While e-commerce has witnessed extensive growth in recent years, so has consumers’ concerns regarding ethical issues surrounding online shopping. The vast majority of earlier research on this area is conceptual in nature, and limited in scope by focusing on consumers’ privacy issues. This study develops a reliable and valid scale to measure consumers’ perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers (CPEOR). Findings indicate that the four factors of the scale – security, privacy, non-deception and fulfillment/reliability – are strongly predictive of online consumers’ satisfaction and trust. The results offer important implications for e-retailers and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of e-ethics from the consumers’ perspective.

The Ethics of Online Retailing: A Scale Development and Validation from the Consumers’ Perspective

Despite the important benefits for firms of commercial initiatives on the Internet, e-commerce is still an emerging distribution channel, even in developed countries. Thus, more needs to be known about the mechanisms affecting its development. A large number of works have studied firms' e-commerce adoption from technological, intraorganizational, institutional, or other specific perspectives, but there is a need for adequately tested integrative frameworks. Hence, this work proposes and tests a model of firms' business-to-consumer (called B2C) e-commerce adoption that is founded on a holistic vision of the phenomenon. With this integrative approach, the authors analyze the joint influence of environmental, technological, and organizational factors; moreover, they evaluate this effect over time. Using various representative Spanish data sets covering the period 1996-2005, the findings demonstrate the suitability of the holistic framework. Likewise, some lessons are learned from the analysis of the key building blocks. In particular, the current study provides evidence for the debate about the effect of competitive pressure, since the findings show that competitive pressure disincentivizes e-commerce adoption in the long term. The results also show that the development or enrichment of the consumers' consumption patterns, the technological readiness of the market forces, the firm's global scope, and its competences in innovation continuously favor e-commerce adoption.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01972241003712264

Toward a Longitudinal Model of e-Commerce: Environmental, Technological, and Organizational Drivers of B2C Adoption

ICT Impact on tourism industry

This paper tries to explain the temporal evolution of electronic commerce in a developed country. For this purpose, we evaluate the contribution of the size of the potential market represented by the community of Internet users to the development of electronic commerce, as well as of other determinant factors. The validation carried out, for the whole Spanish market and over a period of seven years, reveals the existence of a critical threshold of online consumers that, once surpassed, supposes a change in the growth trend of electronic commerce. Likewise, we verify that broadband technology diffusion, the definition of a legal framework of consumer protection, and the design of a value proposition perceived as "secure", also influence the development of electronic commerce. We also confirm the contribution of firms' differentiation strategies to the development of electronic commerce, to the detriment of those based on price leadership. Finally, it seems that possession of a computer is no longer an indicator of access barriers.

/pdf/factors-influencing-the-evolution-of-electronic-commerce-an-4364hii80a.pdf

Factors influencing the evolution of electronic commerce: an empirical analysis in a developed market economy

This paper investigates the effects of female financial inclusion on inclusive economic development. Financial inclusion, understood as the access to and usage of a diverse range of quality financial products and services, can have a positive effect on the reduction of income inequality. Specifically, when women participate in the financial system, the inequality gap decreases, enabling higher economic development, which also increases both physical and social wellbeing. An instrumental variable analysis is conducted on a sample of 91 countries, comprising both developed and emerging countries, using data from the Global Findex (2015) database and the World Bank DataBank. Our results effectively provide evidence attesting to the fact that greater financial inclusion of women, measured as access to a bank account and access to credit cards, has a positive effect on economic development. However, bank loans did not show any significance when explaining economic development.

Female financial inclusion and its impacts on inclusive economic development

In the last decades Catalonia has become one of the main European tourism destinations. In this context, a change in the economic activity’s paradigm based on investment and use of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been observed. By analysing a sample of tourist companies in Catalonia, this article corroborates the positive relation between ICT uses, innovation and labour productivity in tourism.

/pdf/tecnologias-de-la-informacion-y-comunicacion-innovacion-y-y7h2nfs2gd.pdf

Tecnologías de la información y comunicación, innovación y actividad turística: hacia la empresa en red

Principios de economía del conocimiento: Hacia una economía global del conocimiento

Situación y perspectivas del comercio electrónico en España: Un análisis a través del volumen del negocio electrónico

y la comunicación (TIC) y que comprenden el conjunto convergente de aplicaciones de microelectrónica, informática, telecomunicaciones, optoelectrónica y los recientes avances de la ingeniería genética, son aplicadas masivamente en la esfera económica. De hecho, este fondo social de conocimiento ha impregnado la actividad económica hasta tal punto que en la actualidad ya podemos citar un número creciente e interdisciplinario de trabajos que sostienen la hipótesis siguiente: las TIC son el paradigma tecnológico sobre el cual se fundamenta la actual revolución industrial, también baJORDI VILASECA I REQUENA JOAN TORRENT I SELLENS Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Jordi Vilaseca i Requena

Papers

Tecnologías de la información y comunicación, innovación y actividad turística: hacia la empresa en red

Principios de economía del conocimiento: Hacia una economía global del conocimiento

Situación y perspectivas del comercio electrónico en España: Un análisis a través del volumen del negocio electrónico

Conocimiento, trabajo y actividad económica en España: un análisis empírico de las relaciones ingreso-gasto

La web de la asignatura en un modelo de aprendizaje virtual a distancia