In this thesis, we investigate the effects of Information Technology (IT) and the Internet on business environments from three perspectives: the catalyst function of IT and the Internet in developing new business models, the enabler role of these technologies for emerging digital marketplaces,...

Loyalty is a big part of today's business because retaining a customer is cheaper than attracting a new one. This relationship also holds true in e-commerce. There are many programs on the Internet to enhance loyalty in the electronic environment, most of which can be summarized as frequent...

When deciding whether to utilize an online intermediary in addition to their own distribution channels, quality differentiated service providers face the trade-off between the benefit of extended reach and the threat of increased competition. Using an analytical framework, we analyze when and...

We investigate the implications of a personal health record (PHR) platform on the adoption and sharing of electronic health records (EHR). Through our analysis, we find evidence that health care providers may not have an incentive to share patients’ records electronically even though EHR...

As the United States begins to put a lot of attention and resources into digitizing its healthcare sector, it is instructive to understand why the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) remains so poor when compared with many other developed countries. The 2009 stimulus bill provides...

Coordination is the art and science of managing interactions and dependencies among activities and agents in multi-agent systems. Since the coordination problems are NP-complete, there is a notorious difficulty in solving them optimally. Therefore, a heuristic approach that offers near-optimal...

A stochastic model based on the Capacitated Facility Location Allocation problem is developed to find the optimal Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network structure. Given the locations of the peers and their demand distributions in a grid space, the model finds the optimal points in the space to place the...

Most of the tools that are used for Information Security (ISEC) risk assessment are qualitative and are not grounded in theory. This paper presents and applies a well-known financial risk theory, Value at Risk (VaR), to the ISEC risk assessment. VaR in its most succinct form is defined as a...

This dissertation deals with two important research problems in computer networks: resource allocation and caching. It consists of three essays in the broad research areas mentioned above. Essay 1 presents a pricing and allocation mechanism for peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. A P2P system can be...