ECRA co-editors' introduction for Vol. 9, Issue 4, July-August 2010

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-2010

Abstract

This issue consists of four regular research articles, in addition to three others that were developed under the ‘Social Networks and Web 2.0’ special issue, by Julie Smith-David, Bin Wang and Chris Westland, who deserve our thanks for their editorial work.1. Regular research articlesThe first article is by Joyce Wangui Gikandi and Chris Bloor, and is entitled ‘Adoption and Effectiveness of Electronic Banking in Kenya.’ Electronic and Internet banking in developed countries has been the subject of extensive study in the literature on economics, financial services, operations management, information systems and electronic commerce. This article takes a different approach to studying electronic banking, since Kenya is a developing country setting. The authors conducted a three-stage survey of firms representing 90% of Kenya’s banking sector. The multiple methods that are used in the study involve secondary data collection from annual reports, a baseline survey conducted in 2005 and a second comparative survey from 2009, as well as face-to-face interviews with banking executives.The authors identified a number of factors in their research that reflect the challenges of e-banking in a developing country. They include: top management and budgetary support of e-banking systems investments, constant changes in e-banking technologies as a source of pressure, the magnification of traditional risks in the presence of e-banking, e-banking staff training, and security infrastructure and practices issues. They also point out that Internet security will be the most important future challenge in e-banking in Kenya. Since the country is relatively small, there were concerns expressed about the possibility that e-banking will be affected by Internet service provider monopolies, Internet pricing and site maintenance, but these did not constitute as important issues as consumer trust, privacy and awareness of the risks in the eyes of the study’s respondents. Overall, the article provides a useful examination of the electronic banking sector of a developing country in Africa.The topic of the second article is ‘Sharing Secure M-Coupons for Peer-Generated Targeting via eWOM Communications,’ by Sue-Chen Hsueh and Jun-Ming Chen. Coupon-based discounting in Internet retailing is a flourishing activity, with many different business models, coupon schemes, companies and competitors, and local, regional and national levels of coverage. This research investigates mobile coupons, which have been widely recognized as being less subject to loss and higher levels of redemption in comparison to traditional paper-based coupons. The authors explore a coupon scheme in which the marketer identifies its targeted consumers from its own database to match their profiles with a given promotion campaign. The firm sends ‘virtual coupon books’ that can be used by a consumer or shared with friends of the consumer. This is an instance of ‘peer-generated targeting,’ which goes beyond the usual approaches of individual targeting, segment targeting and self-selection targeting (as instances of first-, second-, and third-degree targeting). The authors provide a design science proposal for this mobile couponing scheme. It includes coverage of the primary protocols for message exchange and authentication, and cryptography and sharing, as well the assessment of the simulated operations of a system to support the related business and technical process.The third article in this issue is by Yung-Ming Li, Chia-Hao Lin and Cheng-Yang Lai, who contributed ‘Identifying Influential Reviewers for Word-of-Mouth Marketing.’ Not all people who contribute online reviews of new products on the Internet have equal influence on others who contemplate buying them. In this research, the authors develop a framework that offers a mechanism for how product reviewers might be chosen that will become the most influential in creating word-of-mouth ‘buzz’ to generate interest in a new product in the market. To do this, they employ a variety of methods in their framework, including: modified point-wise mutual information, a measure of association from information theory; a method to analyze customer behavior in terms of recency of orders, frequency of orders, and monetary value of orders; and artificial neural network methods. They use 2008 data from Epinions.com that cover 82 reviewers and a total of 4573 reviews, which made it possible for the authors to split their data into analysis and testing groups. The authors’ data analysis provides evidence for the effectiveness of the influential reviewer identification framework they recommend.The fourth article in this issue is entitled ‘With or Without You: The Countervailing Forces and Effects of Process Standardization,’ by Robert J. Kauffman and Juliana Y. Tsai. They define the process standardization ecosystem via a robust framework that captures the complex dynamics across four levels of analysis: IT innovation, firm, industry, and economy. They also introduce two dimensions of cascading effects: stakeholder dynamics and process standardization level outcomes. They argue that both of them are essential to the evolution of a business process standard. They illustrate the complex dynamics proposed in the framework using examples of different industry standard-setting organizations. Their goal for this work is to enrich the current theoretical and managerial understanding of the issues related to process standardization. They recommend four research directions to help promote growth in technology research on the topic: the business value of process standardization, the performance of technology standards consortia versus process standards consortia, what drives the rate of adoption and diffusion of process standards, and how to understand the social and behavioral issues that arise in the presence of process standardization.2. Social networks and Web 2.0: a follow-on special sectionAn increasingly important theme in the study of e-commerce involves social networks and the emergence of Web 2.0 functionality and technology-supported business processes. This special section represents articles that were initially submitted to the journal related to a 2008 call for papers, but that did not finish in time for publication in an earlier special issue (ECRA Vol. 9, Issue 1, January–February 2010).The research paper by San-Yih Hwang, Chih-Ping Wei and Yi-Fan Liao, ‘Coauthorship Networks and Academic Literature Recommendation,’ draws from an old and rich literature in co-citation indices that have yielded advances such as Eugene Garfield’s ISI Impact Factor, and Google’s (Larry Page’s) PageRank. The authors extend this framework in the context of PageRank type linkage search and recommendation systems. They examine whether coauthorship network-based recommendations outperform the capabilities of individual interest profiles that are derived from user preference ratings in the identification of relevant academic literature. They propose three schemes that identify the relational closeness of research scholars based on their coauthored research. They include (1) non-transitive closeness, (2) transitive length-2 closeness, and (3) transitive closure closeness. In addition to developing a modeling specification of the underlying conceptual and technical elements of the recommendation approaches that they recommend, the authors also conduct empirical evaluations of the design ideas that they have presented. They report that their approach improves upon the author-based recommendation approach when there are differing degrees of pair-wise content similarity of the articles that are sought in the search task. Content coherence is a predictor of search recommendation effectiveness when the task profiles for search involve similar elements, but this works less well when the task profiles don’t match the contents too strongly. The authors’ results show that the most effective approach is a hybrid blend of the coauthorship network and content coherence approaches.The second paper of the special section is entitled ‘E-Commerce Communities as Knowledge Bases for Firms,’ by Jue-Fan Wang. The author asks: Is an e-commerce community an appropriate unit of analysis to study knowledge management issues? What kinds of knowledge management practices exist in Asian e-commerce? What are the effects of e-commerce community-based knowledge management? To answer these questions, the author collected data from 107 business-to-business e-commerce firms in China and Taiwan. The author offers a number of insights. (1) Four modes of knowledge management are relevant: knowledge dissemination, knowledge advancement, knowledge sharing deals, and new knowledge generation. (2) The results of a survey study indicate that knowledge activities in e-commerce communities are involved in product planning, research and development, prototype initiation, manufacturing, and marketing. Chinese and Taiwanese e-commerce communities perform best in knowledge advancement and the least well in knowledge sharing deals. (3) In addition, the four modes of knowledge management positively correlate with innovativeness-related performance, and knowledge advancement and sharing deals create greater impacts on this outcome. (4) E-commerce community knowledge management in China and Taiwan also yield process innovativeness and member satisfaction.Finally, Yaobin Lu, Ling Zhao and Bin Wang contributed ‘From Virtual Community Members to C2C E-Commerce Buyers: Trust in Virtual Communities and Its Effect on Consumers’ Purchase Intention.’ Trust in consumer-to-consumer e-commerce interactions continues to be a subject of considerable research interest. In this article, the authors explore trust formation in the Taobao Virtual Community, a community of buyers and sellers on the Internet in China. The business model that Taobao uses involves the conversion of virtual community members into active buyers and sellers, a process that requires trust to be established. The authors employ empirical methods, including paper-based and online surveys, to analyze member trust. They find that familiarity, perceived similarity, structural assurance and propensity to trust support the trust of others in the virtual community. They further note that the perceived integrity and benevolence of virtual community members supports a member’s willingness to make a purchase transaction with another member.3. Final remarksThe pipeline of submissions and work-in-progress at ECRA continues to be healthy. We receive on the order of 300 manuscripts each year now, blending special issue and regular research submissions. ECRA’s current acceptance rate is about 15–16%. We hope to increase the page count of the journal, if demand for the publication of high quality articles persists. ECRA operates with a six to nine-month lead-time to publication for regular research submissions, depending on the scheduling of special issues.The Editorial Team continues to emphasize ‘developmental reviewing’: we work with authors to help them bring out the best in the work that they are doing. We are also actively soliciting special issue and special section proposals from interested future guest editors for the journal, and are especially interested to support proposals that reach out to communities of scholarship that are still under-represented at ECRA. They include the topics of: intellectual property and technological innovation; the Internet and legal studies; public policy and political science; international development and global issues in e-commerce; and user-generated content on the Internet.

Discipline

Computer Sciences

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

Volume

9

Issue

4

First Page

275

Last Page

276

ISSN

1567-4223

Identifier

10.1016/j.elerap.2010.05.002

Publisher

Elsevier

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