abstraCt Despite the fact that over half of U.S. residents are now online, Internet users hesitate to enter into transactions with e-retailers in the absence of certain assurances. Recent IS research shows that institution based assurance structures, such as Web seals, are drivers of online trust. We extend the research in online trust to include the effect of third-party organization (TPO) cre...

Signaling theory provides the framework to address three main research questions: (1) How accurately do consumers notice and recollect TPA seals on retail Web sites? (2) How familiar are consumers with major TPA seals? and (3) How accurately do consumers understand the assurances represented by the TPA seals? Results of this study of three major TPA seals (TRUSTe, BBBOnLine Reliability, and Ver...

The proliferation of regional economic integration has resulted in a complex and continually expanding network of free trade agreements (FTAs). In explaining the formation of these agreements, the literature has generally focused on the e¤ect of country-pair characteristics and ignored the role of existing FTA network. In this paper we investigate, both theoretically and empirically, how third ...

The rapid development of E-Commerce not only generate huge amount of business opportunities but also raises a new question to the supporting platform of E-Commerce. Nowadays, E-commerce platform design is one of the hot spot of E-commerce research. The traditional 3-layered E-commerce platform can’t meet the requirement of today’s E-commerce application which is more complicated than before[1]....

We believe that in order to effectively design and deploy reliable e-health systems, a strong cooperation among several diverse research areas of ICT is necessary, in addition to a strict interaction and cooperation among medical specialists and ICT experts. To this aim, IREHSS would provide a forum for the interaction of experts belonging to these different research areas as an important chanc...