Toward Integrated Fuzzy Front-end Decision Support Systems for New Product Development

Innovation and new product introduction have become key challenges facing companies entering emerging markets. Most of the existing quantitative or economic models proposed for New Product front-end decision making are deficient in the way they handle the decision maker’s subjective judgment, while the empirical ones are constrained by the need for gathering field data for diverse business types. Expert systems that have been proposed are limited in scope due to the difficulty involved in capturing rules from experts for each business situation and deficiency in handling uncertainties. The emerging paradigm of soft computing combines heuristics, powerful optimization algorithms and learning techniques, to realize analytically sound systems that also capture the human subjectivity in decision making. Fuzzy measures exemplified by the Dempster-Shafer belief measures and the possibility measures of Zadeh are now being increasingly accepted by researchers as powerful tools for semantic modeling and uncertainty representation. The aim of this dissertation is to develop a fuzzy measure theoretical model of new product screening, translate the conceptual model to an executive decision process model and use fuzzy rule bases and fuzzy inferencing to derive business strategies from expert evaluation of critical success factors. New product managers of several American firms whom we interviewed have been receptive to the idea of testing a prototype of the proposed system to aid in their business decisions involving new product development. We intend to validate the prototype in a real business setting involving decisions to launch telecommunication products on a global scale

Use of the Web for Electronic Commerce in Real Estate

In this paper, we will explore the ways in which electronic commerce, the World-wide Web (WWW) in particular, is affecting the real estate industry. Real estate is a promising setting for studying electronic commerce because it is an information-intensive and information-driven industry; transaction-based, with high value and asset-specificity; market-intermediary (agents and brokers connect buyers and sellers rather than buying or selling themselves); and experiencing on-going information technology (IT) related changes. In this paper, we apply a coordination theory framework to suggest where IT might change the process of buying or selling a house. Electronic commerce applications have the potential to drastically change current practices in the real-estate industry, including the disintermediation of agents. Web-based commerce is eroding the long-enjoyed information monopoly of real-estate agents. We illustrate this potential by reviewing a number of existing real estate websites that demonstrate the possible impact of electronic commerce on this industry

Trust for E-Business Management

How do we develop and sustain trust? What is the process for building trust between business partners in virtual environments? Is there a significant difference between the development and sustainability of trust online or offline? In this paper, we first introduce the concept of e-business and discuss the importance of trust for ensuring effective collaboration. Secondly, we discuss the relationships between e-collaboration and trust for managing e-business. Thirdly, we suggest a framework, which may help facilitate the development and sustainability of trust in an online environment. Finally, implications for the development and sustainability of trust online, which can be used to understand the interplay among technologies, e-business and collaboration is provided. We suggest that the implications of this study are three-fold: trustworthy relationships among business partners, effective sustainable collaboration, and optimal use of ICT for supporting e-business activities

Investigating the Interplay between Structure and Information and Communications Technology in the Real Estate Industry

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reshaping many industries, often by reshaping how information is shared. Information intensive industries, by their nature, show the greatest impacts due to ICTs that enable information sharing and the bypassing of traditional information intermediaries. However, while the effects and uses of ICT are often associated with organizations (and industries), their use occurs at the individual level. In other words, it is changes to individual work related to the use of ICTs that reshape both organization and industry structures, and vice versa. To explore the relationships between individual uses of ICT and changes to organization and industry structures, we examined the residential real estate industry. Real estate is a revelatory industry for the study of ICT uses because it is information-intensive and realtors are information intermediaries between buyers and sellers. As agents, buyers and sellers increase their uses of ICT, they also change how they approach their daily work. We use structuration theory to provide an analytic perspective within this setting. Data reveal historical structures of this industry guiding the day-to-day work of agents, buyers and sellers. Many of these structures are embodied in a set of explicit contracts that reify existing structures and legitimize realtors’ actions. However, the increasing uses of ICT are simultaneously altering industry structures by subverting some of the realtors’ control over information while also reinforcing the existing contract-based structures. This structurational perspective and our findings help to explain why information intermediaries persist when technology-based perspectives would suggest their disappearance

Key Dimensions of E-commerce Service Quality and Its Relationships to Satisfaction and Loyalty

Evidence exists that one successful strategy to satisfy and retain customers is offering superior service quality. Motivated by the growing interest in e-commerce, we focus our research questions on identifying the key dimensions of e-commerce service quality and its relationships to customer satisfaction and loyalty. In exploring answers to our research questions a hypothesized model is proposed and empirically tested using a research survey with 370 online shoppers. Salient results include: (1) key dimensions of e-commerce service quality are website usability, information quality, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and personalization; (2) customer satisfaction is influenced mostly with the perception of reliability, while customer loyalty is affected by the perception of assurance; (3) customer retention is predicted by the customer satisfaction index. Results of the study contribute to the nascent body of research in e-service quality and offer unique insights for managers of online firms on how to manage the quality of their e-commerce e-service

FINDING HER MASTER’S VOICE: THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION AMONG FEMALE MUSLIM BLOGGERS

Emerging cyber-collective movements have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite the exponential growth of bloggers in Muslim countries, there is a lack of empirical study of cyber-collective actions in these countries. We analyzed the female Muslim blogosphere because very little research attempts to understand socio-political roles of female bloggers in the system where women are frequently denied freedom of expression. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling cyber-collective movements by utilizing existing social theories on collective action and computational social network analysis. This paper contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. We also observe the transcending nature of cyber-collective movements with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Using the global female Muslim blogosphere, we provide understanding of the complexity and dynamics of cyber-collective action. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to address the lacking fundamental research shedding light on re-framing collective action theory in online environments

Beyond the Electronic Commerce Diffusion Rate: Efficiency Prevails

The diffusion race of e-commerce applications and solutions in the German industry seems to be concluded. This applies more or less for large firms, but especially for SMEs in the analyzed industry sectors. Independent of firm size, more than one third of all firms responded that the implementation of e-commerce contributed substantially to improve existing operational processes and to expand markets. E-commerce readiness, and due to its relative efficient usage, is observable not only in large firms. The “digital divide” or “digital gap” between large firms and SMEs has disappeared. Increasingly, SMEs may often benefit more from e-commerce applications than large firms. Although e-commerce technologies may be available theoretically in all industries and firms, efficient usage depends directly on the consistent implementation of more sophisticated solutions, such as on-line procurement or Internet-based supply chain management. Firms with defined strategic IT-related goals are more often efficient than firms without such goal

Raising and Rising Voices in Social Media - A Novel Methodological Approach in Studying Cyber-Collective Movements

Emerging cyber-collective social movements (CSMs) have frequently made headlines in the news. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of systematic methodologies to empirically study such movements in complex online environments. Using the Al-Huwaider online campaign as a case to illustrate our methodology, this contribution attempts to establish a rigorous and fundamental analysis that explains CSMs. We collected 150 blogs from 17 countries ranging between April 2003 and July 2010 with a special focus on Al-Huwaider’s campaigns capturing multi-cultural aspects for our analysis. Bearing the analysis upon three central tenets of individual, community, and transnational perspectives, we develop novel algorithms modeling CSMs by utilizing existing collective action theories and computational social network analysis. This article contributes a methodology to study the diffusion of issues in social networks and examines roles of influential community members. The proposed methodology provides a rigorous tool to understand the complexity and dynamics of CSMs. Such methodology also assists us in observing the transcending nature of CSMs with future possibilities for modeling transnational outreach. Our study addresses the lack of fundamental research on the formation of CSMs. This research contributes novel methodologies that can be applied to many settings including business, marketing and many others, beyond the exemplary setting chosen here for illustrative purposes