Search

Electronic Commerce is shaping many of our daily life tasks and with the introduction to new aspect of social interaction on the net a new phenomenon is emerging in the arena of e-commerce known as social commerce. Within this new trend in social commerce Instagram a simple yet powerful app is now playing a new role in combining both the advantage of social network with it design feature and capabilities. In this paper we are looking at how a simple yet power picture based social network app like Instagram is shaping the electronic commerce arena around the world and within Kuwait as a given example. Instagram became a major part of most Kuwaiti individuals. In Kuwait Instagram became an hourly stop to many instead of daily stops. Instagram changed from being a voyeuristic tool to becoming a handy shopping outlet. Everything from exotic pets to home car washing and detailing service could be found at Instagram. Everyone is using Instagram in Kuwait; from the old widower selling home cooked traditional dishes to the multimillion real estate investing company. In this paper we are exploring the factors and barriers that helped Instagram become a social commerce outlet for many users in Kuwait and around the world.

The Internet enables businesses to acquire a great deal of reference information, including the price in the open markets, for estimating appropriate prices of the assets to sell off. In particular, what is the value of reference price information to a company in the market and how can the company make use of this information? Using a multiple regression model for price estimation applied to used cars for a rent-a-car company, we propose a framework to collect the reference price information, in order to estimate appropriate prices in the future. The result is a new information system that collects online reference price information and provides very accurate information in estimating future prices of used cars and rental prices.

The purpose of this study is to study the effects of regulatory policy on online gambling, one of increasingly popular types in the online game industry. Previous information systems (IS) studies on online game primarily aim user behavior. Nowadays, instead of heuristic approaches on individual behavior, there is a growing need to examine the effects of regulatory policy on dynamic changes of games or game providers. Standing above the approaches of prior studies, we empirically test the regulatory policy effect with two theoretical viewpoints: social influence and previous experience. We use a vector autoregression (VAR) analysis to predict game usage and to model various forms of the co-movement of online games. We provide also evidence of strong Granger-causal interdependencies within games and game providers. This study offers one of the first empirical evidences studying the effects of regulatory policies on online game industry. In research methodology point, this study also introduces an explanation of VAR methodology in IS research. Thus, it delivers advanced knowledge on gaming behaviors as well as helps develop suitable regulatory policies to satisfy policymakers and to protect users of online game.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) has become a very popular business area to study as it represents new patterns of collaboration and social interaction in the virtual world. In this study, we empirically raise the issues of identity fraud in MMORPGs. In principle, the online game classification system controls the scope of users' activities with regard to the level of age appropriateness. However, the results from this study cast doubt on the effect of the current classification system in that distinctive behavior differences were not found to exist from one age group to another. Specifically, the econometric and multivariate analyses show that the behaviors of the group whose ages are around 40 is very similar to those of the group whose ages are under 14.