Globalization or Localization? A longitudinal study of successful American and Chinese online store websites

This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of 2562 images on the homepages of successful American and Chinese online store websites,with the goal of determining whether cultural factors impact their visual presentation and evolution. Descriptive and statistical content analyses reveal that the U.S. and Chinese online store sites showed significant cross-national image differences from their inception; moreover, the Chinese sites diverged further from the U.S. sites over time, strengthening their own cultural identity and suggesting a trend towards localization in a diverse and dynamic world market. These findings support the view that although English-speaking Western culture is widespread in today’s Information Age, other cultures are not necessarily undermined

Performance measures of net-enabled hypercompetitive industries: the case of tourism

This paper investigates the theory and practise of e-metrics. It examines the tourism sector as one of the most successful sectors on-line and identifies best practice in the industry. Qualitative research with top e-Marketing executives demonstrates the usage and satisfaction levels from current e-metrics deployment, selection of e-metrics for ROI calculation as well as intention of new e-metrics implementation and future trends and developments. This paper concludes that tourism organizations gradually realise the value of e-measurement and are willing to implement e-metrics to enable them evaluate the effectiveness of their planning processes and assess their results against their short and the long term objectives

An improved negative selection algorithm based on the hybridization of cuckoo search and differential evolution for anomaly detection

The biological immune system (BIS) is characterized by networks of cells, tissues, and organs communicating and working in synchronization. It also has the ability to learn, recognize, and remember, thus providing the solid foundation for the development of Artificial Immune System (AIS). Since the emergence of AIS, it has proved itself as an area of computational intelligence. Real-Valued Negative Selection Algorithm with Variable-Sized Detectors (V-Detectors) is an offspring of AIS and demonstrated its potentials in the field of anomaly detection. The V-Detectors algorithm depends greatly on the random detectors generated in monitoring the status of a system. These randomly generated detectors suffer from not been able to adequately cover the non-self space, which diminishes the detection performance of the V-Detectors algorithm. This research therefore proposed CSDE-V-Detectors which entail the use of the hybridization of Cuckoo Search (CS) and Differential Evolution (DE) in optimizing the random detectors of the V-Detectors. The DE is integrated with CS at the population initialization by distributing the population linearly. This linear distribution gives the population a unique, stable, and progressive distribution process. Thus, each individual detector is characteristically different from the other detectors. CSDE capabilities of global search, and use of L´evy flight facilitates the effectiveness of the detector set in the search space. In comparison with V-Detectors, cuckoo search, differential evolution, support vector machine, artificial neural network, na¨ıve bayes, and k-NN, experimental results demonstrates that CSDE-V-Detectors outperforms other algorithms with an average detection rate of 95:30% on all the datasets. This signifies that CSDE-V-Detectors can efficiently attain highest detection rates and lowest false alarm rates for anomaly detection. Thus, the optimization of the randomly detectors of V-Detectors algorithm with CSDE is proficient and suitable for anomaly detection tasks

Information Technology Applications in Hospitality and Tourism: A Review of Publications from 2005 to 2007

The tourism and hospitality industries have widely adopted information technology (IT) to reduce costs, enhance operational efficiency, and most importantly to improve service quality and customer experience. This article offers a comprehensive review of articles that were published in 57 tourism and hospitality research journals from 2005 to 2007. Grouping the findings into the categories of consumers, technologies, and suppliers, the article sheds light on the evolution of IT applications in the tourism and hospitality industries. The article demonstrates that IT is increasingly becoming critical for the competitive operations of the tourism and hospitality organizations as well as for managing the distribution and marketing of organizations on a global scale

The Importance of Place in Corporate Identity an Investigation on the Presence of Old Dutch Firms on the Internet

This paper investigates how old Dutch firms display their corporate identity on the Internet, with special attention paid to location and place. Several scholars argue that the Internet would create the ‘end-of-geography’. Current empirical investigation found that incumbent firms display a strong sense-of-place in the presentation of ‘self’ on their websites. Location is important for old firms' images, underlining the importance of embeddedness. Location remains important when firms compete on the ‘global level’ on the Internet. This paper therefore contributes to the understanding of place and local embeddedness of firms in the ‘global internet space’

Social Media’s impact on Intellectual Property Rights

This is a draft chapter. The final version is available in Handbook of Research on Counterfeiting and Illicit Trade, edited by Peggy E. Chaudhry, published in 2017 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785366451. This material is for private use only, and cannot be used for any other purpose without further permission of the publisher.Peer reviewe

The elicitation of key performance indicators of e-government providers: A bottom-up approach

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.Delivering an adequate e-Government service (e-service) is becoming more of a necessity in today's digital world. In order to improve e-services and increase the engagement of both users' and providers' side, studies on the performance evaluation of such provided e-services are taking places. However a clear identification of the key performance indicators from the e-Government providers’ side is not well explored. This shortcoming hampers the conduct of a holistic evaluation of an e-service provision from the perspective of its stakeholders in order to improve e-services as well as to increase e-services take-ups. In this paper, a systematic process to identify indicators is implemented based on a bottom-up approach. The process used three focus-group meetings with providers, users, and academics in Qatar, Lebanon and UK to collect, identify and validate key indicators from the perspective of e-services’ providers. The approach resulted in the identification of five factors levels (service, technology, employees, policy and management and social responsibilities) with fifteen sub-categories of SMART variables. Hence, leading to the development of a new model, STEPS, that can fully explain and predict e-government success from the providers’ point of view. It will work as a strategic management tool to align various stakeholders on common goal and values based on evidence based evaluation of e-services using smart measurable indicators for the improvement of an e-service at the engagement level in the field of e-government. In addition, other fields can benefit from the outcome of this work, such as logistics service providers, who make their services available across new and existing relationships between the Internet commerce firms, their customers, and their vendors

Evaluating whether a change in organisational structure would improve its competitive advantage

The purpose of this research is to study and analyse the internal and external structure of Ultimate Clean ltd, where I do work. We have put concentration on background of the company in the starting. This information is followed by aim and scope of research, which shows that what is the research question and what is scope of our research. After that Literature review is elaborated under five main subheadings. These subheading gives us deep information about the literature of organisation structure, competitive advantage. After that, Organisational context with internal and external analyse of the company is given which highlight the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of the company. Some external factors like political, economic, social and legal, are also discussed in this report. Then some information is given for method of research that why we use it, where and when it is used. Some limitations are also discussed in this report of method. After this, result section comes. In this section, we discussed deeply about the answers of customers, employees and employer. We prepare a discussion of the result and conclude it wisely. In the end, some recommendations are also given to improve organisational structure of Ultimate Clean ltd. We suggest a new structure for the organisation to develop within company to have a good competitive advantage in market place. A big list of references is also given in the end of this report

Trust and Experience in Online Auctions

This paper aims to shed light on the complexities and difficulties in predicting the effects of trust and the experience of online auction participants on bid levels in online auctions. To provide some insights into learning by bidders, a field study was conducted first to examine auction and bidder characteristics from eBay auctions of rare coins. We proposed that such learning is partly because of institutional-based trust. Data were then gathered from 453 participants in an online experiment and survey, and a structural equation model was used to analyze the results. This paper reveals that experience has a nonmonotonic effect on the levels of online auction bids. Contrary to previous research on traditional auctions, as online auction bidders gain more experience, their level of institutional-based trust increases and leads to higher bid levels. Data also show that both a bidder’s selling and bidding experiences increase bid levels, with the selling experience having a somewhat stronger effect. This paper offers an in-depth study that examines the effects of experience and learning and bid levels in online auctions. We postulate this learning is because of institutional-based trust. Although personal trust in sellers has received a significant amount of research attention, this paper addresses an important gap in the literature by focusing on institutional-based trust