PERSONALIZED SERVICES AS EMPATHIC RESPONSES: THE ROLE OF INTIMACY

Personalization that uses information technology to tailor content and products/services to the preferences and tastes of individual customers has become a useful function for online marketing. Many techniques have been developed, and research on personalized services has increased substantially in recent years. Several theories have been proposed to explain the effect of positive consumer attitude toward personalized services such as reducing information overload and the Elaboration Likelihood Model. These theories are grounded on a rational perspective. As personalization can be treated as an empathic response to the service receivers, we cannot ignore the role of emotion in a relationship building process. In this paper, we propose the relationship building (or Guanxi in Chinese) perspective in investigating the effectiveness of personalization, which treats intimate experience resulting from personalized response as an important factor to affect the receivers’ attitude towards the personalized recommendation. We conducted a controlled laboratory experiment on personalized recommendation to examine the role of intimacy in affecting consumer attitudes. Our findings indicated that intimate experience does mediate the effect of personalized response on consumer attitudes toward the recommendation. The results and findings provide valuable information to practitioners and researchers

Component Based Systems Development Adoption and Diffusion

Component Based Development (CBD) has caught the attention of academics and practitioners alike. Building upon sound Object-Oriented principles, CDB has a strong conceptual foundation as well as extensive practical orientation and application. CBD approaches promise the potential to deliver quality systems in a short period of time with opportunities for component reuse to further reduce cost that seems especially appropriate for the myriad of e-business systems that are a focal point of many organizations’ contemporary systems development portfolios. Indeed, numerous commercial organizations are supplying components that can be relatively easily integrated to create cost-effective systems. Interestingly, however, CBD is currently not applied extensively. The prospective reasons are many. Management is currently ill-informed and not committed to the CBD approach as they often lack knowledge of the benefits of adopting CBD. Further, many system developers, system analysts and programmers are not aware of CBD issues and opportunities. Possible reasons could be that they received their software education a long time ago (e.g. five or ten years ago or more), and are only familiar with traditional approaches. There is also considerable confusion with regard to component granularity and CBD focus. To some, the focus is on creating the components while to others, the focus is on creating systems by integrating components. A question exists as to the role of education and research given this situation. Numerous opportunities exist for academics to play a leading role in creating awareness and removing uncertainties in exploring CBD concepts and application. However, little attention is currently being given to CBD, especially in teaching. Like IS professionals, many educators are hesitant to change from traditional development perspectives currently being taught as they face faculty development challenges. By in large, few have had experience in this area and easily fall back to what they learned historically. Further, there is a dearth of textbooks and educational material available to assist academic in the teaching process. Research seems to be fragmented and lacking coherency in focus. Research, teaching and practice all seem to be going in different directions

Ellectronic commerce 2006 : a mangerial perspective

xl, 792 p. : il.; 28 c

Electronic commerce. : a managerial perspective.

New Jerseyxxx, 520 p.; 28 cm

Decision support and expert systems : management support systems

xxv, 940 p. ; 23 cm

Electronic commerce. : A managerial perspective.

New Jerseyxxxii, 520 p.; 25 cm