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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Effects Of Market-Enabling Internet Agents On Competition And Prices, Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes
The Effects Of Market-Enabling Internet Agents On Competition And Prices, Kevin Crowston, Ian Macinnes
School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship
The Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automate the search for price or other information across multiple vendors by using an "agent" to retrieve relevant information. The use of agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers ' search costs. We develop a framework that suggests that vendors who sell products with many differentiating factors beyond price will tend to accept agents, while vendors of commodities or branded goods will tend to resist them unless they have lower costs than their competitors. Empirically, we found that agents seem to be …
How Do Information And Communication Technologies Reshape Work? Evidence Form The Residential Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand, Marcel Allbritton
How Do Information And Communication Technologies Reshape Work? Evidence Form The Residential Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand, Marcel Allbritton
School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship
We are exploring how ICT use affects the work lives of real estate agents, the process of selling/buying houses and the overall structure of the residential real estate industry. Earlier stages of our work involved intensive field research on how real estate agents use ICT. In this paper, we report on the design and analysis of a pilot survey of 868 agents intended to investigate their ICT use more generally. Analysis of the 153 responses to this survey sheds light on how ICT use supports information control, enables process support, and helps agents to extend and maintain their social capital.