Agents in decentralised information ecosystems: the DIET approach

The complexity of the current global information infrastructure requires novel means of understanding and exploiting the dynamics of information. One means may be through the concept of an information ecosystem. An information ecosystem is analo gous to a natural ecosystem in which there are flo ws of materials and energy analo gous to information flow between many interacting individuals. This paper describes a multi-agent platform, DIET (Decentralised Information Ecosystem Technologies) that can be used to implement open, robust, adaptive and scalable ecosystem-inspired systems. We describe the design principles of the DIET software architecture, and present a simple example application based upon it. We go on to consider how the DIET system can be used to develop information brokering agents, and how these can contribute to the implementation of economic interactions between agents, as well as identifying some open questions relating to research in these areas. In this way we show the capacity of the DIET system to support applications using information agents.Future and Emerging Technologies arm of the IST Programme of the European Union, under the FET Proactive Initiative – Universal Information Ecosystems (FET, 1999), through project DIET (IST -1999-10088), BTexaCT Intelligent Systems Laboratory for stimulating discussion and comment

E-commerce ethics and its impact on buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty: an empirical study of small and medium Egyptian businesses

The theoretical understanding of e-commerce has received much attention over the years; however, relatively little focus has been directed towards e-commerce ethics, especially the SMEs B2B e-commerce aspect. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a framework that explains the impact of SMEs B2B e-commerce ethics on buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty. Using SEM to analyse the data collected from a sample of SME e-commerce firms in Egypt, the results indicate that buyers’ perceptions of supplier ethics construct is composed of six dimensions (security, non-deception, fulfilment/reliability, service recovery, shared value, and communication) and strongly predictive of online buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty. Furthermore, our results also show that reliability/fulfilment and non-deception are the most effective relationship-building dimensions. In addition, relationship quality has a positive effect on buyer repurchase intentions and loyalty. The results offer important implications for B2B e-commerce and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of relationship marketing

The Role of Virtual Integration, Commitment, and Knowledge-Sharing in Improving International Supplier Responsiveness

Globalization has triggered significant structural strategy shifts of multinational enterprises (MNEs). With increasing global competition, MNEs have disintegrated their value-adding activities with their suppliers or subcontractors around the world (Buckley and Ghauri, 2004; Sturgeon, 2002). As a function of this mega-trend, the issue of how MNEs can effectively coordinate and control their global supply chain relationships with local suppliers becomes a critical task for MNE efficiency and competiveness

The Communication of Corporate-NGO Partnerships: Analysis of Sainsbury’s Collaboration with Comic Relief.

This study focuses on CSR communication using the example of Corporate-NGO partnership between British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief. Questionnaires were distributed to 40 participants asking them about their consumer behaviour and opinion on partnerships. Using thematic analysis, two main themes have been identified in the data set: some consumers are sceptical towards cross sector partnerships because they assume selfish reasons behind the collaboration and view them as corporate PR tool. On the other hand, the majority of consumers evaluate Corporate-NGO Partnerships as appropriate and a gain for society at large. The analysis showed that Sainsbury’s customers know about the partnership with Comic Relief while non-customers lack awareness, and that the most successful means of communication of partnerships is the supermarket promotion

Olympic agents

We present an agent-oriented middle-tier architecture deployed during the realisation of the Athens 2004 Olympics results internet broadcasting. The system involved the online processing of messages (XML in nature) and their publishing to the www.athens2004.com internet site. Those messages were containing the Games intermediate and final results and were originated from the Olympic venues. For the accomplishment of this task a number of systems and applications needed to be integrated. Also the domain posed some unique problems regarding the fact that for the first time in the history of the Games a real time approach for broadcasting results was deployed and furthermore due to the reliability and performance requirements of the system. Various enterprise application integration patterns were used in conjunction with an agent oriented design approach. Asynchronous intercommunicating agents were deployed for realizing the architectural components of the system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

Generic Constraints for Content-Based Publish/Subscribe

Publish/subscribe interaction enables the loosely coupled exchange of asynchronous notifications. Matching notifications to subscriptions and routing notifications from producers to interested consumers are the main problems in large-scale publish/subscribe systems. Content-based selection provides great flexibility because it allows to categorize notifications with respect to multiple dimensions but it also requires complex routing strategies. Previous work has tightly coupled..