E-Commerce Commons^™

Backend Challenges And Issues For Electronic Government, Salim Y. Alkindi

Information Technology Master Theses

The term electronic government (also called e-government, or eGov) refers to multidisciplinary projects that are complex in nature. Since the beginning of the Internet revolution many countries have adopted e-government as a step toward enhancing the delivery of public or governmental services to citizens by what are called e-services. A typical request for a service is initiated and passes through an electronic service (“e-service”) portal, or a front office. The term front office application usually system can be defined as designates software seen and used directly by an end user. This software provides the capabilities needed to collect the user …

The Challenge Of Blocking Malvertising, Catherine Dwyer, Susanne O'Callaghan, Chinmay Juneja, Preston Rollins, Harpreet Wasan, Ameet Kanguri

Student and Faculty Research Days

This poster invited Research Days attendees to learn more about malvertising--the practice of hiding malicious code within online advertisements--and the challenges of detecting and preventing it.

Gone In 200 Milliseconds: The Challenge Of Blocking Malvertising, Catherine Dwyer, Ameet Kanguri

Student and Faculty Research Days

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar global industry that lets advertisers serve ads to specific customers of interest as they browse the web. Using real time bidding (RTB), as web visitors land on a site, advertising networks are alerted of space available and whatever profile information can be gleaned about the visitor. Ad networks then auction this combination of space and profile through ad exchanges, and the winning bid's ad content is served to the web visitor. The entire process, from a visitor landing on a publisher's page to ads being auctioned, takes 200 milliseconds--the time needed to snap your …

The Role Of Cryptography In Security For Electronic Commerce, Ann Murphy, David Murphy

The ITB Journal

Many businesses and consumers are wary of conducting business over the Internet due to a perceived lack of security. Electronic business is subject to a variety of threats such as unauthorised access, misappropriation, alteration and destruction of both data and systems. This paper explores the major security concerns of businesses and users and describes the cryptographic techniques used to reduce such risks.

Intelligshop: Enabling Intelligent Shopping In Malls Through Location-Based Augmented Reality, Aditi Adhikari, Vincent W. Zheng, Hong Cao, Miao Lin, Yuan Fang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping experience is important for both citizens and tourists. We present IntelligShop, a novel location-based augmented reality application that supports intelligent shopping experience in malls. As the key functionality, IntelligShop provides an augmented reality interface-people can simply use ubiquitous smartphones to face mall retailers, then IntelligShop will automatically recognize the retailers and fetch their online reviews from various sources (including blogs, forums and publicly accessible social media) to display on the phones. Technically, IntelligShop addresses two challenging data mining problems, including robust feature learning to support heterogeneous smartphones in localization and learning to query for automatically gathering the retailer content …

Near Real-Time Retail Payment And Settlement Systems Mechanism Design, Zhiling Guo, Robert John Kauffman, Mei Lin, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rapid expansion of e-commerce, along with rising domestic and cross-border payments, has fueled the demand among financial institutions for a cost-effective means to expedite clearing and settlement of low-value retail payments. These are called faster payments settlement systems. Traditionally, retail payments have made extensive use of interbank netting systems, in which payments are accumulated for end-of-day settlement. This approach, known as deferred net settlement (DNS), reduces the liquidity needs of the payment system, but bears inherent operational and financial risks for unsettled intraday payments. As large dollar volumes of retail payments accumulate, real-time gross settlement (RTGS) has been recognized as …

Competition, Cooperation And Regulation: Understanding The Evolution Of The Mobile Payments Technology Ecosystem, Jun Liu, Robert J. Kauffman, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The past twenty years have been a time of many new technological developments, changing business practices, and interesting innovations in the financial information system (IS) and technology landscape. They have led to the increasing use of prior innovations that have supported e-commerce, and that are now being brought into financial services to support different kinds of improvements to core business processes. This research examines recent changes in the payment sector in financial services, specifically related to mobile payments (m-payments) that enable new channels for consumer payments for goods and services purchases, and other forms of economic exchange. We extend recent …

Showrooming Vs. Competing: How Does Brand Selection Matter?, Qian Tang, Mei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this study, we empirically examine the effect of local shoe store openings on the sales of a competing, major online shoe retailer. Both showrooming and competing effects can play a role: Under the showrooming effect, the local store opening can lead to more online sales for the online retailer, whereas the competing effect created by the local store opening can substitute away the demand for the online retailer. We examine when one effect dominates the other by classifying local stores into single- and mixed-brand stores. We find that the showrooming effect is dominant for a single-brand store opening, and …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Electronic Contract Signing Without Using Trusted Third Party, Zhiguo Wan, Robert H. Deng, David Kuo Chuen Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electronic contract signing allows two potentially dis-trustful parties to digitally sign an electronic document “simultaneously” across a network. Existing solutions for electronic contract signing either require the involvement of a trusted third party (TTP), or are complex and expensive in communication and computation. In this paper we propose an electronic contract signing protocol between two parties with the following advantages over existing solutions: 1) it is practical and scalable due to its simplicity and high efficiency; 2) it does not require any trusted third party as the mediator; and 3) it guarantees fairness between the two signing parties. We achieve …

A Conceptual Model To Evaluate Decisions For Service Profitability, Eng Lieh Ouh, Stan Jarzabek

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Service profitability depends on the cost of engineering a service for a given base of tenants, on service provisioning cost, and on the revenue gained from selling the service to that tenant base. The tenant base depends on the range of service variability, i.e., on Service Provider's ability to vary service requirements to meet tenant expectations. These various factors that have to do with service profitability form a complex web of information that makes it difficult to analyze and see the exact impact of decisions regarding the choice of service architecture or the use of service adaptation techniques. To make …

A Proposed Model For The Approach To Augmented Reality Deployment In Marketing Communications, Stephen O'Mahony

Dept. of Marketing & International Business Conference Material

In the contemporary landscape, human interaction is characterized by the pervasive mediation of intelligent agents. Owing to advances in computer science and engineering, phenomena once limited to fixed locations are metamorphosing from extraneous entities to implicit components of the everyday. Computing power has simultaneously enhanced and miniaturized to the extent that contemporary consumer devices demonstrate power equivalent to or greater than that of personal computers of recent memory. At the same time, network connectivity has proliferated to ubiquitous levels, reflected in the fact that the amount of inanimate objects connected to the Internet has recently surpassed the human population of …

Implicit Measures And Online Risks, Lucinda W. Wang

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

Information systems researchers typically use self-report measures, such as questionnaires to study consumers’ online risk perception. The self-report approach captures the conscious perception of online risk but not the unconscious perception that precedes and dominates human being’s decision-making. A theoretical model in which implicit risk perception precedes explicit risk evaluation is proposed. The research model proposes that implicit risk affects both explicit risk and the attitude towards online purchase. In a direct path, the implicit risk affects attitude towards purchase. In an indirect path, the implicit risk affects explicit risk, which in turn affects attitude towards purchase.

The stimulus used …

Reputationpro: The Efficient Approaches To Contextual Transaction Trust Computation In E-Commerce Environments, Haibin Zhang, Yan Wang, Xiuzhen Zhang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In e-commerce environments, the trustworthiness of a seller is utterly important to potential buyers, especially when a seller is not known to them. Most existing trust evaluation models compute a single value to reflect the general trustworthiness of a seller without taking any transaction context information into account. With such a result as the indication of reputation, a buyer may be easily deceived by a malicious seller in a transaction where the notorious value imbalance problem is involved—in other words, a malicious seller accumulates a high-level reputation by selling cheap products and then deceives buyers by inducing them to purchase …

Recovering Household Preferences For Digital Entertainment, Jin Li, Zhiling Guo, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cable TV return path data made possible by current generation set-top boxes present a new opportunity to analyze household viewing behavior and recover household viewing preferences from it. This research develops a model of household viewing preference that supports quantifying a household's valuation for different categories of digital content within the constraints of the programs to which it subscribes. This study uses a data set of more than 1 million observations on households from a digital entertainment firm that offers basic and premium services. Our estimation is via a Bayesian hierarchical model that employs the Gibbs sampler. The results show …

Data Privacy Preservation In Collaborative Filtering Based Recommender Systems, Xiwei Wang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation studies data privacy preservation in collaborative filtering based recommender systems and proposes several collaborative filtering models that aim at preserving user privacy from different perspectives.

The empirical study on multiple classical recommendation algorithms presents the basic idea of the models and explores their performance on real world datasets. The algorithms that are investigated in this study include a popularity based model, an item similarity based model, a singular value decomposition based model, and a bipartite graph model. Top-N recommendations are evaluated to examine the prediction accuracy.

It is apparent that with more customers' preference data, recommender systems …

Push Or Pull? A Website's Strategic Choice Of Content Delivery Mechanism, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Really simple syndication (RSS) technology enables an alternative delivery mechanism for online content. Instead of waiting passively for users to pull online content out, websites can push it to potential users through RSS. This is expected to significantly affect user behavior, website profitability, and market equilibrium. This research uses an economic model to study the impact of RSS adoption and examine whether it increases a website’s profit and competitive advantage. The findings are intriguing: they demonstrate that RSS can either increase or decrease website profit. In a competitive context, RSS adoption can actually be a disadvantage; in some cases, it …

Mechanism Design For Near Real-Time Retail Payment And Settlement Systems, Zhiling Guo, Robert John Kauffman, Mei Lin, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

have made extensive use of interbank netting systems, in which payments are accumulated for end-of-day settlement. This approach, known as deferred net settlement (DNS), reduces the liquidity needs of a payment system, but bears inherent operational risks. As large dollar volumes of retail payments accumulate swiftly, real-time gross settlement (RTGS) is an attractive option. It permits immediate settlement of transactions during the day, but it brings up other risks that require consideration. We propose a hybrid payment management system involving elements of both DNS and RTGS. We explore several hybrid system mechanism designs to allow payment prioritization, reduce payment delays, …

Platform Pricing With Endogenous Network Effects, Mei Lin, Ruhai Wu, Wen Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper examines a monopoly platform’s two-sided pricing strategy through modeling the trades between the participating sellers and buyers. In this approach, the network effects emerge endogenously through the equilibrium trading strategies of the two sides. We show that platform pricing depends crucially on the characteristics associated with market liquidity, including both sides’ entry costs, the buyers’ preferences, and the distribution of the sellers’ quality. The platform may subsidize sellers if the market is sufficiently liquid, whereas buyer subsidy can be optimal given an illiquid market. We also illustrate the impact of the sellers’ quality heterogeneity on the platform’s optimal …

The Learning Curves In Open-Source Software (Oss) Development Network, Youngsoo Kim, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine the learning curves of individual software developers in Open-Source Software (OSS) Development. We collected the dataset of multi-year code change histories from the repositories for five open source software projects involving more than 100 developers. We build and estimate regression models to assess individual developers' learning progress (in reducing the likelihood they may make a bug). Our estimation results show that developer's coding experience does not decrease bug ratios while cumulative bug-fixing experience leads to learning progress. The results may have implications and provoke future research on project management about allocating resources on tasks that add new code …

Technology Investment Decision-Making Under Uncertainty In Mobile Payment Systems, Robert J. Kauffman, Jun Liu, Dan Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Innovations in the mobile payments industry provide potentially profitable investment opportunities for banks. Nonetheless, significant uncertainties are associated with decision-making for this IT investment context, regarding future market conditions, technology standards, and consumer and merchant responses, especially their willingness to adopt. As a result, traditional capital budgeting approach and experienced intuition have not been effective. We develop a model to support a bank’s mobile payment systems adoption decision-making at the firm level when it faces endogenous technological risks and exogenous market conditions. This study applies theory and modeling from financial economics for decision-making under uncertainty to investments in m-payment systems …

Canaries In The Urban Data Mine: Analytics For Smarter City Life, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technology-based sensors and data analytics have created unprecendented levels of informedness for consumers, corporations, the public and government agencies. The information they generated provides a basis for smarter cities and more sustainable urban living.

How Many Credit Card Frauds Must We Endure Before Security Improves?, Maritza Martinez

UCF Forum

Yes, it can happen to you…

Pricing Strategy For Cloud Computing Services, Jianhui Huang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The cloud computing services market exhibits unique characteristics such as instant accessibility, fluctuating demand and supply, and interruptible service provision. Various pricing mechanisms exist in current industry practice. None of these pricing mechanisms, however, is comprehensive enough to capture all these features in a way that allows the vendors to optimize resource allocation. This dissertation identifies key factors related to cloud computing pricing, and examines their interplays. This research uses multiple approaches, including a market survey, game theory modeling, simulation, lab experiments and econometric modeling, to analyze the pricing strategy of cloud services vendors. A field study of a representative …

Running And Chasing: The Competition Between Paid Search Marketing And Search Engine Optimization, Kai Li, Mei Lin, Zhangxi Lin, Bo Xing

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As search engine is leading the revenue growth in online marketing field, the competition of search engine marketing between paid search marketing (PSM) by search engine providers (SEPs), and search engine optimization (SEO) provided by search engine optimization firms, is white-hot. While PSM is simply for advertisers to buy the top ranks in sponsored links, SEO tries to optimize advertisers' websites by free-riding search engine's organic searching results. This study aims to investigate this competition by analytical modeling regarding organic search quality. We focus on sustainability conditions of SEO firms, investment analysis of SEO firms, and profit analysis of SEP. …

Ratings Lead You To The Product, Reviews Help You Clinch It? The Dynamics And Impact Of Online Review Sentiments On Products Sales, Nan Hu, Noi Sian Koh, Srinivas K. Reddy

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

It is generally assumed that ratings are a numeric representation of text sentiments and their valences are consistent. This however may not always be true. Using a panel of data on over 4000 books from Amazon.com, we develop a multiple equation model to examine the inter-relationships between ratings, sentiments, and sales. We find that ratings do not have a significant direct impact on sales but have an indirect impact through sentiments. Sentiments, however, have a direct significant impact on sales. Our findings also indicate that the two most accessible types of reviews - most helpful and most recent - play …

The Influence Of Online Word-Of-Mouth On Long Tail Formation, Bin Gu, Qian Tang, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The long tail phenomenon has been attributed to both supply side and demand side economies. While the cause on the supply side is well-known, research on the demand side has largely focused on the awareness effect of online information that helps consumers discover new and often niche products. This study expands the demand side factors by showing that online information also influences the long tail phenomenon through the informative effect, which affects consumers' evaluation of product quality. We examine the informative effect in the context of online WOM. Two sets of theories suggest opposite directions for the implication of the …

Mining Fraudulent Patterns In Online Advertising, Richard J. Oentaryo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advances in web technologies have rendered onlineadvertising as an effective means for small and large businesses to target different market segments on the fly. Online advertising is a huge industry. According to Gartner Inc., worldwide online advertising revenue is projected tohit $11.4 billion in 2013, up from $9.6 billion in 2012. Global revenue will also reach $24.5 billion in 2016, with online advertising creating opportunities for app developers, advertising networks, and service providersin various regions. An online advertising ecosystem is typically coordinated by an advertising commissioner, acting as a broker between advertisers and content publishers. An advertiser plans a budget, …

The User’S Communication Patterns On A Mobile Social Network Site, Youngsoo Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Modular Product Architectures And The Emergence Of Platform Ecosystems, C. Jason Woodard, Eric K. Clemons

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While a large body of research has examined the advantages and disadvantages of modularity in product design, studies of modularization have tended to focus on settings in which a product’s architecture is determined by a single designer or designers within a single organization. In this paper, we ask whether modularity can arise in a decentralized setting where high-value designs are rewarded but designers’ ability to coordinate with each other and anticipate the consequences of their actions is limited—in short, whether modularity can evolve. To answer this question, we developed an agent-based model in which boundedly rational firms combine components into …