E-Commerce Commons^™

On Self-Selection Biases In Online Product Reviews, Nan Hu, Paul A. Pavlou, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online product reviews help consumers infer product quality, and the mean (average) rating is often used as a proxy for product quality. However, two self-selection biases, acquisition bias (mostly consumers with a favorable predisposition acquire a product and hence write a product review) and underreporting bias (consumers with extreme, either positive or negative, ratings are more likely to write reviews than consumers with moderate product ratings), render the mean rating a biased estimator of product quality, and they result in the well-known J-shaped (positively skewed, asymmetric, bimodal) distribution of online product reviews. To better understand the nature and consequences of …

Factored Similarity Models With Social Trust For Top-N Item Recommendation, Guibing Guo, Jie Zhang, Feida Zhu, Xingwei Wang

Research Collection School of Computing and Information Systems

Trust-aware recommender systems have attracted much attention recently due to the prevalence of social networks. However, most existing trust-based approaches are designed for the recommendation task of rating prediction. Only few trust-aware methods have attempted to recommend users an ordered list of interesting items, i.e., item recommendation. In this article, we propose three factored similarity models with the incorporation of social trust for item recommendation based on implicit user feedback. Specifically, we introduce a matrix factorization technique to recover user preferences between rated items and unrated ones in the light of both user-user and item-item similarities. In addition, we claim …

Inferring User Consumption Preferences From Social Media, Yang Li, Jing Jiang, Ting Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social Media has already become a new arena of our lives and involved different aspects of our social presence. Users' personal information and activities on social media presumably reveal their personal interests, which offer great opportunities for many e-commerce applications. In this paper, we propose a principled latent variable model to infer user consumption preferences at the category level (e.g. inferring what categories of products a user would like to buy). Our model naturally links users' published content and following relations on microblogs with their consumption behaviors on e-commerce websites. Experimental results show our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly …

They All Seem Good, But Which One Fits Me? Reducing Fit Uncertainty For Digital Entertainment Goods, Ai Phuong Hoang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Faster Internet connections and advanced streaming technologies have boosted the consumption of digital entertainment content. Nonetheless, many content providers are still struggling to differentiate their services and sell their offerings in the market, due to the large number of options available and customers’ uncertainty about the specific attributes of individual information goods. The providers employ different strategies to communicate information on the quality and fit of their products. In this research, I examine the effectiveness of sampling-based seller strategy on the marketing of digital entertainment goods. Using a large dataset on series drama on-demand, I show that content sampling plays …

Aspect-Based Helpfulness Prediction For Online Product Reviews, Yinfei Yang, Cen Chen, Forrest Sheng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Product reviews greatly influence purchase decisions in online shopping. A common burden of online shopping is that consumers have to search for the right answers through massive reviews, especially on popular products. Hence, estimating and predicting the helpfulness of reviews become important tasks to directly improve shopping experience. In this paper, we propose a new approach to helpfulness prediction by leveraging aspect analysis of reviews. Our hypothesis is that a helpful review will cover many aspects of a product at different emphasis levels. The first step to tackle this problem is to extract proper aspects. Because related products share common …

Newsvendor Models With Monte Carlo Sampling, Ijeoma W. Ekwegh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Newsvendor Models with Monte Carlo Sampling by Ijeoma Winifred Ekwegh The newsvendor model is used in solving inventory problems in which demand is random. In this thesis, we will focus on a method of using Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the order quantity that will either maximizes revenue or minimizes cost given that demand is uncertain. Given data, the Monte Carlo approach will be used in sampling data over scenarios and also estimating the probability density function. A bootstrapping process yields an empirical distribution for the order quantity that will maximize the expected profit. Finally, this method will be used …

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 …