A Study of the Impact of Culture on Trust Determinants in eCommerce: A Cross-culture Comparison Study

The aim of this study is to examine the impact of culture on the trust determinants in e-commerce. The study adopts two broad trust building foundations (cognition- and affect-based trust) from cross-culture literature, focuses on one wellestablished cultural construct (i.e., individualism-collectivism) as groups of culture, develops a theoretical model of cognition-based versus affect-based e-Vendor trust, and empirically tests the model using cross-cultural data

A Study of the Dynamic Nature of Trust from a Longitudinal Perspective

Trust is dynamic in nature. It is a process rather than an outcome; it develops over time. Trust is an essential ingredient for successful business transactions in electronic commerce. Yet, there is little empirical research on the dynamic nature of trust in information systems and electronic commerce areas using a longitudinal (pre- and post-phase) approach. This paper proposes a model of dynamic trust from a longitudinal perspective. Furthermore, it provides empirical evidence of the dynamic nature of trust in the context of e-Channel and e-Vendor. The results of the study show that a consumer’s trust changes over time due to variations in the level of trust in the pre-purchase phase and satisfaction with a previous transaction in the post-purchase phase. The results also reveal that satisfaction and post-trust are strong determinants of a consumer’s future intention to reuse the e-Channel and to repurchase through the e-Vendor

An OBTG (Organizational - Business - Technological - Governmental) E-business Adoption Model for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Despite the increased number of SME adopters of information communication technology for their business, there are limited studies that address the factors affecting SME’s adoption decision. Especially, a theoretical perspective on E-business adoption model for SMEs is required to understand better the SME’s complex adoption decision and, in turn, to provide a realistic means of guidelines for other SME’s for their adoption decision. Thus, the goal of this study is three-fold: i) to review key literature of the factors affecting SME’s adoption decision and then summarize major determinants of key dimensions with definition and literature sources, ii) to propose a theoretical framework of e-business adoption, and iii) to provide an insightful discussion on the driving factors and barriers of the e-business adoption decision by SMEs

The Likelihood Ratio as a tool for Radio Continuum Surveys with SKA precursor telescopes

In this paper we investigate the performance of the likelihood ratio method as a tool for identifying optical and infrared counterparts to proposed radio continuum surveys with SKA precursor and pathfinder telescopes. We present a comparison of the infrared counterparts identified by the likelihood ratio in the VISTA Deep Extragalactic Observations (VIDEO) survey to radio observations with 6, 10 and 15 arcsec resolution. We cross-match a deep radio catalogue consisting of radio sources with peak flux density $>$ 60 $\mu$Jy with deep near-infrared data limited to $K_{\mathrm{s}}\lesssim$ 22.6. Comparing the infrared counterparts from this procedure to those obtained when cross-matching a set of simulated lower resolution radio catalogues indicates that degrading the resolution from 6 arcsec to 10 and 15 arcsec decreases the completeness of the cross-matched catalogue by approximately 3 and 7 percent respectively. When matching against shallower infrared data, comparable to that achieved by the VISTA Hemisphere Survey, the fraction of radio sources with reliably identified counterparts drops from $\sim$89%, at $K_{\mathrm{s}}\lesssim$22.6, to 47% with $K_{\mathrm{s}}\lesssim$20.0. Decreasing the resolution at this shallower infrared limit does not result in any further decrease in the completeness produced by the likelihood ratio matching procedure. However, we note that radio continuum surveys with the MeerKAT and eventually the SKA, will require long baselines in order to ensure that the resulting maps are not limited by instrumental confusion noise.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in mnra

Do Mobile App Providers Try Enough to Protect Users’ Privacy? – a Content Analysis of Mobile App Privacy Policies

Privacy policies are widely used to draw clear image of risks to users’ personal information in different contexts such as mobile apps. Nonetheless, many believe privacy policies are ineffective tools to notify and aware users about possible risks to information privacy merely because most users have a very low tendency to go through privacy policies to read and comprehend them. Due to intimacy of mobile apps, much of personal information disclosed to them are at risk. Specially, when mobile app users share sensitive personal information to apps chance of privacy violation and consequent risks are higher. It is not only important to understand how mobile developers practically implement a contract to protect users’ privacy based on users’ preferences but also crucial to examine the role of sensitivity of information on developers’ emphasis on different aspects of privacy. This research focuses on two aspects to understand the circumstance users experience when privacy policies are presented: efforts users have to make to read and understand privacy policies in terms of readability and length of statements, and developers’ emphasis on aspects of information privacy with respect to sensitivity of information. To elucidate easiness of reading privacy policy statements, readability and length are calculated. Through the lens of framing concept of prospect theory, this study investigates the information sensitivity level effect on developers’ emphasis on privacy dimensions. Three mobile app categories deal with different levels of sensitive data are health, navigation, and game apps. To differentiate between emphasis on different privacy dimensions when information sensitivity differs, a text mining method is developed in R to analyze the weights of four key privacy dimensions (collection, secondary use, improper access, and error). We downloaded 90 unique mobile app privacy policies. Readability calculations reveal that users should have a minimum of 12 years of secondary education to easily understand privacy policies. The average length of privacy policies is at least 1900 words, which hinders a thorough reading. ANOVA results show a significant difference between secondary uses of information in app privacy policies dealing with higher sensitive data. In addition, the findings demonstrate collection is more emphasized in health than game app privacy policies but do not find any significant difference between improper access dimensions. This study has made two key contributions. First, by building upon the framing concept of prospect theory, this research provides an effective framework to understand the organizational perspective of privacy concerns. Second, the results demonstrate the information sensitivity level is important for measuring privacy concerns

AN EXTENDED ADAPTIVE STRUCTURATION THEORY FOR THE DETERMINANTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF VIRTUAL TEAM SUCCESS

Virtual teams represent an organizational form which can revolutionize the workplace and provide organizations with unprecedented levels of flexibility and responsiveness. Extant reviews on virtual team research lack in two important aspects: First they do not explain the inconsistencies in virtual team research, and second they fail to explain how virtual teams achieve success. This paper, based on an extensive literature review of available research on virtual teams, identifies key drivers of virtual team effectiveness. Integrating the identified drivers, it develops a conceptual, analytical framework with 9 propositions, to explain virtual teams’ path to success. The new framework is termed as EAST (extended adaptive structuration theory). It goes beyond the generalized frameworks, such as AST (Adaptive Structuration Theory) and Input- Output frameworks to identify virtual team specific constructs such as Mission, Emergent Socio- Emotional States, and Individual Dimension. EAST identifies potential areas of future research for scholars, and provides advice to IS professionals regarding how to deploy virtual teams

Development of Renovation Techniques for Medium and Large Diameter Water Transmission Pipes

Smart lining System was developed to restore and improve water quality, hydraulic, and structural function of water large transmission pipes through the construction of the high quality lining in the study. Smart lining System consists of smart cleaning, smart spray-on lining, and smart CIPP2+. Smart cleaning is the pre-process of lining process, and could ensure SSPC SP-10 and surface roughness 50 μm(Rz) as the quality of surface preparation for the lining by removing effectively deposited slime, residual lining, tuberculation, graphitization of pipe wall with the high pressure water jet, mechanical scraper, and air spin-head blasting equipment step by step

E-business for Nations: A Study of National Level E-business Adoption Factors using the CBTG (Country Characteristics- Business- Technology- Government) Framework

Most past studies have analyzed e-business adoption factors from a firm level perspective and also from a single country level perspective. Earlier studies have proposed frameworks which can be used with in their nation only; we in this research propose a unique framework that can be adopted by any country to develop its e-business. We present a theoretical perspective on e-business adoption factors required for a nation. Major goals of this study are (i) to review existing key literature on e-business across the countries and determine key factors affecting e-business adoption, (ii) to propose a research model based on the identified factors, (iii) to perform an empirical analysis on the proposed model using the national level macro economic data from secondary sources, and (iv) to provide practical implications to country administrators, academics and policy makers. The limitations and future directions of the study are also discussed

A New Approach for Collaborative Knowledge Management: A Unified Conceptual Model for Collaborative Knowledg Management

With the advancement of new communication and virtualization technologies, various tools and models have been proposed for enabling effective management of the e-collaboration processes related to the creation, sharing, and presentation of collective knowledge. In the theoretical perspective, two significant aspects of collaborative knowledge management have been considered: (a) the internal processes of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing, which occur not only within the individual knowledge workers but also among them (collaboration); (b) the effective design of human-computer interfaces facilitating the internal processes, by providing functionalities for the knowledge workers to comprehend, conceptualize, and cooperate in knowledge creation and sharing through e-collaboration processes, including the effective presentation of the generated knowledge on the website. At the present time, although there exist several studies in the related areas, there is no unique conceptual model that can be applied toward assessing both the interface layer and the internal processes of collaborative knowledge creation and sharing in distributed ICT-based work contexts. This gap has been a great motivation for us to propose a conceptual model, namely the Unified Collaborative Knowledge Management (UCKM) model, which can be used to design and evaluate the overall knowledge management process, including the underlying sub-processes, the presentation of knowledge, and the human-computer interfaces

The collective information privacy on social networking sites

With surprising evolution over the past decade, different numbers of social networking sites (SNSs) have created an obligation in the everyday lives of their users and modified the modes of social interaction into content-sharing activities arising the concern toward the group and individual privacy. Drawing from the theory of multilevel information privacy, this study investigates the determinants behind the perception of collective information privacy norm (IPN) and how the perceived psychological ownership affects the individual’s decision to disclose or disguise group-created content. More specifically, we aim to explain how users arrive at the decision to share content, including others, considering their tie strength, the user’s salient identity while in the group, and group characteristics (formal, informal). Our research contributes to the Information Systems and privacy literature by delineating group behavior among virtual communities