The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet has dramatically changed the way that consumers shop for goods. Consumer-generated product reviews have become a valuable source of information for customers, who read the reviews and decide whether to buy the product based on the information...

Government regulation of financial reporting by publicly listed firms, coupled with a punitive regime for violation of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), has been in place in the United States for seven decades. Whether this regime is effective or useful is an open question,...

Growth of online auctions and other forms of e-commerce has been hampered by concerns about the privacy, integrity, and security of online transactions. To earn the trust of their participants, new e-commerce organizations, like traditional organizations, have to reach the state of expectations...

Mediating transactions through the Internet removes important cues that salespeople can use to assess a consumer's willingness to pay. We analyze whether dealers' difficulty in identifying consumer characteristics on the Internet and consumers' ease in finding information affect race and gender...

Government regulation of financial reporting by publicly listed firms, coupled with a punitive regime for violation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) has been in place in the United States for seven decades. Whether this regime is effective or useful is an open question,...

This paper offers a systematic exploration of online feedback mechanism design issues in trading environments with opportunistic sellers, imperfect monitoring of a seller's effort level, and two possible transaction outcomes (corresponding to "high" and "low" quality respectively), one of which...

Online feedback mechanisms harness the bi-directional communication capabilities of the Internet in order to engineer large-scale word-of-mouth networks. Best known so far as a technology for building trust and fostering cooperation in online marketplaces, such as eBay, these mechanisms are...

SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the...

Online reputation mechanisms are emerging as a promising alternative to more established mechanisms for promoting trust and cooperative behavior, such as legally enforceable contracts. As information technology dramatically reduces the cost of accumulating, processing and disseminating consumer...

Generaly said, trust is an important factor in many social interactions. Because on-line transactions are characterized by uncertainty and anonymity, trust and risk are essential elements in e-commerce and e-government services. There is a statistically significant relationship between trust and...