An Intelligent Idea Categorizer for Electronic Meeting Systems

Research on group decisions and electronic meeting systems have been increasing rapidly according to the widespread of Internet technology. Although various issues have been raised in empirical research, we will try to solve an issue on idea categorizing in the group decision making process of electronic meeting systems. Idea categorizing used at existing GDSS was performed in a top-down procedure and mostly by participants' manual work. This resulted in tacking as long in idea categorizing as it does for idea generating, clustering an idea in multiple categories, and identifying almost similar redundant categories. However such methods have critical limitation in the electronic meeting systems, so we suggest an intelligent idea categorizing methodology which is a bottom-up approach. This method consists of steps to present idea using keywords, identifying keywords' affinity, computing similarity among ideas, and clustering ideas. This methodology allows participants to interact iteratively for clear manifestation of ambiguous ideas. We also developed a prototype system, IIC (intelligent idea categorizer) and evaluated its performance using the comparison experiments with other systems. IIC is not a general purposed system, but it produces a good result in a given specific domain.     

Smart Card-Based Electronic Card Payment Systems in the Transportation Industry

Many products and services will soon be (or are already being) sold over the Internet or other networks. Paying for these with standard methods of payments, such as cash, checks, credit card, or debit card, may be ineffective or inefficient. For such cases, electronic card payment systems are more appropriate. Several things need to be considered when investigating electronic card payment system options, including: customer needs and benefits, developmental and operational cost, corporate benefits, continually changing technologies, critical mass of customers, security, standards of payment systems, and customer perception and comfort with new technologies. In this article, we analyze how smart card-based systems are used in mass transportation. Managers in mass transportation face the following questions: Do you develop your own electronic card payment system, do you wait for multifunctional cards that will be accepted across many industries to provide the functionality required in your market, or do you do nothing. The discussion here concentrates mainly on the transportation industry, where the transactions and payments are made on local area networks.     

Towards a Structured Design of Electronic Negotiations

Global communication networks and advances in information technology enable the design of information systems facilitating effective formulation and efficient resolution of negotiation problems. Increasingly, these systems guide negotiators in clarifying the relevant issues, provide media for offer formulation and exchange, and help in achieving an agreement. In practice, the task of analysing, modelling, designing and implementing electronic negotiation media demands a systematic, traceable and reproducible approach. An engineering approach to media specification and construction has these characteristics. In this paper, we provide a rationale for the engineering approach that allows pragmatic adoption of economic and social sciences perspectives on negotiated decisions for the purpose of supporting and undertaking electronic negotiations. Similarities and differences of different theories that underlie on-going studies of electronic negotiations are identified. This provides a basis for integration of different theories and approaches for the specific purpose of the design of effective electronic negotiations. Drawing on diverse streams of literature in different fields such as economics, management, computer, and behavioural sciences, we present an example of an integration of three significant streams of theoretical and applied research involving negotiations, traditional auctions and on-line auctions.     

Why do stored value systems fail?

Stored value systems are the most recent form of electronic payment technology. They are meant to coexist with credit and debit technology, by primarily targeting the low value area of the transaction market. Being targeted at low value transactions, they are designed to have very low transaction cost. Stored value systems rely on creating a form of electronic value, on smart cards or as computer files. Such value can be bought (withdrawn) at any one time, and spent in arbitrary fractions at later times. When the technology emerged for its first implementations in the first half of the 1990s, it was much celebrated as a replacement for cash with many benefits over existing payment technologies. Many of these systems have subsequently been set up as trials, and the commercial rollout of some systems has started. However, actual usage of stored value systems is still low, much lower than was expected by the operators of the systems. Several years after the first trials were implemented, it is still unclear whether and when they will play a relevant role in the payments system market. And none of the trials that have been run can be considered a commercial success. This makes it necessary not only to assess the technology, but also the commercial future and user uptake of these systems. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Use of Electronic Brokerage Systems in China: A Modified e‐Commerce Model

I applied the DeLone and McLean (2004) information systems success model to the use of electronic brokerage systems in China. Several modifications to the model are proposed, including the addition of specific measures of customer perceptions concerning both the perceived costs and benefits of using such systems. Structural equation modelling revealed that the DeLone and McLean (2004) model is not a good representation of those who use electronic brokerage systems for cross‐national transactions, but that the modified model is a good fit for all customers. Copyright © 2011 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Coordinating electronic commerce activities in MANIFOLD

Modern electronic commerce environments are heavily web-based and involve issues such as distributed execution, multiuser interactive access or interface with and use of middleware platforms. Thus, their components exhibit the properties of communication, cooperation and coordination as in CSCW, groupware or workflow management systems. In this paper we examine the potential of using coordination technology to model electronic commerce activities and we show the benefits of such an approach. Furthermore, we argue that control-oriented, event-driven coordination models (which enjoy some inherent properties such as security) are more suitable for electronic commerce than data-driven ones which are based on accessing an open shared communication medium in almost unrestricted ways. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Montreal Taxonomy for Electronic Negotiations

Research in the domain of electronic negotiations is a rather new and very interdisciplinary field, which gains more and more attention due to the industry hype and momentum regarding electronic commerce and electronic markets. Negotiations in a narrow sense (not taking into account simple forms such as hit and take) have been identified as an advantageous coordination mechanism for the interaction of buyers and sellers in electronic markets that transcend the selling of commodities or uniform goods. Hence, support for negotiations may become a critical success factor for electronic markets, especially regarding the recent failures of many industrial ventures. This paper presents the Montreal Taxonomy, which allows not only for the exact characterisation and comparison of a broad variety of electronic negotiation designs and systems, ranging from auctions to bilateral bargaining tables, but could also lead towards a more structured approach for the design of electronic negotiations.     

Prototyping Electronic Commerce Systems Using Esterel

In this article I present the advantages of using the synchronous programming language Esterel to prototype electronic commerce systems. I first outline a technique to model HTML tags, which is then specialized to document types. A simple example illustrates the coding ideas for both the static and dynamic aspects of behavior. This is then extended to handle certain other features found in electronic commerce systems. I also show how the Esterel environment can be used to formally verify certain properties.     

Electronic Call Market for Commodity Transactions: Design of Computer-Mediated Order Matching System

Commodity exchanges provide potential market structures for electronic trading because commodity products have relatively simple and well-standardized product attributes. Most existing electronic trading systems are introduced for financial exchanges, where qualities of traded products (such as stocks and bonds) are homogeneous, thus taking into account only bid and offer prices for computer-mediated order matching. However, a single commodity market, such as the cotton or grain market, is made up of many heterogeneous goods that are similar to each other but have different product qualities and contract terms. In addition to the price, commodity traders have other pertinent preference ranges over product attributes and delivery conditions. We delineate an electronic call market system for commodity trading, which optimizes the realization of traders' utilities over extended product attributes beyond the price. The electronic call market not only maximizes the total surplus of market participants based on bid and ask prices but also satisfies their qualitative preferences over other attributes, which are difficult to include in the quantitative prices. The trading mechanism of the electronic call market integrates an economic auction model with a social choice model to produce a Pareto-improved transaction. Market simulations are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed electronic call market. The order matching system of the electronic call market is implemented using constraint logic programming.     

A Classification Scheme for Negotiation in Electronic Commerce

In the last few years we have witnessed a surge of business-to-consumer and business-to-business commerce operated on the Internet. However, most current electronic commerce systems are little more than electronic catalogues that allow a user to purchase a product under predetermined and inflexible terms and conditions. We believe that in the next few years we will see a new generation of electronic commerce systems emerge, based on automated negotiation. In this paper, we identify the main parameters on which any automated negotiation depends. To show the applicability of our classification framework, we use it to categorise a representative sample of some of the most prominent negotiation models that exist in the literature.