1 INTRODUCTION
ELECTRONIC commerce (e-commerce) is increasingly assuming
a pivotal role in many organizations. It offers
opportunities to significantly improve (make faster, cheaper,
more personalized, and/or more agile) the way that
businesses interact with both their customers and their
suppliers. However, in order to harness the full potential of
this new mode of commerce, a broad range of social, legal,
and technical issues need to be addressed. These issues
relate to things such as security, trust, payment mechanisms,
advertising, logistics, and back office management
[152], [45], [138], [169].
Even more fundamental than these issues, however, is
the very nature of the various actors that are involved in ecommerce
transactions. In most current (first generation) ecommerce
applications, the buyers are generally humans
who typically browse through a catalog of well-defined
commodities (e.g., flights, books, compact discs, computer
components) and make (fixed......
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