Electronic commerce research and applications (ECRA) Co-Editors' Introduction for Volume 8, Issue 3, May - June 2009

• Main Authors: KAUFFMAN, Robert J., Chau, Patrick Y. K., Payne, Terry R., Westland, J. Christopher
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2009
• Subjects: Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4030
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This issue consists of four regular submissions that were developed to completion during 2007–2009. The coverage of the research that is represented is broad. It includes topics and themes that relate to recommender systems, electronic word-of-mouth in email messages, e-commerce system quality of service, and the adoption of Internet banking. These topics represent some of the important streams of research that Electronic Commerce Research and Applications has been covering during the past eight years.The issue opens with an article by Cheng-Lung Huang and Wei-Liang Huang of the National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. “Handling Sequential Pattern Decay: Developing a Two-Stage Collaborative Recommender System” considers the problem of how to predict customer purchasing behavior in electronic commerce, when purchasing patterns stochastically drift over time. This is a common issue for most e-commerce firms, since they are only doing business with their customers at varying intervals instead of on a continuous basis. The authors propose a recommender system approach that involves two stages. The first stage involves the development of time-window weight settings that help the recommender system to figure out how to represent customer purchase patterns over time for specific products. The second stage involves the use of product categories as a basis for controlling the amount of data that is handled, and provides an additional means for assessing pattern-matching accuracy. This helps to yield sequential purchase patterns that have a greater impact on maximizing predictive capability. The authors report extensive simulation and empirical results to evaluate the performance and robustness of the new tools they have proposed in a real-world grocery store setting, as well as with mocked-up data. This research is a good example of a contribution to the journal that implements the full spectrum of design science research methodology, and should provide helpful illustration for others who are interested in submitting this kind of research for publication review.The second article of this issue focuses on the use of electronic word-of-mouth and viral marketing strategy. The article is entitled “Factors Affecting Pass-Along Email Intentions: Integrating the Social Capital and Social Cognition Theories.” It is co-authored by Chien-Chih Huang, Tung-Ching Lin, and Kuei-Ju Lin of National Sun Yat-sen University, also of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The authors contend that there has not been much research that helps us to understand the mechanics of “pass-along email messages” to date, and how they support viral marketing. Consumers receive these messages via email, blogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, and social networks. They can be resent to others at very low cost. The authors explore two different theory bases in their work as a means to study consumers’ intentions to forward pass-along email to other potential consumers: social capital theory and social cognition theory. Using data on more than 325 email users, the authors use a structural equation modeling approach to develop their empirical results. Their main social capital variables include relational commitment and social interaction ties. On the social cognition dimension, they employ three other variables, including message-passing self-efficacy, image outcome expectation, and affection outcome expectation. Combining these drivers with two additional control variables, message quality and message involvement, the authors are able to make useful managerial estimates of the electronic word-of-mouth effect through the assessment of consumer intentions to pass along relevant email messages. This kind of research will be useful to firms that wish to undertake viral marketing campaigns, since it will inform them of the key drivers that tend to heighten consumers’ willingness to pass along the email that they receive from the seller.The third article in this issue is entitled “Cost-Based Admission Control for Internet Commerce QoS Enhancement,” by Yussuf Abu Shaaban of Heriot Watt University and Jane Hilston of Edinburgh University, both in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. The authors study a dynamic mechanism that they call cost-based admission control as a means to control congestion in electronic commerce systems. They argue that mechanisms for identifying and managing unacceptable quality of service are necessary for an e-commerce firm to remain competitive in the marketplace, since its systems largely determine the experience that its customers will have with an organization. When quality of service is low, consumer satisfaction is likely to be low, leading to their defection to other sellers of products and services via the Internet. The essence of their proposal is to employ a discounted-charge model for high-load periods that helps to guide customers to postpone their requests for system resources to a later time when there is a lighter expected load on the system. By emphasizing the participation of customers in their cost-based admission control approach, the authors are able to construct a means to schedule system loads so that high-load period requests for system service are less subject to failure, while the overall performance and throughput of the system is heightened. Again, we see a fine example of a research article in this journal in which the proposed technology artifact is thoroughly evaluated and tested using experimental and simulation methods.The final article of this issue is by Ming-Chi Lee of the National Pingtung Institute of Electronic Commerce in Pingtung, Taiwan. The title is “Factors Influencing the Adoption of Internet Banking: An Integration of TAM and TPB with Perceived Risk and Benefit.” Electronic banking and Internet banking represent areas of continuing interest in this journal, and understanding the extent to which technology adoption is held up or promoted for banking services via the Internet is of high managerial and strategic importance to many firms. The authors point out that the uniqueness of the research they present in this article is that it simultaneously considers factors of two kinds: those that increase consumer propensity to adopt and those that inhibit consumer adoption. The authors leverage three areas of theory: perceived risk theory, the technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior. The authors give their main attention to the prediction of whether a banking customer perceives sufficient benefits so as to be predisposed to adopt online banking. The authors reflect consumer concerns of risk in five different areas: financial risk, security and privacy concerns, system performance for banking functions, social considerations, and risks with how long online banking transactions take. The authors report that the single greatest concern lies with security and privacy, and the related financial risks that are created.The Editors-in-Chief welcome the submission of new manuscripts to the journal that explore design science, recommender systems, quality of service, electronic banking and Internet marketing issues. We thank the Area Editors and the anonymous reviewers for their assistance in the development of the articles in this issue of the journal. We also appreciate the help that ECRA’s new Publisher, Rebecca Wilson, to guide our efforts, and strengthen our efforts to be effectively coordinated with the publisher, Elsevier B.V.