E-Business, IT, & Finance articles

The pros and cons of mass self-communication are linked to notions of "user empowerment" and "user disempowerment". Empowerment in the general sense is defined as "enabling people to control their own lives and to take advantage of opportunities" or in other words "a process, a mechanism by which people, organizations, and communities gain mastery over their affairs."

Today, the effects of IT are felt throughout marketing practice in all organizations, impacting on all the core operations areas, including market analysis and decision making, monitoring and control, communications, distribution channels, product development, service management and delivery, etc.

Platform industries, which are gaining considerable attention, are information technology industries with components and rules that facilitate interactions among a network of users. Examples are Microsoft Windows and Facebook. Such platform industries are important in their own right, but also because many other industries increasingly use platforms.

White collar and corporate crimes have long been part of markets and are among the most difficult crimes for the legal system to deal with, let alone control. This is especially so where these crimes are of enormous proportions or involve some of the most powerful individuals or corporations in a society. Their seeming invulnerability to regulation is enhanced in boom times and this is further buttressed by powerful political forces supporting corporate risk taking.

The Web is an enormous set of documents connected through hypertext links created by designers of websites. Publishing on the Web, however, is more than just setting up a page on a site; it usually also involves linking to other pages on the Web. The increasing amount of data available on the Web provides a huge amount of useful information that can be processed to discover useful knowledge. This trend has conducted to "web mining" as a new emerging discipline.

With the increasing influence of online consumer reviews (OCRs) on a consumer's decision making, online sellers have begun to embed the OCRs in their advertisements.

A paradigm shift in consumer confidence has taken place with the worst recession on record forcing people to evaluate their personal and household finances. We explore the extent to which consumer confidence has been tarnished post-recession. What has changed in the British psyche since the credit crunch?

The rapid evolution of e-commerce in recent years has allowed us to study large samples of experienced e-shoppers. These shoppers, who are already familiar with the characteristics of the new e-commerce channel, display different behaviour to potential e-shoppers. Consequently, the effects of some variables previously thought to be crucial may have varied.

In hindsight, many of the original predictions made at the dawn of the internet era have not become a reality. Retailers are not cannibalizing their own custom, virtual merchants do not dominate the market place, and the high street has not been put out of business.

Research in the American Accounting Association journal Accounting Horizons reveals that female chief financial officers (CFOs) have a decided edge on their male counterparts when it comes to a factor critical to the reliability of corporate financial statements. As the study puts it, firms with female CFOs have a "higher quality of accruals."