ECRA Co-editors' introduction for volume 8, issue 1

• 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/4035
• Institution: Singapore Management University

1. Introduction: As we begin 2009, ECRA has initiated a new format of bi-monthly publication of issues. This first issue is marked January--February 2009, rather than Winter 2009, and the expansion of the page space of the journal reflects the growing interest that authors are expressing in publishing new research in this journal. 2. Regular research articles: The study of online IT and other services is rapidly advancing, and is also supported by recent developments in the study of service-oriented technology and management. In the online world, the increasing push has recently been toward on-demand services that are provided to the market via the Internet delivery channel, and priced in a manner that reflects vendors’ capabilities to understand their customers’ willingness-to-pay. Many online service markets, as the authors Woonam Hwang of the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology and Jungsuk Oh of Seoul National University in South Korea point out, are characterized by the coexistence of multiple services offering complementary features. The complementarities, according to the authors, provide a basis for network externalities, which further give rise to ‘complications’ in the analysis of adoption and diffusion of competing online services. The authors extend the prior research of economist, Brian Arthur, how developed an ‘adoption function model’ to evaluate competition between network externality-bearing technologies, the extent to which increasing returns influence the trends, and also the role of historical events in creating path-dependent ‘lock-in’ events that make technology adoption outcomes unique.The article offers a number of interesting findings in theoretical terms. For example, their model provides a basis for concluding that a firm with first-mover advantage faces unsuspected potential competition. The authors report that when the network externality is ‘large’ enough, the firm that follows will only be able to achieve a lower market share, in spite of the fact that it can deliver the same service level to the market as the market leader does. First-movers need to watch out though: consumer heterogeneity can result in minor perturbations of demand in the market that relate to uncertainty about the value of services. This may lead to an outcome in which the follower can make market share inroads. The authors also propose a ‘two-step punctuated equilibrium’ approach, such that under specific conditions, the distribution of product market share may be stable for a while, but then move to a different longer-lasting equilibrium.The second article among the regular research contributions is by Yung-Ming Li and Jhih-Hua Jhang-Li, who contributed ‘Pricing Web Advertising Channels: Display Ads and Contextual Ads’. A ‘contextual ad’ on the Internet is one that permits a consumer to click through in the context of a page that may have another purpose to another page that the advertisement points to. Contextual ads have been interesting to the firms that use them since they do not have to pay the advertiser unless consumers click through them. The authors employ a Hoteling model to compare the performance of display ads that give consumers impressions about a product versus contextual ads that require the consumer to make a click. One kind of ad creates ‘impression benefits’, while the other creates ‘click benefits’. The authors evaluate their performance under monopoly and duopoly market structures, to determine the extent to which one form of advertising versus another is more attractive to invest in. They find that duopoly market structure encourages a higher level of investment in multimedia technologies for advertising. Also, in a duopolistic market, it turns out that contextual advertising increases a firm’s propensity to attract consumers in order to acquire them as customers.One of the most interesting areas of interdisciplinary investigation is in the area of price dynamics in traditional and online markets. We have seen major works from different authors in economics, marketing, information systems, computer science, and law, and there is a broad recognition that pricing studies are at the heart of electronic commerce research. Although there are many research papers that have explored prices on the Internet in the American market, for example, Amazon.com, Buy.com, MySimon.com, eBay and other online sites, there are relatively fewer published articles that chronicle the empirical regularities and theoretical interpretations of Internet-based selling-related price dynamics in other national market contexts. In this article, the authors, Tomonari Akimoto of the Daiwa Institute of Research and Fumiko Takeda of the University of Tokyo, explore price movements of home electronics products listed on a price comparison Web site in Japan called Kakaku.com. Their data cover the period from November 2004 to December 2005, for eleven different products. They include liquid crystal display televisions, plasma display panel TVs, DVD players, DVD recorders, digital cameras, air-conditioners, washing machines, cleaners, cathode-ray tube TVs, video cameras, and refrigerators.Their analytical model focuses on the percentage of informed and uninformed customers, and differences in the average costs of firms in the market. For the empirical elements of the research, the authors focus on a new construct for this context called ‘value of information’, which is the ratio of the difference between the average price and the lowest price for a product. The authors report a number of interesting empirical regularities. One is that price dispersion increases in the earlier stages and decreases in the later stages of the product life cycle of home electronics products. A second is that the sizes of the lowest price changes are larger when the product is earlier in its life cycle. The prices that change the most frequency are the lowest prices for Japanese home electronics. The authors also report that, on balance, the number of price decreases seems to outstrip the number of price increasing among lower price products.The area of trust and reputation mechanisms is one of the most well-developed areas in information systems and electronic commerce research. The presence of trust and the information that reputation mechanisms offer eases the process of transaction-making that permits economic exchanges to be accomplished. In spite of the value-creating potential of high levels of interorganizational and customer-and-firm trust, it often is the case that still more needs to be done to prime the pump for achieving high transactability and supporting the exchange process. These issues are discussed in the work of Kamal K. Bharadwaj and Mohammad Yahya Hadi Al-Shamri, who contributed an article entitled “Fuzzy Computational Models for Trust and Reputation Systems”. The central motivation of this work is the perceived insufficiency of ‘public’ trust and reputation mechanisms. The authors propose that additional relational value can be added for transaction-making through a process that emphasizes the constructs of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘experience’ in dyadic transactions with a specific partner. The authors premise their theoretical interpretation on the observations that trust is subjective and asymmetric, context-dependent, and non-monotonic, in that it can increase or decrease over time, in the presence of the approach stimuli.The authors further observe that trust and reputation do not always have widely agreed upon interpretations – in other words, the constructs are ‘fuzzy’. As a result, it is appropriate to try to develop greater depth of insight into what constitutes them, and how they can be measured well in different settings and over time. For this, the authors have proposed the use of ‘fuzzy computational models’ that can process information related to reputation and trust, and provide managers with greater fidelity with their assessment. The authors implement a two-level filtering approach with a fuzzy extension of a ‘beta reputation model’, which leverages the constructs to provide additional useful information. As a work of design science, this research also creates technology artifacts that permit experimental comparisons to be made for the accuracy of system-based recommendations of the new approach with tried-and-true approaches.Yu-chen Chen, Rong-an Shang, and Chen-yu Kao investigated the capacity of Internet-based sellers to convey rich and detailed information about their products to consumer, and the related impacts. They note that this a unique strength of e-retailers in their article “The Effects of Information Overload on Consumers” Subjective State towards Buying Decisions in the Internet Shopping Environment. Their emphasis is on ‘subjective state’, which is defined in terms of the consumer’s shopping experience, the utility he or she feels for it, and the extent to which this is remembered and then influences other aspects of the consumer’s decision-making process. The authors posit that ‘information overload’ plays an important role. The available evidence is conflicting though. Either greater information richness leads to a more favorable subjective state on the part of the consumer, or it leads to a diminution in the utility realized and poorer purchase decisions. They propose and perform an experimental test of an extended model that involves information filtering, on-line shopping experience, and perception of information overload for how a consumer’s decision is affective by changes in his or her subjective state. The authors report that information filtering tools and on-line shopping experience have some benefits that they offer, but only within limits.3. Final commentsWe want to remind the readers of this journal that there will be special issues of ECRA that will be under development this year on nomadic computing; marketing, technology and e-commerce; electronic auctions; technologies for e-business innovation; technological innovations for services; and more. We continue to solicit proposals from interested parties. We encourage them to make direct contact with one of the journal’s co-editors to discuss the outline of their ideas, the positioning of the project relative to the journal’s editorial mission and ongoing special issues, and the extent to which a given project is able to engage an interested interdisciplinary audience.In addition, the Coordinating Editor, Rob Kauffman, is actively soliciting ideas for ‘Research Directions’ contributions from interested authors. If you would like to see a sample, the article by Demirkan et al. (2008) on ‘service-oriented technology and management’ in volume 7, issue 4 will give you a good example. ‘Research Directions’ articles can provide surveys of the literature, perspectives on different approaches to research in the various interest sub-areas of e-commerce research, essays that motivate critical thinking about existing work, and well-documented opinion pieces that help us to bridge industry and academic interests.