---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Jounral of Electronic Commerce Research Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 10:33:00 -0800 From: "Melody Kiang, Ph.D." mkiang@CSULB.EDU To: ISWORLD@LISTSERV.HEANET.IE

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, I am happy to announce that Vol. 2, Number 1, 2001 issue of JECR is now available at the journal's web site at: "http://www.csulb.edu/journal". This is a continuation of the special issue in "Intelligent Agents in E-Commerce" edited by Dr.Mahesh Raisinghani. The following are abstracts from the three papers published in the current issue.

"The Effects of Market-enabling Internet Agents on Competition and Prices" Kevin Crowston Syracuse University, School of Information Studies, Syracuse, NY, USA Ian MacInnes Syracuse University, School of Information Studies, Syracuse, NY, USA "The Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly useful feature is the ability to automate the search for price or other information across multiple vendors by using an "agent" to retrieve relevant information. The use of agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers' search costs. We develop a framework that suggests that vendors who sell products with many differentiating factors beyond price will tend to accept agents, while vendors of commodities or branded goods will tend to resist them unless they have lower costs than their competitors. Empirically, we found that agents seem to be accepted for differentiated goods, but resisted for more commoditized goods, though not universally. An analysis of prices from one agent shows that 1) a small number of vendors tended to have the lowest prices and 2) while divergence in pricing remains, price dispersion declined over the period studied."

"An Automated Executive and Managerial Performance Monitoring, Measurement and Reporting System" Mahesh S. Raisinghani University of Dallas, Graduate School of Management, Irvine, TX, USA John H. Nugent University of Dallas, Graduate School of Management, Irvine, TX, USA "This paper puts forward the concept for a new, automated, "management by exception" script-based network tool to monitor, address, and report deviations from corporate plan(s) in near real time via the company's messaging system. In particular, this paper conceptualizes the utilization and application of tools, initially developed for network monitoring and management, in managing and measuring corporate business performance against plan(s). That is, network-type tools (IVAANs?) are used to measure, monitor and report deviations in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from plan(s), and accomplish this in a timely, accurate, and automatic manner, without human intervention or filtering.

Senior executives need a sound analytical basis derived from accurate, valid, and timely information for short- and long-term planning and for allocating scarce resources. IVAAN? notices are directed and delivered to the responsible manager and other parties concerned with the respective KPI via push agents over the company's messaging system. Further, IVAAN? notices may be accumulated and utilized as an objective measure of managerial and executive performance."

"Service Centric Brokering in Dynamic E-business Agent Communities" Sumi Helal Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA Mei Wang Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA "The paper focuses on the development of protocols for brokering-based agent communities in e-Business. The global market is driving e-Business to become service-centric, offering highly modular e-Services that can be flexibly and dynamically composed into rapidly deployable e-Businesses. This trend is giving rise to a new set of requirements of negotiation-based, autonomous, and intelligent computing. It is, therefore, expected that in the near future, e-Services will be designed and implemented as software agents (also known as gent-based systems). This paper prepares for the proliferation of agent-based systems in e-Business by contributing a suite of protocols for self-organizing agent communities. The protocols are based on a three-tier architecture of agents, brokers, and superbrokers. We present the architecture and the protocols (Broker-Based Agent Community Protocols, or BBACP). An implementation using JKQML is also presented along with a case study drawn from the electronic auto-trading domain."

The Journal of Electronic Commerce Research (JECR) is published quarterly and has an on-going call for quality manuscripts related to all aspects of e-commerce. Please visit our web site for further information.

Sincerely, Melody Kiang Editor-in-Chief, Information Systems Department College of Business Administration University of California, Long Beach 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, CA 90840 USA Phone: (562)985-8944 Fax: (562)985-4080 E-mail:mkiang@csulb.edu

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