benefit from carrying trusted brands and from increasing consumer trust towards the Internet as a shopping channel.

Although the Internet as a shopping medium provides convenience to easily access products, the U.S. e-commerce retail sales still make up a very small percentage of the U.S. total retail sales. To better understand what influences consumers' choices to shop for products or services on the Internet versus local retail stores, this study tests the influence of antecedent factors of consumer patronage intentions for Internet and local retail stores. The study draws the antecedent factors from the extant literature, which include product classes, the importance consumers place on retailer attributes, and consumer perceived risk in product classes. Because the Internet instituted a convenient shopping medium with information distribution and search capabilities, nomological validity of the search, experience, and credence (SEC) product classification framework is tested in the online shopping context. This study tests the validity of the SEC product classification framework by examining whether significant differences exist in (1) the level of importance that consumers place on retailer attributes, (2) the amount and type of risks that online shoppers perceive in product classes (search, experience, and credence), and (3) their patronage intentions for two retailer types---Internet and local retail stores---based on product classes. In the same model, the study also tests the mediating effects of perceived risk in product classes in the relationship between the importance of retailer attributes and patronage intentions for retailer types. Although the relationships between some of the antecedent factors of patronage intentions have been tested in previous studies, they have never been tested jointly in the context of Internet shopping. Data were collected in three stages. The first two stages were the pretest studies that were conducted to select products as examples to represent each product category. The hypotheses were tested using data collected from a nationwide survey of those who previously purchased products or services on the Internet. The results of the analyses support the hypotheses.

The rapid growth and integration of the Internet as a communication and commercial medium into our society and economy has changed both in many ways. This dissertation is an exploratory study of factors deemed significant in the context of e-business success or failure. A survey instrument is used in addition to qualitative data was gathered from in-depth interviews. Drawing upon the literature from the area of new business in brick and mortar (B&M) firms, an examination of the factors that lead to the success or failure of new brick and mortar businesses are examined in terms of new e business companies. Also examined in this study are the business strategies that an e-commerce site should be addressing to avoid failure factors and the types of e-business models that have been employed and have proven to be successful or destructive to an e-business. In an attempt to understand the marketing and managerial implications for the success or failure of an e-business, seven factors are included in the study which have been selected from a group of factors found to be significant in several studies on the factors leading to the success or failure of small businesses in the brick and mortar world and factors which may be considered relevant to an e-business. These are; management factors, entrepreneur factors, product/service factors, marketing factors, market factors, financial factors, and Web site design and efficiency factors.

Web Service Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become a standard language in the world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) for specifying interactions between internet services. This standard frees developers from low-level concerns involving platform, implementation, and versioning. These freedoms risk development of less robust artifacts that may even become part of a mission-critical system. Model checking a BPEL artifact for correctness with respect to temporal logic properties is computationally complex, since it requires enumerating all communication and synchronization amongst various services with itself. This entails modeling BPEL features such as concurrency, hierarchy, interleaving, and non-deterministic choice. The thesis will provide rules and procedures for translating these features to a veriable model written in Promela. We will use these rules to build a program which automates the translation process, bringing us one step closer to push button verification. Finally, two BPEL artifacts will be translated, manually edited, verified, and analyzed.

Web services intend to provide an application integration technology that can be successfully used over the Internet in a secure, interoperable and trusted manner. Policies are high-level guidelines defining the way an institution conducts its activities. The WS-Policy standard describes how to apply policies of security definition, enforcement of access control, authentication and logging. WS-Trust defines a security token service and a trust engine which are used by web services to authenticate other web services. Using the functions defined in WS-Trust, applications can engage in secure communication after establishing trust. BPEL is a language for web service composition that intends to provide convenient and effective means for application integration over the Internet. We address security considerations in BPEL and how to enforce them, as well as its interactions with other web services standards such as WS-Security and WS-Policy.

There is a growing need to better understand what influences user behavior for developing comprehensive IT security systems. This study integrates two prominent bodies of research, the theory of planned behavior used to frame the factors influencing user behavior and individual level climate perceptions used to frame organizational environment influences, to develop a multidimensional IT security user behavior model. The model is then used as the basis for a survey based research to empirically test the hypotheses whether the perceived IT security climate of an organization significantly influences the users beliefs regarding the use of IT security. The intent of the study is to extend the theory of planned behavior and IT security literature by investigating salient IT security beliefs and environmental influences on those beliefs. First, anti-spyware was identified as an appropriate target IT security artifact, and then incorporated into a multi-phased research approach. Second, a semi-structured interview process was used to elicit salient beliefs regarding use of the IT security artifact. Third, IT security psychological climate was conceptualized based on the extant literature on organizational climate, safety climate and IT security in order to examine the organizational environment influences on these beliefs. Finally, a survey was used to collect data to validate the constructs and test the hypothesized relationships.