A network of people connected by directed ratings or trust scores, and a model for propagating those trust scores, is a fundamental building block in many of today's most successful e-commerce and recommendation systems. In eBay, such a model of trust has significant influence on the price an item may command. In Epinions (epinions.com), conclusions drawn from the web of trust are linked to many behaviors of the system, including decisions on items to which each user is exposed. We develop a framework of trust propagation schemes, each of which may be appropriate in certain circumstances, and evaluate the schemes on a large trust network consisting of 800K trust scores expressed among 130K people. We show that a small number of expressed trusts/distrust per individual allows us to predict reliably trust between any two people in the system with high accuracy: a quadratic increase in actionable information. Our work appears to be the first to incorporate distrust in a computational trust propagation setting.

Bringing communities of buyers and sellers together in the arena of electronic commerce stimulates three major potentials: the building of trust, the collection and effective use of community knowledge and the economic impacts of accumulated buying power. In this context, we introduce the concept of Virtual Communities of Transaction and review important personalization approaches which we may utilize in their design: collaborative filtering, data mining, and techniques to optimize the user interface and the underlying product offerings. The key contributions of this paper are the elaboration of Virtual Communities, the presentation of a categorization scheme for different types of communities, the identification of classes of member profiles, and the innovative concept of community products. We conclude with the case of the Amazon.com Recommendation Center to illustrate key design ideas and discuss an evolutionary application, the Participatory Product Catalog. 1.

Technology can play an important role in enabling people to interact with each other. The Web is one such technology with the affordances for sharing information and for connecting people to people. In this paper, we describe the design of two social interaction Web sites for two different social groups. We review several related efforts to provide principles for creating social interaction environments and describe the specific principles that guided our design. To examine the effectiveness of the two sites, we analyze the usage data. Finally, we discuss approaches for encouraging participation and lessons learned.

Information Systems at the University

Companies are finding that the development of World Wide Web presence sites is becoming a competitive necessity, particularly the need to establish online storefronts. Even so, there are few useful frameworks in the electronic commerce (EC) literature to help managers identify online opportunities and what types of applications can add business value to the user. I expand on an existing framework originally developed by Hammer and Mangurian [1] to identify opportunities from Web-based EC applications. I argue that firms compete along 5 dimensions of commerce: By using various modes of interaction, firms compete over both time and distance to provide some product or service to their customers through a chain of relations. In addition, new investments in information technology are typically justified using 3 different criteria—generating efficiency, effectiveness, and/or strategic benefits. These 2 perspectives can be combined to create the Electronic Commerce Value Grid, which identifies 15 areas in which managers can use Web-based electronic storefronts to add value for their customers.

Abstract The emerging electronic economy is bringing with it new forms of IT-enabled intermediation, virtual supply chains, rapidly changing electronic commerce technologies, increasing knowledge intensity, and unprecedented sensitivity for time-to-market by customers. Customers are demanding more value, customized to their exact needs, at less cost, and as quickly as possible. The enterprises that will survive in such a demanding environment will need to innovate and invent new ways of creating value, and will require different enterprise architectures and different IT infrastructures. This article focuses on providing a framework for guiding an enterprise as it transforms itself to function more effectively in the electronic economy. Using the distribution industry in general and Marshall Industries in particular as a context, the article draws insights for transforming an extended enterprise's architecture and its IT infrastructure to enable new ways of creating value in ...

Successfully conducting business on the Internet calls for new marketing paradigms that meet the requirements of the unique combination of its inherent characteristics: electronic markets, technological platform, and marketing issues. In this context, electronic markets are the framework in which market transactions are performed on the Internet. Underlying Internet technology forces marketing activities to be different from the ones applied to traditional sales channels and performance marketing is the essential ingredient for creating the best offering for the customer. The Web Assessment model unites these constituting characteristics into one approach for the evaluation of commercial Web sites. The Web Assessment methodology has been developed over the last one and a half years and the initial ideas have already been presented at conferences on information systems ([20], [21]). Based upon the Web Assessment methodology a software tool was created in order to enable Web users to make an online evaluation of their favorite Web sites. The paper describes the underlying model and presents the first observations which could be made when using the tool. The findings outlined in this paper were collected from participating Internet users who completed the online questionnaire. The data is a collection of subjective user assessments of various Internet commerce applications. There are various kinds of observations which can be made with the Web Assessment tool. We selected examples portraying a "single company profile " and an "inter-business comparison". The inter-business comparisons is explored in more detail using the examples of two bookstores – the already legendary virtual Amazon.com versus the traditional bookseller Barnes & Noble.

Virtual communities have been the focus of research for some time. However, while many studies provide recommendations on how to build, extend and manage virtual communities, few verify the success factors they consider essential for virtual communities. Conclusions made regarding basic preferences and distinct priorities of different stakeholders in virtual communities have not been empirically substantiated. This study uses an online survey of members and operators of virtual communities to evaluate success factors discussed in the literature. Incongruences between members and operators are identified and analysed. This research gains first empirically validated insights into success factors for establishing and managing virtual communities. The study results are summarised in ten hypotheses. Key words: virtual community, success factors, onlinesurvey, hypotheses on how to build and manage virtual communities 1.

In this paper we describe mobile virtual healthcare communities as a solution for meeting cancer patients information and interaction needs. After an introduction into the healthcare system and its potential starting points for virtual communities, we focus on cancer patients. We analyse their situation through field studies and identify information and interaction needs. On this basis we derive requirements for user centric socio technical system design for cancer patients. As at present no existing offers meet these prerequisite, we intend to develop and implement a mobile healthcare community for cancer patients. The objective is to introduce a socially accepted, technically stable and economically reasonable system. By the time of the conference we assume to have implemented this community platform. 1

As e-commerce and virtual communities fundamentally change the way Americans do business and build relationships, how can people be assured of safety in unfamiliar cyber-spaces? This essay focuses on online auction eBay to understand how eBay has successfully drawn millions of users to its site in spite of perceived risks and uncertainties. It argues that eBay is, in fact, a community (of commerce), and that the rhetorical construction of “community” on the site provides a foundation for trust between users. Based on trust theory, this essay isolates eBay’s “community trust” model as consisting of seven elements that work together to give users reasons to trust and to be trustworthy. Finally, the essay examines recent changes to eBay’s system, suggesting that so-called improvements for control might actually weaken the “community trust” system already in place—a warning to other sites that might imitate eBay’s community approach.