Editor's Introduction
Vladimir Zwass
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 7, Number 4, Summer 2003, pp. 5.
Abstract:Electronic commerce redefines the way corporations address their marketplaces, organize their supply chains, and implement their internal processes. In fact, e-commerce activities make the internal-external dichotomy ever less apt. The Special Section on boundaries and strategies of electronic commerce deals with several nodal aspects of this redefinition. The papers included in the section address such subjects as business-system integration derived from intranet interactions, market bundling via horizontal portals, a model of electronic contracting derived from risk-trust assessment, and the business rationale underlying the failure of the Wireless Application Protocol, the security exposure of which is analyzed in detail. The guest editors of the Special Section, Claudia Loebbecke and Rolf T. Wigand, will introduce it to you.

Trust has emerged as a principal obstacle to the proliferation of e-commerce and, consequently, an important research domain in the field. Stefano Grazioli and Sirkka L. Jarvenpaa analyze a major factor in the trust deficit on the Web: intentional deception. Using rigorous content analysis of a (regrettably) large body of publicly known cases, the authors identify several tactics of deception and empirically describe them as predominantly used by businesses or individuals. Grazioli and Jarvenpaa also discuss the remedies to be employed against each of the deception tactics.

Auctions of various designs are a shining application of e-commerce. Nir Vulkan and Chris Preist present, and validate through simulation, an algorithm for agent-based spot trading of communication bandwidth. This market is characterized by rapid demand fluctuations and is realized as a double auction (or exchange) with many buyers and sellers. The article not only presents a solution to this specific yet broad problem, but also advances our knowledge of automatic negotiation with learning.