ANDREW B. WHINSTON is the Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair Professor in Information Systems at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He isaprotessor in the Departments of Economics and Computer Science as well, and Fellow of the IC* Institute, Austin, and the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, for several years a pioneering research facili...

E-commerce is a dynamic, quickly changing phenomenon. This implies that e-commerce firms are constantly evolving from one model to another very rapidly. There would be many ways to explain the dynamics of e-commerce models, including economics, configuration, and maturity. This paper presents an economic model to explain the adoption, growth, and withdrawal process of a new business model.

Web 3.0 or so called “Internet 3.0” is a popular 3D internet application. The emerging economics burgeoning Internet population will soon have an array of Web 3.0 in which to work and play. Although some strategies of web 3.0 platforms have been proven to be successful for attracting user acceptance in the developed countries, the effects of these strategies are questionable in the market of em...

The online-to-offline (O2O) commerce has been one of the hottest topics nowadays, but which features of the O2O commerce drive the consumers to be involved into are still blur. To figure out the question, two important features of O2O commerce, i.e., offline experience and the integration of online and offline information, were incorporated into an empirical model to examine their influences on...

The paper questions the notion that the diffusion of electronic commerce will lead to disintermediation. Rather than interpreting intermediation as a single service it is pointed out that intermediaries can provide a number of services. The analysis based on the New Institutional Economics, Market Microstructure Theory, and Information Economics shows that the three intermediation services stud...