Trustworthiness in electronic commerce: the role of privacy, security, and site attributes

While the growth of business-to-consumer electronic commerce seems phenomenal in recent years, several studies suggest that a large number of individuals using the Internet have serious privacy concerns, and that winning public trust is the primary hurdle to continued growth in e-commerce. This research investigated the relative importance, when purchasing goods and services over the Web, of four common trust indices (i.e. (1) third party privacy seals, (2) privacy statements, (3) third party security seals, and (4) security features). The results indicate consumers valued security features significantly more than the three other trust indices. We also investigated the relationship between these trust indices and the consumer's perceptions of a marketer's trustworthiness. The findings indicate that consumers' ratings of trustworthiness of Web merchants did not parallel experts' evaluation of sites' use of the trust indices. This study also examined the extent to which consumers are willing to provide private information to electronic and land merchants. The results revealed that when making the decision to provide private information, consumers rely on their perceptions of trustworthiness irrespective of whether the merchant is electronic only or land and electronic. Finally, we investigated the relative importance of three types of Web attributes: security, privacy and pleasure features (convenience, ease of use, cosmetics). Privacy and security features were of lesser importance than pleasure features when considering consumers' intention to purchase. A discussion of the implications of these results and an agenda for future research are provided.     

Modeling the customer in electronic commerce

This paper reviews interface design of web pages for e-commerce. Different tasks in e-commerce are contrasted. A systems model is used to illustrate the information flow between three subsystems in e-commerce: store environment, customer, and web technology. A customer makes several decisions: to enter the store, to navigate, to purchase, to pay, and to keep the merchandize. This artificial environment must be designed so that it can support customer decision-making. To retain customers it must be pleasing and fun, and create a task with natural flow. Customers have different needs, competence and motivation, which affect decision-making. It may therefore be important to customize the design of the e-store environment. Future ergonomics research will have to investigate perceptual aspects, such as presentation of merchandize, and cognitive issues, such as product search and navigation, as well as decision making while considering various economic parameters. Five theories on e-commerce research are presented.     

Empirical taxonomy of services and service products in electronic commerce

In this study, we newly classify services and service products in EC into four categories: Mass Services, Interactive Services, Supporting Services, and Professional Services. Five selected variables reflecting the characteristics of the services, and two factorized dimensions, (1) proportion of on-line services, and (2) need of on-line interaction, are utilized for the classification. In addition, the relationships with customer purchase intentions in EC are investigated as a result of the classification. For this purpose, a customer survey was conducted on respondent groups who frequently purchase goods or services by EC and who also had advanced knowledge of the services and EC. Statistical methods of factor analysis, cluster analysis, and analysis of variance were utilized for analysis of the data.     

计算机网络安全技术在电子商务中的应用探究

随着我国经济的飞速发展以及互联网技术在各行各业中的应用,电子商务已经成为我国商业模式中新的宠儿。但同时,由于电子商务主要是依托网络技术进行办公,网络安全与信息安全已经越来越引起人们的担忧。尤其是伴随着现代网络技术的进步,为电子商务的发展既带来了机遇同时又带来了挑战。电子商务交易过程的安全性成为制约该行业未来发展的瓶颈。本文对于网络安全技术在电子商务中的应用做了探讨,并就如何提高电子商务交易过程中的安全性,从而为该行业未来的发展提供有力的技术保障提出了一些建议和措施。     

电子商务环境下信用评级的一种新方法

为提高电子商务环境下信用评价水平，构建了一套完整的电子商务环境下信用指标体系，提出了一种基于拉开档次机理的模糊综合评判法，该方法改进了传统的拉开档次法．将其用在评价指标权重的确定上，采用模糊综合评判法对各指标值进行融合．结果表明，基于拉开档次机理的模糊综合评判法能够放大不同电子商务主体的信用差距，达到鼓励电子商务环境下基于信用机制的竞争的效果．该方法适用于需要放大被评价对象间差异的情形．     

Perceived risks and customer needs of geographical accessibility in electronic commerce

Customer needs of geographical accessibility still plays an important role in electronic commerce, though the extent to which it does so varies according to the characteristics of products, services and the market strategies of firms. In this study, factors affecting customer needs of geographical accessibility and their structural relationships were investigated through a customer survey and statistical analysis using the methods of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The result shows that the three independent factors, unease of delivery, complexity of services, and trust and reliability affect significantly customer needs of geographical accessibility, with perceived risks of distant orders being a mediating factor in the relationship.     

以培养电子商务专业人才为目标的图形图像处理课程研究

职业技术学院在我国劳动技能与技术型人才的培养上做出了杰出的贡献,随着近年来社会各个行业对实务型人才需求量的猛增,更加大了职业技术学院的人才教育与培养任务。电子商务作为目前的新兴行业,促进了贸易的飞速发展,人才需求量也逐步扩大。特别是图形图像处理与设计方面的人才非常紧缺,这就要求各个职业技术学院加大对以电子商务专业人才为培养目标的图形图形处理课程的教育与研究。     

Interface agents: caveat mercator in electronic commerce

Electronic commerce has opened new opportunities for buyers and sellers. Consumers can do things in an on-line environment that are simply not possible in face-to-face transactions. In this paper, we push this observation by examining and using a new type of software agent to convert merchant interfaces into middleware thus enabling one to assess and optimize their interactions with all the computing support available in today's Decision Support System (DSS) environments.     

A practical anonymous payment scheme for electronic commerce

We propose a practical anonymous payment scheme with anonymous accounts. By means of our proposed scheme, the size of a bank's database is dramatically reduced. Also, the issue of e-coins for an anonymous account is controlled by several issuers, who represent a bank and who can be chosen by the customer or assigned by the system, on the current available issuers list according to the internet conditions. Our scheme does not require the assistance of a mutually entrusted third party.     

Time-bound negotiation framework for electronic commerce agents

For efficient and informative coordination of agents especially in electronic commerce environment, a time-bound agent negotiation framework is proposed utilizing a time-based commitment scheme. By attaching commitment duration to agent messages, the traditional contract net protocol is extended to a time-bound negotiation framework (TBNF). The proposed negotiation framework has a new message type which allows for parties to agree upon the extension of a commitment duration, and a novel commitment concept in the form of negative commitment. The semantics of the messages with the commitment duration are interpreted, and then the three typical negotiation protocols are formally defined and compared — nothing-guaranteed protocol, acceptance-guaranteed protocol, and finite-time guarantee protocol — which can be incorporated into TBNF. The TBNF should provide a background for efficient and effective electronic commerce negotiation while accommodating each agent's adaptive negotiation strategy.     

Assessing users'' product-specific knowledge for personalization in electronic commerce

While many electronic commerce (EC) companies are adopting one-to-one marketing approaches using various personalization technologies to make their products and services unique for the purpose of attracting and retaining customers and improving their completion edges in the EC ecosystem, which, nevertheless, has low entrance barriers for new players to join and further intensify the competition, none or few of them consider a fundamental issue—the user's product-specific knowledge. Our research proposed to add this new domain of the customer's knowledge on appropriate target products into the personalization process as a part of the overall EC strategy for businesses. In this paper, we present our initial design for assessing the user's product-specific knowledge using the proposed innovative method for detecting it directly in a non-intrusive way without asking users to answer or fill out any types of questionnaires. Our method is based on customer's on-line navigation behaviors by analyzing their navigation patterns through pre-trained artificial neural networks. An empirical study designed for a case of EC store selling digital cameras was conducted in our research to prove the concept, and a good preliminary result was derived from the study.

For the purpose of comparing the performances between the conventional approach of using questionnaire and the proposed innovative approach of navigation pattern mining, a questionnaire based approach for evaluating the user's product-specific knowledge was designed and incorporated into our knowledge level assessment system (KLAS). Our study result shows that although the pure questionnaire-based KLAS is intrusive and may not be accepted by some users, for those users willing to complete the questionnaire, the proposed navigation pattern approach can be combined with the questionnaire-based approach to create a hybrid KLAS which has a significantly improved accuracy rate in detecting the customer's product knowledge level.     

CellTrust: a reputation model for C2C commerce

The improvement of wireless technologies and the increasing spread of mobile phones open new possibilities to perform mobile Customer-to-Customer commercial activities. In this new scenario, where users cannot rely on stable connections, it assumes a great relevance how to trust the counterpart in a transaction and how to avoid that a disconnection, possible in wireless connections, can encourage users to cheat. To tackle these issues we propose a feedback-based reputation mechanism able to detect malicious users better than other state-of-the-art techniques, as shown by the large number of experiments run to measure the accuracy of the compared methods in the most common situations.

基于认证中心的多级信任模型的分析与构建

对几种流行的基于认证中心的多级信任模型做了分析和比较,提出了一种新的模型－可扩展的多级信任模型,并对其构建技术进行了分析。     

A countable and time-bound password-based user authentication scheme for the applications of electronic commerce

In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient user authentication scheme with countable and time-bound features. The countable feature is to limit the use to a certain number of times, which means that the users are able to successfully log into the system in a fixed number of times. The feature of the time-bound allows each login ticket to have a period of expiration. In other words, if a login request is overdue, it would not be available anymore. These features make our scheme more reliable for applications in the field of electronic commerce, such as on-line games, pay-TV, and so on. Since our scheme does not require any password or verification table and can avoid replay attacks, it is under firm security. Moreover, our scheme shows a lower computational overhead on the user side. Therefore, it offers an efficient and adequate alternative for the implementations in the mobile environment with limited computing capability.     

一种基于二层节点和客观风险的电子商务交易信任模型

为解决P2P环境下电子商务的安全交易问题,在深入研究电子商务相关信任模型的基础上,基于交易中可能存在的客观风险,提出了一种基于二层节点的综合信任度的计算模型。综合考虑了影响交易的交易金额、交易时间等多种因素,引入了可交易度的概念,并将其作为节点是否进行交易的决策依据。实验表明,该模型能够更准确地计算节点的信任值,可有效地提高交易的安全性。     

Trust, power and interorganizational information systems: the case of the electronic trading community TransLease

This paper focuses on Cap Gemini’s electronic commerce system, TransLease. TransLease is an interorganizational information system (IOS), which facilitates electronic commerce between motor vehicle leasing and repair companies. During our investigation, the system was used by approximately 1000 repair agents working for seven of the UK’s leading vehicle leasing and contract hire companies. This system was originally developed by AT&T and acquired by Cap Gemini in July 1998. At the time of acquisition, the system was seen as being of high strategic value, although it was also seen as underperforming. This paper reports the results of an action research project, which formed one element of the process by which Cap Gemini investigated the former problem. In the paper, TransLease is described as a complex electronic community, dependent upon the existence of symbiotic relationships. As such, the problems that the system users and developers experienced can be attributed to factors that impeded the mutual benefit accruing from participation in the system. The efficacy of the terms of exchange and the degree to which participants mutually benefit through electronic interaction is determined by the complex interplay of a number of relational and organizational factors. The research therefore illustrates the importance of the ‘soft’ organizational issues in IOS management and development, and suggests a conceptual model of the factors relevant in this case. At the time of this study, TransLease was still in the early stages of its life cycle, having only been available in the marketplace for approximately 18 months. During this time, through recognizing the complex problems and issues detailed in this paper, Cap Gemini accordingly redressed the way in which the system was managed and maintained. TransLease is now seen as having matured into a highly successful example of an IOS – a view reflected by its position as market leader in the industry. As this paper will show, the key to improving the existing service has been the emphasis Cap Gemini now places on managing the ‘soft’ aspects of the electronic community.     

The role of intermediaries in electronic marketplaces: developing a contingency model

Abstract. Early research in electronic markets seemed to suggest that e‐ commerce transactions would result in decreased costs for buyers and sellers alike, and would therefore ultimately lead to the elimination of intermediaries from electronic value chains. However, a careful analysis of the structure and functions of electronic marketplaces reveals a different picture. Intermediaries provide many value‐adding functions that cannot be easily substituted or ‘internalized’ through direct supplier–buyer dealings, and hence mediating parties may continue to play a significant role in the e‐commerce world. In this paper we provide an analysis of the potential roles of intermediaries in electronic markets and we articulate a number of hypotheses for the future of intermediation in such markets. Three main scenarios are discussed: the disintermediation scenario, in which market dynamics will favour direct buyer–seller transactions; the reintermediation scenario, in which traditional intermediaries will be forced to differentiate themselves and re‐emerge in the electronic marketplace; and the cybermediation scenario, in which wholly new markets for intermediaries will be created. The analysis suggests that the likelihood of each scenario dominating a given market is primarily dependent on the exact functions that intermediaries play in each case. A detailed discussion of such functions is presented in the paper, together with an analysis of likely outcomes in the form of a contingency model for intermediation in electronic markets.     

Tractable combinatorial auctions and b-matching

Auctions are the most widely used strategic game-theoretic mechanisms in the Internet. Auctions have been mostly studied from a game-theoretic and economic perspective, although recent work in AI and OR has been concerned with computational aspects of auctions as well. When faced from a computational perspective, combinatorial auctions are perhaps the most challenging type of auctions. Combinatorial auctions are auctions where agents may submit bids for bundles of goods. Given that finding an optimal allocation of the goods in a combinatorial auction is in general intractable, researchers have been concerned with exposing tractable instances of combinatorial auctions. In this work we expose the use of b-matching techniques in the context of combinatorial auctions, and apply them in a non-trivial manner in order to introduce polynomial solutions for a variety of combinatorial auctions.     

Agent and data mining based decision support system and its adaptation to a new customer-centric electronic commerce

Recently, as the Internet has become more widely used, Electronic Commerce (EC) has emerged and has developed a high-level business environment. The customer-centric EC model is important for the success of EC and this study presents a new customer-centric EC model in make-to-order (MTO) semiconductor manufacturing environment. In this study we proposed the EC model providing the process transparency of process sampling method that can provide online semiconductor customers with the performance information of available process sampling methods which can be used at all manufacturing process steps for their own products in MTO manufacturing environment, and then the capability to select a desirable one among them based on their purchase situations on EC web site. In the proposed EC model the customer can select a process sampling method that is most suitable to him/her according to the customer's purchase situation. In this model the use of intelligent decision support system called customized sampling decision support system (CSDSS) that can autonomously generate available customized sampling methods and provide the performance information of those methods to EC system is requisite. We implemented an Internet-based prototype of CSDSS which had an architecture based on intelligent agent technology and also the successful integration of data mining process for the generation of optimal sampling method into DSS framework by means of applying that technology.     

分布式信任模型在电子商务中的应用

本文提出一个通用的,并可以独立使用的动态分布式信任模型(DDTM)。在DDTM中,访问权限直接与信任值相关联。信任值又具体分为直接信任值、间接信任值和信任授权等级。文中已经计算并将每一类型的信任价值用明确的数字形式表示。这个模型的核心是基于推荐的信任模型,被组织成信任授权树(TDT),并以证书链的形式进行授权。