Competing Virtual Monies

Money as a generally accepted media of payment has been running through various evolutionary stages, the latest being virtual money. Virtual money is a money-like electronic payment system for business transactions on the Web. Different companies supply different virtual monies. If we regard the Internet as a new, relatively separate nation, and a nation usually has just one currency, the main question is whether virtual money should be supplied by monopoly or through competition? This article shows that on one hand competition provides special advantages but on the other hand the monopolistic supply of money offers advantages as well. The same is true for disadvantages. It is shown that competition is no guarantee for an optimal solution, but the opportunity of choice and flexibility as offered in competitive systems provides a better base for a prospering (virtual) monetary system than any monopoly-like situation

Pricing for Digitized Information Goods: The Case of Austrian Online Newspapers

The paper gives a very brief overview about pricing concepts for digitized information goods. The main part of this analysis is devoted to the explanation of the fact, that despite of the existence of these pricing concepts, the price for almost all web versions of newspapers equals zero. For this purpose we conducted an investigation, focused on expert interviews with the managers of Austrian online newspapers. The results of this study show why the price currently equals zero, how revenues for online newspapers may be achieved, and what the managers think about the theoretical pricing concepts

Risks and Challenges for Retailers: The Value Chain Transformation-A European Perspective

Electronic commerce—especially online shopping—creates radical changes in the value chain of various businesses. These changes emerged not only because of the new technology but also because of the willingness of customers to use the Internet for commercial transactions. This paper describes intentions of households in the urban area of Vienna, Austria, to shop online. Additionally it identifies major reasons for the possible disintermediation of retailers

Institutions as Pattern Models for Electronic Markets

This paper analyses electronic markets from a social science perspective, with an emphasis on different types of institutions. An analytical framework which supports the identification of certain institutional settings of elec- tronic markets and its preconditions is developed. The provided method tries to unify the perspectives of meth- odological individualism and methodological holism

GRES-IT Workshop Proceedings

Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operation

Are Customer Service Offerings Influencing E-Loyalty? A Graphical Chain Model Approach in the Austrian Mobile Phone Service Provider Industry

Customer loyalty is seen as one of the key factors of a company’s success. According to current research results, a necessary premise among others to gain customer loyalty is how the customers perceive the customer service. In the field of B2C e-commerce online customer support areas are used to fulfill parts of this support duty. It is an open question how big the impact of the online customer support on the customer loyalty is. The goal of this paper is to determine, which factors are influencing e-loyalty significantly. Two factors are used to measure loyalty: positive word-of-mouth and switching probability. In the first part a brief overview of the actual scientific work and recent research results are given. After this, the methods and data acquiring steps are described. The results of the so gained data are presented and interpreted. Based on these results, the conclusion and further research recommendations complete this work

Maximizing the Customer Delivered Value with Web-based Mass Information Systems

This paper describes a research framework focusing on conceptual, marketing-oriented aspects of Web-based Mass Information Systems (WMIS) analysis and design with a special emphasis on the integration of adaptive system components for supporting negotiations, market segmentation, targeted direct marketing initiatives, and transaction processing. Methods to gather and analyze customer preferences and expectations as well as to visualize the actual behavior of WMIS users are identified in order to maximize the customer delivered value in global electronic markets

INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT – FIRST RESULTS FROM CONTENT ANALYSIS

True and long-lasting stakeholder relationships have been identified as precondition for long-term success of companies. Thus, companies put a lot of effort into communication with stakeholders and stakeholder engagement. Consequently, the possibilities to communicate with stakeholders to involve them in environmental, social and economic projects of companies has been widely discussed. However, the various stakeholders (internal and external, primary and secondary) influence companies in different ways. Information systems support the stakeholder engagement and allow specific communication in accordance with various stakeholders needs’, but to date a clear picture on their application is missing. Our work investigates this gap and serves as a starting point for better understanding on how information systems support stakeholder engagement. We select CSR reports from a reporting database and analyse them in terms of information systems involved in the stakeholder engagement process. Based on this we will develop a “landscape” of information systems support for stakeholder engagement. First results presented in this work-in-progress paper are based on a limited number of reports suggest that information systems mainly support communication with external stakeholders, whereas direct face-to-face communication predominates internal stakeholder engagement. Overall, information technology (such as the Internet) prevails compared to application of specific information systems

The Digital Divide - Any Reasons for enthusiasm? The Case of Austria

The paper presents a secondary analysis of the Austrian data of a Eurobarometer (conducted in all member states of the EU) data set and addresses questions of penetration and usage of new information and communication technologies. Before going into the empirical analysis we provide a brief theoretical analysis of the digital divide concept, based on a literature overview. Up to now, research on digital divide analyized predictors of this phenomenon only separately without considering interaction effects. Our analysis aims to develop various types of Users and Non-Users by combining demographics and information about internet usage in a cluster analysis. Results give strong support to consider Users and Non-Users not as homogenous groups in future research. A more differentiated view has to be applied: combinations of attributes can yield in deprivation in a double or even tripel sense, so that some groups are harder to reach by ICT-policies than others