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I am pleased to announce publication of Volume 18, Issue 3 of the Journal
of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce. This issue is
comprised of the following articles:

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A Model of the Determinants of Purchasing From Virtual Stores

Reza Barkhi
France Belanger
James Hicks
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

Virtual stores are Internet-based innovations that influence the dynamics
of consumer choice-making. Utilizing Attitude to Behavior Theory, the
Theory of Reasoned Action, Technology Acceptance Model, Functional Theory
of Attitude, Causal Theory of Action, and prior literature, we develop and
empirically evaluate a model that describes consumer purchase decisions in
a virtual store. We test the model using data collected from validated
survey instruments for each of the constructs utilizing the Structured
Equation Modeling technique. The model helps in the design of virtual
stores by describing how individuals who visit such stores can be induced
to purchase from virtual stores. It describes that perceived usefulness,
perceived behavioral control, and perceived peer influence impact attitude
toward purchasing from a virtual store. Attitude toward purchasing from a
virtual store, in turn, influence the actual purchasing from a virtual
store. We discuss the implications for the design of virtual stores that
lead to purchase decisions.

Keywords: Electronic Commerce, Ease of Use, Usefulness, Peer Influence,
Structured Equation Modeling, Theory of Reasoned Action, Theory of Planned
Behavior

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Developing Consumer-based Service Brand Equity via the Internet: The Role
of Personalization and Trialability

Patrick Y.K. CHAU
The University of Hong Kong

Candy K.Y. HO
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The commercialization of the Internet has provided opportunities for
building service brands in the minds of consumers. Services are
characterized as intangible, heterogeneous, inseparable, and perishable,
features that often engender high information costs and hence low
perceived value to potential consumers. When a service is available via
the Internet, a medium that can subdivide and rebuild the service into
personalized offerings, potential consumers become better informed in
advance of what the service provides. The Internet also permits most
services to be trialable before consumption. These new features empowered
by the Internet have important implications for what we call
consumer-based service brand equity (CSBE), the value that potential
consumers assign to a service brand. This paper investigates the effects
of service personalization and trialability on the development of CSBE of
Internet banking service, a typical service available via the Internet.
Results from a laboratory experiment indicate that both service
personalization and trialability have significant positive influences on
the development of the CSBE of an Internet banking service brand. While
personalization was found to indirectly influence CSBE development by
mediating the perceived benefits of the brand, trialability exerted both a
direct and an indirect effect. Trialability developed the brand's CSBE by
first mediating the information gathering cost savings and then the
perceived benefits of the brand. Implications of the study's results are
discussed.

Keywords: Consumer-based brand equity, Service brand equity, Internet
banking, Technology adoption, Personalization, Trialability

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A New Architecture for Personalization Engines: An Open Source Approach

Arun Sen
Yingying Chen
Bo Zhang
Texas A&M University

Many benefits have been professed in having personalized engines in a web
site. Several kinds of architectures have evolved to support this kind of
information system. Even though, a recent survey has shown that online
shopping behavior is not altered by installing these systems in a web
site, enormous money is being spent to use them in web sites. These
commercial personalization engines are very expensive to buy and are
proprietary in nature. One alternative advocated in this paper is to use
a new architecture that follows an open source philosophy and uses a
SPIN-based question-answering strategy to interact with the visitors. An
implementation (called JESPER, a Jess-enabled Personalization system) of
such an architecture using JESS (Java-based Expert System Shell) is also
presented. Our experience shows that the personalization engines built
this way for a web site can be quite cheap and rigorous.

Keywords: E-Commerce, Web site, Personalization, Open source, On-line
shopping

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Please consider the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic
Commerce as a possible outlet for your own very best original research
dealing with multiparticipant digital systems.

For further information about JOCEC, including prior issues and submission
guidelines, please see:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1091-9392&subcategory=CM480000&linktype=1

JOCEC is published by Taylor & Francis.

Clyde W. Holsapple
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce
Gatton College of Business and Economics
University of Kentucky