Abstract

Just as the Internet has changed the way many businesses conduct business, so can it change the way that academic researchers design and execute research in e-business management. We present a series of re-volutionary research strategies that employ six new data-collecting methodologies that can be used in conjunction with Internet technology. Data-collecting agents can gather very large amounts of data from the World Wide Web in a fraction of the time and the cost that it takes to gather data using traditional re-search methodologies. Online experiments, online judgment tasks, and online surveys expand the reach of the researcher and reduce the cost when compared to traditional experiments, judgment tasks, and sur-veys. Because of the vast amount of data available online, research designs such as massive quasi-experiments can be conducted that allow the researcher to find subjects without taking them out of their own environment who meet some pre-determined requirements, or some data that match a set of experi-mental or empirical test conditions. Finally, log files can be used to track a person‘s m ovem ents and ac-tions through a Web site. We investigate these relatively new tools from a philosophy of science perspec-tive. Using R unkel and M cG rath‘s [110] three-horned dilemma model for traditional research methodol-ogies as a basis, we develop a framework that illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of these new tools