Signaling theory provides the framework to address three main research questions: (1) How accurately do consumers notice and recollect TPA seals on retail Web sites? (2) How familiar are consumers with major TPA seals? and (3) How accurately do consumers understand the assurances represented by the TPA seals? Results of this study of three major TPA seals (TRUSTe, BBBOnLine Reliability, and Ver...

The need for security protection in Internet-based healthcare applications is generally acknowledged. Most healthcare applications that use the Internet have at least implemented some kind of encryption. Most applications also enforce user authentication and access control policies, and many audit user actions. However, most fall short on providing strong assurances that the security mechanisms...

Cloud service certifications (CSCs) gain increasing attention in practice as a measure against the prevailing uncertainties of cloud computing, but demand efforts for passing audit requirements. However, research findings on certifications’ effectiveness are inconclusive. This research-in-progress paper develops a research model to evaluate CSCs’ effects on two certification outcomes suggested ...

The vertical transmission trials conducted in a variety of developing countries by researchers from more developed countries illustrate a variety of crucial ethical issues. Three crucial issues are the injustice of the use of placebo control groups, the coerciveness of the offer to participate, and the exploitation of Third World countries. This paper examines each of these issues separately. I...

It has been argued that the traditional regulatory approach of the Endangered Species Act, based on land-use restrictions, has failed to protect endangered species on private land. In response, there has been a call for the use of incentives to complement this regulatory approach. This paper examines the potential of incentives programs to elicit conservationoriented management choices from lan...

Wireless Local Area Networks have gained popularity at an unprecedented rate over the last few years. However, as the spectrum of applications they are called to support broadens, their inefficiency in meeting the diverse requirements of a wider range of applications becomes evident. Most existing access mechanisms cannot provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) assurances. Even those that are QoS awar...

As China’s accession into the World Trade Organization and opening its financial market, competition in the banking industry is getting throat-cutting in China. Using Internet banking to acquire market shares is critical for banks’ survival and therefore understanding drivers for Internet banking adoption is critical for banks’ success. Applying Davis’s technology acceptance model and incorpora...

Industrial software projects are not based on a top-down development process relying on refinement but use a more iterative and incremental approach with respect to changing requirements. We call this an evolutionary approach. In this paper, we present the basic concepts of a suitable overall componentware methodology with respect to software evolution. We clarify the difference between refinem...

Satellite systems are beginning to incorporate complex autonomous operations, which calls for rigorous reliability assurances. Human operators usually plan satellite maneuvers in detail, but autonomous operation will require software to make decisions using noisy sensor data and problem solutions with numerical inaccuracies. For such systems, formal verification guarantees are particularly attr...

Given the persistence of public doubts about the integrity of ballot secrecy, which depress turnout, two prior experiments have shown precise evidence that both official governmental and unofficial mobilization campaigns providing assurances about ballot secrecy increase turnout among recently registered nonvoters. To assess whether these findings replicate in other political settings, we descr...