Information and communication technologies are crucial for intermediaries in electronic business. In order to compete with strong competition in internet-based markets, differentiation from competitors is required. This means that innovative service ideas need to be implemented in order to succeed. The approach discussed here is helpful in reducing the complexity of matching service ideas with ...

This paper defines a multi-level modeling approach for availability assessment of e-business applications, based on two main steps: 1) hierarchical description of the system and its interactions with the users, from the functional and structural points of view, and 2) hierarchical construction and solution of the availability models based on information from the first step. Four modeling abstra...

Electronic commerce has existed in the business-to-business marketplace since the 1970s, in forms such as electronic data interchange (EDI) and electronic funds transfer (EFT). With the emergence of the Internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, electronic commerce entered a new era which opened the door for an electronic business-to-consumer marketplace. Although the retail side of electr...

While the adoption rate of electronic commerce by organizations has grown significantly over the years and that they have achieved substantial savings and benefits, it has also presented numerous new challenges for them to conduct business activities in the electronic environment. This trend has prompted a need for existing business models to be reviewed, including the adoption of appropriate e...

Agent-based economy or agent-based electronic commerce is the term for describing one of possible next steps of electronic commerce. The systematic understanding of the agent-based economy is important for researchers to develop practical intelligent agent systems, and for current electronic commerce industries to cope with the challenges of the intelligent agents. With these purposes, we condu...

We outline a business model based analysis framework, which helps examine the intricacies and evolution of eBusiness. While the current research has mostly examined volume and scope as indicators of eBusiness evolution, we suggest that this analysis should be augmented with qualitative analysis of the evolution of eBusiness models, their implementation strategies and diffusion. The critical par...

In this paper we investigate those aspects of electronic commerce which can be used to facilitate inter-organisational business dealings. The Internet has substantially promoted different aspects of electronic commerce such as electronic ordering and shopping: electronic malls are increasingly becoming part of the modern information society. However, the pace of adoption of emerging computing a...