The relationship between business characteristics and ICT deployment in the rural tourism sector. The case of Spain

The deployment of information and communication technologies (ICT) is crucial for the competitiveness of rural tourism businesses. It is therefore important to know the relation between a firm's characteristics and ICT deployment. This study makes two hierarchical segmentations to predict the behaviour of these firms when deploying the Web and e‐mail. This work determines which characteristics are related to ICT deployment. Activity and category are the two characteristics that most effectively predict a firm's behaviour, whereas location and size are less effective. These results have implications for entrepreneurial behaviour and for public agents working in rural tourism. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How nonfungible tokens empower business model innovation

Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have experienced exponential growth over the past few years. Many companies and creators have experimented with various ways to develop NFT businesses, but often without clear guidance on how NFTs shape property rights and business models. In this article, we examine the roles of NFTs in establishing digital property rights, creating value for creators and collectors, and empowering business model innovation. As NFTs unlock digital property rights, they can spawn new business models centered around digital ownership, portable and composable digital assets, and decentralized communities. We believe our framework can help businesses and creators formulate and implement actionable strategies to create and capture value in NFTs and Web3.     

Not so trustless after all: Trust in Web3 technology and opportunities for brands

Web3 technology is described as trustless in that interactions and transactions do not require trusted third parties and instead rely on smart contracts and the immutability of the decentralized blockchain. Thus, in contrast to earlier iterations of the web, Web3 users are asked to trust the technology itself rather than the human intermediaries. On its face, this shift to a trustless web calls into question the traditional conceptions of and requirements for trust. However, in this article, we caution against claims that advocate distrusting Web3 on the basis that, despite how quickly Web3 technology is advancing, the psychological processes through which people perceive and make sense of the social world remain fundamentally unchanged. Drawing on the psychology of trust and the evolution of web technologies and associated objects of trust, we argue that Web3 is not so trustless after all. We also highlight opportunities for brands to build trust in Web3 technology, including key considerations in leveraging opportunities and directions for further research. Overall, this article provides critical guidance to brand managers, policy advisors, and academics seeking to understand, build, and trust Web3 technology.     

Nowcasting food inflation with a massive amount of online prices

The consensus in the literature on providing accurate inflation forecasts underlines the importance of precise nowcasts. In this paper, we focus on this issue by employing a unique, extensive dataset of online food and non-alcoholic beverages prices gathered automatically from the webpages of major online retailers in Poland since 2009. We perform a real-time nowcasting experiment by using a highly disaggregated framework among popular, simple univariate approaches. We demonstrate that pure estimates of online price changes are already effective in nowcasting food inflation, but accounting for online food prices in a simple, recursively optimized model delivers further gains in the nowcast accuracy. Our framework outperforms various other approaches, including judgmental methods, traditional benchmarks, and model combinations. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, its nowcasting quality has improved compared to other approaches and remained comparable with judgmental nowcasts. We also show that nowcast accuracy increases with the volume of online data, but their quality and relevance are essential for providing accurate in-sample fit and out-of-sample nowcasts. We conclude that online prices can markedly aid the decision-making process at central banks.     

Big web data: Challenges related to data,technology, legality,and ethics

The digital data available online is currently measured in zettabytes. These vast repositories of big web data are increasingly viewed as a strategic resource comparable in value to land, gold, and oil. This big web data can be extracted and analyzed by organizations to gain a better understanding of their internal and external environment and improve organizational performance. Because of these opportunities, automated retrieval and organization of web data (i.e., web scraping) for research projects is becoming a common practice. This article outlines the data-related, technical, legal, and ethical issues related to web scraping. Awareness of these issues can help researchers save time and resources and, most importantly, mitigate the potential risk of ethical controversies or lawsuits related to the retrieval and use of big web data.