Firms are undertaking growing numbers of e-commerce initiatives and increasingly making significant investments required to participate in the growing online market. However, empirical support for the benefits to firms from e-commerce is weaker than glowing accounts in the popular press, based on anecdotal evidence, would lead us to believe. In this paper, we explore the following questions: What are the returns to shareholders in firms engaging in e-commerce? How do the returns to conventional, brick and mortar firms from e-commerce initiatives compare with returns to the new breed of net firms? How do returns from businessto-business e-commerce compare with returns from business-to-consumer e-commerce? How do the returns to e-commerce initiatives involving digital goods compare to initiatives involving tangible goods? We examine these issues using event study methodology and assess the cumulative abnormal returns to shareholders (CARs) for 251 e-commerce initiatives announced by firms between October and December 1998. The results suggest that e-commerce initiatives do indeed lead to significant positive CARs for firms ’ shareholders. While the CARs for conventional firms are not significantly different from those for net firms, the CARs for businessto-consumer (B2C) announcements are higher than those for business-to-business (B2B) announcements.

Supply chain formation is the process of determining the structure and terms of exchange relationships to enable a multilevel, multiagent production activity. We present a simple model of supply chains, highlighting two characteristic features: hierarchical subtask decomposition, and resource contention. To decentralize the formation process, we introduce a market price system over the resources produced along the chain. In a competitive equilibrium for this system, agents choose locally optimal allocations with respect to prices, and outcomes are optimal overall. To determine prices, we define a market protocol based on distributed, progressive auctions, and myopic, non-strategic agent bidding policies. In the presence of resource contention, this protocol produces better solutions than the greedy protocols common in the artificial intelligence and multiagent systems literature. The protocol often converges to high-value supply chains, and when competitive equilibria exist, typically to approximate competitive equilibria. However, complementarities in agent production technologies can cause the protocol to wastefully allocate inputs to agents that do not produce their outputs. A subsequent decommitment phase recovers a significant fraction of the lost surplus.

. An electronic business model is an important baseline for the development of e-commerce system applications. Essentially, it provides the design rationale for e-commerce systems from the business point of view. However, how an e-business model must be defined and specified is a largely open issue. Business decision makers tend to use the notion in a highly informal way, and usually there is a big gap between the business view and that of IT developers. Nevertheless, we show that conceptual modelling techniques from IT provide very useful tools for precisely pinning down what e-business models actually are, as well as for their structured specification. We therefore present a (lightweight) ontology of what should be in an e-business model. The key idea we propose and develop is that an e-business model ontology centers around the core concept of value, and expresses how value is created, interpreted and exchanged within a multi-party stakeholder network. Our e-business mo...

We set out to examine whether current, DRM-based online offerings of music and movies accord with consumers ’ current expectations regarding the personal use of copyrighted works by studying the behavior of six music, and two film online distribution services. We find that, for the most part, the services examined do not accord with expectations of personal use. The DRM-based services studied restrict personal use in a manner inconsistent with the norms and expectations governing the purchase and rental of traditional physical CDs, DVDs, and videocassettes. If adopted by consumers the DRM systems stand to alter the norms governing personal use of copyrighted content and create pitfalls of legal liability for unsuspecting consumers. In conclusion, we present technological and legal considerations which may help current and future DRM system designers better accommodate consumers ' expectations of personal use.

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In the literature on mobile commerce service adoptio n, aggregate diffusion issues or technology issues are usually focused. However, a comparison of the slow adoption of WAP services in Europe with the successful adoption of comparable I- mode services in Japan and technologically simple SMS-based services in Scandinavia, suggests that aggregate and technology-based models are insufficient to explain the mobile commerce adoption process. We suggest that alternative explanations may be found in both the business models at the supply side and in the individual end- users behavior at the demand side of the mobile commerce value chain. Here, we focus on this demand side issue, and consider the adoption requirements of mobile commerce end-users. A triangulation of three perspectives on the mobile commerce end-user is suggested to understand and explain the end-user adoption process. The three perspectives view the end-user as a technology user, a consumer and a network member, respectively. The three perspectives are combined in a common framework. With each perspective comes relevant theories, models and methodologies. To illustrate how the triangulation may be performed, an example is given using the technology acceptance model as the relevant technology user model, the customer life cycle model as the relevant consumer model, and social network analysis as basis for the network member perspective. We also suggest applying the framework to design evaluation guidelines that can be used by service providers, operators and terminal producers to evaluate and predict end-user adoption of mobile commerce services in 3G and later mobile technologies. 1.

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible. For a general set of customer characteristics, it is shown that in the presence of contract administration costs, offering fixed-fee pricing in addition to a non-linear usage-based pricing scheme is always profit- improving, and there may be markets in which a pure fixed-fee is optimal. Moreover, it is proved that the optimal usage-based pricing schedule is independent of the value of the fixed- fee. These results imply that the optimal pricing strategy is never fully revealing. A procedure for determining the optimal combination of fixed-fee and non-linear usage-based contracts is presented.

When looking at the implementation of ERP systems in large organizations, the typical business concerns span from attaining the goals of the application, usually globalization and efficiency, securing the organization’s acceptance, avoiding rigidity and so on. By now, the literature is full of both normative models on how to implement ERPs successfully and cautioning tales of how the road to success is paved by traps, slowdowns and even disillusion. This paper does not want to take sides in this emerging literature, simply because it submits that there is a need to look at the broader context of ERPs implementation. There is a need to discover new meanings before turning to consulting or critique. Such meanings stem from re-considering the managerial concepts that accompany the ERP implementation, especially the issues of “what is an ERP”; how to do strategic alignment; and what does globalization really entail. The authors frame the study of ERP in organizations within the broader context of an analysis of the consequences of modernity. The new vocabulary sheds a different light on what organizations are doing with ERP: these systems are open, pasted-up, uncontrollable expanding infrastructures; strategic alignment flounders in never-ending tactics and compromises; globalizationgenerates side-effects. Harnessed to enhance control over complex, global organizations, ERPs enshrine the consequences of modernity in a nutshell: they accelerate organizational drift and runaway. The case of the introduction of SAP in a large Norwegian company illustrates a range of drifting processes and side-effects. 1.

In order to effectively respond to changing market conditions, business partners must be able to rapidly form supply chains. This thesis approaches the problem of automating supply chain formation—the process of determining the participants in a supply chain, who will exchange what with whom, and the terms of the exchanges—within an economic framework. In this thesis, supply chain formation is formalized as task dependency networks. This model captures subtask decomposition in the presence of resource contention—two important and challenging aspects of supply chain formation. In order to form supply chains in a decentralized fashion, price systems provide an economic framework for guiding the decisions of self-interested agents. In competitive price equilibrium, agents choose optimal allocations with respect to prices, and outcomes are optimal overall. Approximate competitive equilibria yield approximately optimal allocations. Different market protocols are proposed for agents to negotiate the allocation of resources to form supply chains. In the presence of resource contention, these protocols produce better solutions than the greedy protocols common in the artificial intelligence

Although organizational innovation with information technology is often carefully considered, bandwagon phenomena indicate that much innovative behavior may nevertheless be of the “me too” variety. In this essay, we explore such differences in innovative behavior. Adopting a perspective that is both institutional and cognitive, we introduce the notion of mindful innovation with IT. A mindful firm attends to an IT innovation with reasoning 1 Jane Webster was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Swanson & Ramiller/Innovating Mindfully with IT RESEARCH ARTICLE grounded in its own organizational facts and specifics. We contrast this with mindless innovation, where a firm’s actions betray an absence of such attention and grounding. We develop these concepts by drawing on the recent appearance of the idea of mindfulness in the organizational literature, and adapting it for application to IT innovation. We then bring mindfulness and mindlessness together in a larger theoretical synthesis in which these apparent opposites are seen to interact in ways that help to shape the overall landscape of opportunity for organizational innovation with IT. We conclude by suggesting several promising new research directions.