Abstract
Trust is an important ingredient for fostering the development of electronic commerce on the Internet. Recent statistics report on the growth of fraudulent activities on the Internet. We report the results of an investigation that checked for the amount of fraudulent activities on auction sites. The results indicate a significant level of fraudulent activities, well above the levels reported by auction site operators. Since fraud can be a major stumbling block for increasing the volume of electronic commerce on the web, it motivated further research on trust building activities given the prevalence of fraudulent activities on the Internet. We describe methods used by swindlers in their online swindling activities and propose methods to reduce the impact of fraudulent activities.
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Bezalel Gavish holds the Eugene J. and Ruth F. Constantin Distinguished Chair in Business at the Edwin L. Cox School of Business at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Professor Gavish is the founding Chairman of the International Conference on Telecommunications Systems Management and the International Conference on Networking and Electronic Commerce. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Telecommunication Systems Journal, and of the Electronic Commerce Research Journal. Professor Gavish was and is a consultant to numerous corporations and government agencies such as: IBM, AT&T, BNR, GTE, British Telecomm, MCI, Motorola, Xerox, Gorca Telecomm, the World Bank and others. His research interests include the design and analysis of computer communication networks, design and analysis of distributed computing systems, Fraud on the Internet, modeling of search processes on the Web, group decision support systems and their implementation, combinatorial optimization, and scheduling and routing in manufacturing and logistic systems. His research in telecommunications and computer networks concentrates on the topological design of wide area networks, Fiber deployment and design and analysis of local access networks, capacity assignment and routing in backbone networks, configuring cellular phone systems, analysis of low earth orbit satellite systems, economic and organizational impact of telecommunications and electronic commerce.
Christopher L. Tucci is Associate Professor of Management of Technology at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where he holds the Chair in Corporate Strategy & Innovation. He received the Ph.D. in Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His prior work experience was as an industrial computer scientist at Ford Aerospace, where he was involved in developing Internet protocols in the 1980s. Dr. Tucci’s primary area of interest is in technological change and how waves of technological changes affect incumbent firms. He is also studying how the technological changes brought about by the popularization of the Internet affect firms in different industries. He is the co-author of Internet Business Models and Strategies, and has published articles in, among others, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Research Policy, and Journal of Product Innovation Management. In 2004, he was elected to the five-year division leadership track of the Academy of Management’s Technology and Innovation Management Division.
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Gavish, B., Tucci, C.L. Fraudulent auctions on the Internet. Electron Commerce Res 6, 127–140 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-006-6954-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-006-6954-0