E Commerce

E-commerce not only has tremendous potential for growth but also poses unique challenges for both incumbents and new entrants. By examining drivers of firm performance in e-commerce from a capabilities perspective, the authors conceptualize three firm capabilities that are critical for superior firm performance in e-commerce: information technology capability, strategic flexibility, and trust-building capability. The extent and nature of market orientation is conceptualized as a platform for leveraging e-commerce capabilities. The authors test the effects of e-commerce capabilities on performance (e.g., relative profits, sales, return on investment) using data from 122 e-brokerage service providers. The results indicate that information technology capability and strategic flexibility affect performance given the right market orientation.

The number of Internet users has grown exponentially. The evidence is not only demonstrated by figures in developed countries but also in developing countries, such as Indonesia. Internet technology has been adopted for multiple applications like egovernment, e-learning, and e-commerce. Many prior studies found that e-commerce provides advantages. For instance, flexibility and efficiency are advantages which can be achieved by e-commerce. However, e-commerce has disadvantages such as frauds that remain serious threats. Recent reports have found that fraud incidents on e-commerce are increasing with many victims and losses. These reports are likely to affect the trust of parties which are involved in e-commerce systems, particularly customers. Therefore, this study attempts to address this problem by investigating the presence of trust and cyberfraud perceptions on customers' intentions to purchase using e-commerce. This study developed a conceptual model by integrating trust and cyber-fraud perceptions using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) made up of attitude towards behaviour, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control. Trust in this model is defined by two constructs of trust of sellers and trust of the (Internet) medium. In addition, previous studies have not investigated cyber-fraud perception as a moderator of the relationship between trust of sellers and intention to purchase using e-commerce. Accordingly, this relationship was tested to reveal the role of cyber-fraud perceptions. Furthermore, direct effects of cyber-fraud perceptions, trust of sellers, and trust of the (Internet) medium towards intentions to purchase in e-commerce were also examined. The study was undertaken in Indonesia by investigating customers' perspectives of ecommerce transactions. A survey was conducted through an online questionnaire and received 602 valid respondents. For data analysis, structural equation modelling (SEM) was applied. Since the distribution of data was non-normal, a model fit examination employed bootstrapping. The results of this examination demonstrate that the model is robust, parsimonious, and fits the data well. that the dissertation could not be completed without help and support from generous people such as supervisors, respondents, friends and family members. They are the important people to the successful completion of my study. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge my deepest gratitude to my principal supervisor, Associate Professor Joseph M Mula, for his guidance, patience, and encouragement throughout my study. He wholeheartedly read my initial draft of each chapter and gave me valuable suggestions to improve both quality of content and academic language including grammar and word selection. Moreover, almost every day my mailbox was overwhelmed by useful resource links from him relating to the research. He also encouraged in me a passion for writing academic papers for conferences and journals. He is a kind person in supporting my PhD journey. I really owe a huge debt of gratitude to him. Dr. Albert H S Scott, my associate supervisor, has also provided me with valuable support in my thesis writing, particularly in the final stage. He is such a humble person and helpful. Thank you for everything, Dr. Scott. My appreciation goes to the respondents to this research, who have provided their time to complete the questionnaire. Without their voluntary participations, it would have been very hard if not impossible for me to complete this dissertation. I realise that by taking part in the study, respondent's contributions are very important for its completion. I acknowledge the Government of Indonesia particularly the Department of Education and Cultures and the University of Brawijaya (UB), both of which have given me this opportunity to study abroad by providing financial supports. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Yogi Sugito (Rector of UB) and Gugus Irianto, PhD Ak (Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business UB) for their great assistance.

Frequent itemset mining is a classic problem in data mining. It is a non-supervised process which concerns in finding frequent patterns (or itemsets) hidden in large volumes of data in order to produce compact summaries or models of the database. These models are typically used to generate association rules, but recently they have also been used in far reaching domains like e-commerce and bio-informatics. Because databases are increasing in terms of both dimension (number of attributes) and size (number of records), one of the main issues in a frequent itemset mining algorithm is the ability to analyze very large databases. Sequential algorithms do not have this ability, especially in terms of run-time performance, for such very large databases. Therefore, we must rely on high performance parallel and distributed computing. We present new parallel algorithms for frequent itemset mining. Their efficiency is proven through a series of experiments on different parallel environments, that range from shared-memory multiprocessors machines to a set of SMP clusters connected together through a high speed network.

We are developing a purely event-based architecture to facilitate the executable specification of e-commerce applications. In our approach, specifications (policies) are decomposed into events which, like operational events, are stored and animated in an event store. In Section 2 we define the notion of events; in Section 3 the types of events are explained. Section 4 compares the purist event-oriented approach to the object-oriented paradigm. Sections 5 and 6 provide guidance on exposing events and temporal relationships between events in English specifications. The interrelationship between events and policy is described in Section 7.We conclude with a comparison to related work and a summary of the benefits of the purist event-centric paradigm.

We observed that for multimedia data -especially music -collaborative similarity measures perform much better than similarity measures derived from content-based sound features. Our observation is based on a large scale evaluation with >250,000,000 collaborative data points crawled from the web and >190,000 songs annotated with content-based sound feature sets. A song mentioned in a playlist is regarded as one collaborative data point. In this paper we present a novel approach to bridging the performance gap between collaborative and contentbased similarity measures. In the initial training phase a model vector for each song is computed, based on collaborative data. Each vector consists of 200 overlapping unlabelled 'genres' or song clusters. Instead of using explicit numerical voting, we use implicit user profile data as collaborative data source, which is, for example, available as purchase histories in many large scale ecommerce applications. After the training phase, we used support vector machines based on content-based sound features to predict the collaborative model vectors. These predicted model vectors are finally used to compute the similarity between songs. We show that combining collaborative and content-based similarity measures can help to overcome the new item problem in e-commerce applications that offer a collaborative similarity recommender as service to their customers.

The importance of e-business services quality continues to increase, as the use of e-commerce to support business activities becomes a routine practice for many enterprises. Companies need robust, predictable and efficient services that they can rely upon. This paper explores ways of how e-business quality can be established, monitored, reported and managed. A review of the literature considers the work recently undertaken in both business-level quality of service (QoS) and the QoS issues at the infrastructure level, as well as the relationship between these two areas. From a practical research perspective, the work within the framework of the EU-funded LAURA project is presented. The key goal of this project is to facilitate interregional zones of adaptive electronic commerce using the potential of the ebXML architecture. A Dynamic QoS Management framework is proposed to inform the implementation of QoS and SLA concepts within the LAURA project.

We propose a technique that we call HodgeRank for ranking data that may be incomplete and imbalanced, characteristics common in modern datasets coming from e-commerce and internet applications. We are primarily interested in cardinal data based on scores or ratings though our methods also give specific insights on ordinal data. From raw ranking data, we construct pairwise rankings, represented as edge flows on an appropriate graph. Our statistical ranking method exploits the graph X. Jiang acknowledges support from ARO Grant W911NF-04-R-0005 BAA and the School of Engineering fellowship at Stanford. L.-H. Lim acknowledges support from the Gerald J. Liebermann fellowship at Stanford and the Charles B. Morrey assistant professorship at Berkeley.

Business to Business (B2B) relationships in Ecommerce are becoming increasingly important. However, there is little guidance available for managers about how relationships should be formulated or managed. Further, requirements analysis for information technology support of B2B interorganisational relationships (IORs) depends on the business model of the relationship, and needs a predictive basis. This paper describes a method for planning and managing IORs based on Williamson's transaction cost theory, to guide managers when negotiating B2B alliances, and procurement of IT support for them. This method covers market analysis, relationship planning, transaction cost estimation and IT requirements analysis. Lessons learned in presenting the method to managers and using it in case studies are reviewed.

Searching and comparing products satisfying buyer's preferences is one of the essential activities in ecommerce. It is difficult when product space is large and multiple criteria on the product features are to be considered. Furthermore, the matchmaking becomes a challenging problem if buyer's preferences are fuzzy. In this paper, we present a linguistic approach to compare and rank products based on fuzzy preferences, thus making e-commerce more pleasurable for both the buyer and the seller in a marketplace. Our experimental results show the approach approximates human reasoning and is very encouraging.

The use of e-commerce in small medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has become an important topic in information systems research. At present, there is a large number of well-documented benefits derived from e-commerce for small-medium enterprises (SMEs) both in theoretical and practical literature. Despite the enormous attention given to encourage SMEs to adopt e-commerce both by academics as well as governments, little research has been carried out in identifying strategies of ecommerce adoption for SMEs in developing countries, especially Indonesia. It is, therefore, the aim of this paper to understand the factors and combinations of factors that SMEs need to be considered before embracing e-commerce into their business by providing a closer look at actual experience of Indonesian SMEs. Case study research was carried out to analyse and explain the underlying factors that are likely to determine the varying extent of e-commerce adoption in SMEs, especially the service sector. The findings of the case studies have further extended into the development of proposed practical framework to illustrate how e-commerce adoption should be carried out from a strategic perspective.

This paper extends the previous research regarding the Romanian electronic market as context for the launching a business opportunity in this domain. Here we will present a study on the indigenous e-commerce websites in general and their usability in particular. Nowadays, an ...

Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. Consequently, searching and reusing information on the Web is a difficult task without human participation. Adding semantics (i.e meaning) to a Web page would help machines to understand Web contents and better support the Web search process. One of the latest developments in this field is Google's Rich Snippets, a service for Web site owners to add semantics to their Web pages. In this paper we provide an approach to automatically annotate a Web page with Rich Snippets RDFa tags. Exploiting several heuristics and a named entity recognition technique, our method is capable of recognizing and annotating a subset of Rich Snippets' vocabulary, i.e., all attributes of its Review concept, and the names of Person and Organization concepts. We implemented an on-line service and evaluated the accuracy of the approach on real E-commerce Web sites.

The main objective of this study is to determine the factors influence consumers in Oman to switch from in-store to electronic purchasing. Therefore, four constructs (perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived usefulness (PU), facilitating conditions (FC), and social influence (SI)) have been employed in this study which are adopted through the integration between UTUAT and TAM models. The respondent in this study were students from Sultan Qaboos University and Dhofar University, 537 cases have been analysed. Exploratory, confirmatory, and structural equation modelling techniques have been employed in this research using SPSS 25, AMOS 25 software.The study revealed that (PU), (FC), and (SI) have a positive and significant influence on the consumers' behavioural intention in Oman to switch into electronic purchasing. While, the findings demonstrated that there is no significant effect by (PEU) on the consumers' behavioural intention to transform from traditional to electronic purchasing.The study provides business and consumers, a good interpretation about the factors influence the transformation to e-purchasing. In addition, this paper encourages companies to shift to interaction e-purchasing portals which help businesses to target different marketplace inside and outside of country to increase sell ratio to sustain their business. However, up to the researchers' knowledge this study considered to be among the first studies which provide another clearer view of e-purchasing in Oman by incorporating selected factors from two different theories. i.e. incorporating two factors related to the use of technology with other two variables about the required technical resources, and the social effect on individuals to use new technology, thereby being unique and original.

There are three main drivers of economic globalization in the latter half of the 20th century: investment by transnational corporations, international trade, and the Internet. Whereas producer-driven and buyer-driven commodity chains characterize the phases of investment-based and trade-based globalization, respectively, the emergence of the Internet in the mid-1990s heralds a new age of digital globalization. The explosion in connectivity that is enabled by the Internet has launched an e-commerce revolution that is beginning to transform the structure of business-to-business (B2B) as well as business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions in global industries. New infomediaries that navigate access to rich information and greater reach by businesses and consumers are prominent in B2C digital networks. The Internet's most significant impact to date, however, has been in B2B markets, where e-commerce is reshaping the competitive dynamics and power alignments in traditional producer-drive...

The rise of E-commerce came with the promise of disintermediation. Yet, from aggregators to authenticators, the online landscape today is scattered with intermediaries such as EBay and Verisign, aiming to streamline ecommerce transactions and building consumer trust in Electronic Markets. The central theme of this paper is to understand the contextual factors that lead to consumers' need to trust intermediaries. In developing our arguments, the paper synthesizes perspectives from information economics, transaction cost economics, and literature on institution-based trust. Drawing on information economics, the paper contends that Electronic Markets embody certain inefficiencies, which in turn contribute towards heightening consumer uncertainty, especially under conditions of high information specificity. Heightened consumer uncertainty subsequently reduces consumer trust in Electronic Markets. It is only in the face of uncertainty and a loss of trust in Electronic Markets that consumers transfer their need to trust in intermediaries. However, the transference of trust is complete only agency costs from intermediation lie within consumer thresholds. A mini-case is used to illustrate our theoretical arguments, thus creating threads for more insightful investigations in the future.

Consider shopping in the real world: When a customer enters a shop for the first time, she sees the interior, goods and the sales staff. Visual cues allow her to evaluate the shop’s professionalism and competence. Furthermore, interaction with service staff will trigger immediate affective responses that impact her trust. However, she may not conduct any risk evaluation at all, because shopping is a habit she does not perceive as risky.

A growing body of literature suggests that greater benefits of e-business will be obtained when e-business is integrated throughout a supply chain. However, organizations are still cautious in adopting e-business technologies. This paper examines whether a strategic case for e-commerce can be recognised and the factors that influence e-adoption, using e-business development models, a contingency approach and a stakeholder approach. The paper explores the link of e-commerce with strategy and the potential strategic benefits, risks and problems. This paper analysed e-adoption in four diverse healthcare supply chains in the context of the English National Health Service (NHS). The fieldwork showed there is of limited use of e-in supply chains; there are key problems associated with perceived benefits and costs by different actors both within organisations and within the chain. The paper proposes a framework to link the case for e-commerce with the achievement of strategic objectives across three inter-related domains-health, supply and business. r

Purpose -E-commerce is diffusing into developing countries (DCs), and is assumed to help deliver the international development agenda. But how can the connection between e-commerce and socio-economic development be conceptualised? The aim of this paper is to analyse that connection by drawing from the development studies discipline to take a broader perspective on e-commerce than that so far provided by firm-level research. Design/methodology/approach -The authors adopt a literature survey approach, drawing their conceptual foundations from development studies, and supplementing this from the e-commerce literature. Findings -The paper develops a new, integrated model that explains the way in which e-commerce can contribute to socio-economic development.

Application-level web security refers to vulnerabilities inher-ent in the code of a web-application itself (irrespective of the technologies in which it is implemented or the security of the web-server/back-end database on which it is built). In the last few months ...

This paper develops an economic model that captures consumer shopping channel choices based on shopping channel characteristics and consumer risk profiles-risk-neutral or risk-averse. Analyses of results show that after making purchases through one channel, electronic or traditional, risk-averse consumers tend to be more loyal customers than risk-neutral consumers. Further, the two types of consumers may exhibit split channel behavior-risk-neutral consumers prefer one channel and risk-averse consumers prefer the other. However, risk-neutral consumers are not always more likely to prefer electronic channel than risk-averse consumers. Implications for retailer pricing strategies are discussed. D

Abstract. This article discusses a potential application of radio frequency identification (RFID) and collaborative filtering for targeted advertising in grocery stores. Every day hundreds of items in grocery stores are marked down for promotional purposes. Whether these promotions are effective or not depends primarily on whether the customers are aware of them or not, and secondarily whether the customers are interested in the products or not. Currently, the companies are incapable of influencing the customers ’ decisionmaking process while they are shopping. However, the capabilities of RFID technology enable us to transfer the recommendation systems of e-commerce to grocery stores. In our model, using RFID technology, we get real time information about the products placed in the cart during the shopping process. Based on that information we inform the customer about those promotions in which the customer is likely to be interested in. The selection of the product advertised is a...

In this paper we presents our effort towards the goal of perceptual user interface for major interaction tasks, such as navigation/travel, selection/picking and personal data access, in virtual shopping. A set of 3-D navigation devices, vision-based pointing and personal access system are mainly discussed. The motivation and design principles behind these interfaces are also described. A prototype integration solution, which brings these devices together in virtual shopping environment, is given. These interfaces and interaction devices have been implemented and tested for evaluation

Online shopping for fashion has seen explosive growth in recent times but the sector still faces the challenge of translating the in-store experience to the online environment. Clothing has been classified as a high-involvement product category that needs to be seen, tried on and touched to be evaluated (Workman, 2010) and the lack of tactile input online presents a challenge for retailers. Although fashion is a growing category in e-commerce, returns rates are currently around 25% and represent a significant cost to the business (Retail Week, 2012). Developments in digital technologies and new user interfaces go some way towards translating the in-store experience to the online environment, through object interactivity, virtual try-on, mix and match function etc. Such image interactivity technology (IIT) enables consumers to manipulate product images on a retailer's website (Fiore et al, 2005). This provides enriched product information for the user (Merle et al, 2012) and thus...

The U.S. furniture, home furnishings, and textile industries are faced with threats from less expensive imports and as a result must become more strategic with regard to consumer preferences, effective marketing, and supply chain management. As a significant market for textiles, the sustainability of furniture and home furnishing industries is vital to the U.S. textile industry. This paper focuses on the furniture industry. The sustainability of the furniture industry lies on product variety, mass customization, and speed to market based on understanding of consumer preferences. Authors suggest Virtual Reality as a viable tool that may offer ultimate solutions to many identified problems that the furniture industry faces. Finally, the authors propose the Virtual Reality Integrated System (VRIS) as an innovative way for the U.S. furniture industry to more effectively address this situation and ultimately gain a more competitive stance in the furniture marketplace and, as a result, have positive impact on the textile industry.

Abstract.Increased Internet traffic and the sophistication of companies,in tracking that traffic have made,privacy a critical issue in electronic commerce (e-commerce). This has spawned,a number of research works ,addressing Internet privacy from the perspectives ,of three ,main ,stakeholders --

Collaborative filtering-based recommender systems, which automatically predict preferred products of a user using known preferences of other users, have become extremely popular in recent years due to the increase in web-based activities such as e-commerce and online content distribution. Current collaborative filtering techniques such as correlation and SVD based methods provide good accuracy, but are computationally very expensive and can only be deployed in static off-line settings where the known preference information does not change with time. However, a number of practical scenarios require dynamic real-time collaborative filtering that can allow new users, items and ratings to enter the system at a rapid rate. In this paper, we consider a novel collaborative filtering approach based on a recently proposed weighted co-clustering algorithm [3] that involves simultaneous clustering of users and items. We design incremental and parallel versions of the co-clustering algorithm and use it to build an efficient real-time collaborative filtering framework. Empirical evaluation of our approach on large movie and book rating datasets demonstrates that it is possible to obtain an accuracy comparable to that of the correlation and matrix factorization based approaches at a much lower computational cost.

T he Web has transformed electronic information systems from single, isolated nodes into a worldwide network of information exchange and business transactions. In this context, companies have equipped themselves with high-capacity storage systems that contain data in several formats. The problems faced by these companies often emerge because the storage systems lack structural and application homogeneity in addition to a common ontology. The semantic differences generated by a lack of consistent ontology can lead to conflicts that range from simple name contradictions (when companies use different names to indicate the same data concept) to structural incompatibilities (when companies use different models to represent the same information types).

This action research presents a description of how an on-line E-commerce business-planning unit was developed. Initially, an intensive ten-day E-commerce course was developed in collaboration with government, industry and university sectors with a view of raising awareness and promoting electronic business planning issues. The course utilised a range of learning approaches, including peer teaching, in which participants were trained as team leaders to facilitate group learning. Based on the evaluation of this course, a full semester course for final year tertiary studentswas developed and evaluated. An overview of both case studies is given with recommendations for future developments.

The delinquency in hotels is well known both to the professionals of the sector as well as to the clients. The specificity of hotel accommodation as an area of “hospitality” and discretion, providing distinctive tranquility and security prevents disclosure of delinquency cases that occur in them. Despite the discretion which the handling of these cases entails, their existence is undeniable. This survey, conducted for the first time in Greece, aims at exploring the extent and forms of delinquency in the Greek hotel industry, by recording and classifying phenomena of delinquent behavior and how hotel managers are dealing with them. The survey was conducted on the basis of a structured questionnaire that was distributed to directors and managers of hotel businesses. Due to the expected reserves to make public these incidents, the sample was a “convenience sample” and was combined with personal interviews with hotel directors. The questions posed were related to the manifestation of de...

E-commerce represents a model of modern commerce in which autonomous software agents represent the roles of different trading entities. Applications of e-commerce are characterized as consisting of a number of distributed heterogeneous entities operating in dynamic environments. In this paper, building on top of an open framework for multiagent collaboration, we study collaboration between trade entities performing a trade purchase transaction.

ABSTRACT The need to reduce operational costs and meet the increasing expectations of customers while remaining competitive has forced banks to deploy information technologies into the provision of banking services. The adoption rate of some of these electronic banking services is, however, not as good as initially hoped for. This study expanded the Technology Acceptance Model by including trust, subjective norm and demographic variables to understand the factors that influence retail banking customers’ attitude towards cell phone banking services. Data was collected from retail banking customers in Gauteng, South Africa, using a self filling structured questionnaire. A total of 394 usable responses were received. Result of the analysis show that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust and subjective norm are all significantly related to attitude towards cell phone banking. Trust was, however, found to have the strongest predictive power on customers’ attitude towards cell phone banking than all the other variables. Furthermore, attitude was found to contribute significantly to customers’ intention to start using/continue using cell phone banking services. These findings have wider implications on efforts aimed at encouraging more customers to make use of cell phone banking and these have been highlighted in the paper.

The increasing use of e-COIIllnerce generally is considered a positive trend that should be fostered. Yet, many lawmakers believe that laws requiring signatures to authenticate certain transactions represent obstacles to e-comlllerce and threaten to keep it from reaching its full potential.

The evidence suggests that information systems in most organisations are poorly integrated. We might therefore expect that inter-organisational e-commerce applications will only aggravate this situation. Here, we report on an Australian e-commerce project designed to improve pharmaceutical supply chain efficiency within the healthcare sector. One interesting outcome was that the standards that underpinned the project seem to have resulted in improved levels of data and systems integration -both within and between partner organisations. 0-7695-

People use e-government applications, trade financial goods online, purchase online, book hotel rooms using mobile booking apps, and make decisions based on information given in organisational information systems. All of these decisions are impacted by the context in which they are made, as this statement demonstrates: What is chosen frequently relies on how the choice is presented. Designers of choice settings, sometimes known as choice architects, can take use of these heuristics and biases. In this paper various digital nudging research papers are studied. The goal of this study is to see if and how different digital nudges displayed on an e-commerce website impact the customer's psychological state. A variety of research reviews have been done in order to better understand the psychological heuristics impact based on digital nudging.

An exploratory research approach is used to characterize the experience of two second year high school mathematics teachers in their teacher preparation programs: one graduated from a four-year undergraduate program while the other graduated from a fifth-year masters program. The two main forms of data collection included interviews and document review. Findings showed that both teachers felt prepared for the mathematical demands of their jobs but ill prepared for what they termed "on-the-job knowledge." Each teacher offered suggestions for improving their teacher education programs. Complete program curricula are included in the appendices.

e-Commerce companies acknowledge that customers are their most important asset and that it is imperative to estimate the potential value of this asset. In conventional marketing, one of the widely accepted methods for evaluating customer value uses models known as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). However, these existing models suffer from two major shortcomings: They either do not take into account significant attributes of customer behavior unique to e-Commerce, or they do not provide a method for generating specific models from the large body of relevant historical data that can be easily collected in e-Commerce sites. This paper describes a general modeling approach, based on Markov Chain Models, for calculating customer value in the e-Commerce domain. This approach extends existing CLV models, by taking into account a new set of variables required for evaluating customers value in an e-Commerce environment. In addition, we describe how data-mining algorithms can aid in deriving such a model, thereby taking advantage of the historical customer data available in such environments. We then present an application of this modeling approach—the creation of a model for online auctions—one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative types of e-Commerce. The article also describes a case study, which demonstrates how our model provides more accurate predictions than existing conventional CLV models regarding the future income generated by customers.

Information overload on the Web has created enormous challenges to customers selecting products for online purchases and to online businesses attempting to identify customers' preferences efficiently. Various recommender systems employing different data representations and recommendation methods are currently used to address these challenges. In this research, we developed a graph model that provides a generic data representation and can support different recommendation methods. To demonstrate its usefulness and flexibility, we developed three recommendation methods: direct retrieval, association mining, and high-degree association retrieval. We used a data set from an online bookstore as our research test-bed. Evaluation results showed that combining product content information and historical customer transaction information achieved more accurate predictions and relevant recommendations than using only collaborative information. However, comparisons among different methods showed that high-degree association retrieval did not perform significantly better than the association mining method or the direct retrieval method in our test-bed.

Surveillance-based reality television has emerged as a resurgent programming genre in the US and Western Europe during a time when the online economy is becoming increasingly reliant upon surveillance as a form of economic exploitation. The portrayal of surveillance through 'reality TV' as a form of entertainment and selfexpression can thus be understood as playing an important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an 'interactive' economy. This article relies on interviews with cast members and producers of MTV's popular reality show 'Road Rules', to explore the form of subjectivity that corresponds to its implicit definition of 'reality'. This form of subjectivity reinforces the promise of the interactive economy to democratize production by relinquishing control to consumers and viewers. Surveillance is portrayed not as a form of social control, but as the democratization of celebrity -a fact that has disturbing implications for the democratic potential of the internet's interactive capability.

ABSTRACT  By reducing the cost of performing isolated economic activities in remote areas, information technology might serve as a substitute for urban agglomeration. The paper assesses this hypothesis using data on Italian households' usage of the Internet, e-commerce, and e-banking. The results do not support the argument that the Internet reduces the role of distance. Internet usage is much more frequent among urban consumers than among their non-urban counterparts. The use of e-commerce is basically unaffected by the size of the city where the household lives. Geographically remote consumers are discouraged from purchasing goods by the fact that they cannot inspect them beforehand. Leisure activities and cultural items (i.e., books, CDs, and tickets for museums and theaters) are the only goods and services for which e-commerce is used more in isolated areas. Finally, e-banking bears no relationship to city size. In choosing a bank, non-urban customers give more importance to personal acquaintance than do urban clients, partly because bank account holders in remote areas are more likely to have taken out a loan from their bank.

The article examines integration of cryptocurrencies as electronic payment systems in e-commerce enterprises. Practical usage of Ethereum and Bitcoin cryptocurrencies as electronic payment systems, as well as factors that may affect their functionality are studied. Coinbase Commerce and Bitpay, as market leaders in cryptocurrency payment providers, were analyzed to compare integration issues and commission analysis with traditional payment systems LiqPay, PayPal. It is determined that the factors influencing the integration of cryptocurrencies in the enterprise include the field in which this enterprise is operating, instability of the national currency, development of information technology. It has been proven that e-commerce companies specializing on selling consumer goods could use hybrid cryptocurrency payments in Bitcoin in 50% of transactions and Ethereum in 65% of transactions in the studied timeframe to reduce the cost of the transaction compared to the LiqPay system.