Joseph A. Cazier

E-business differentiation through value-based trust

For e-business, location is irrelevant and competition is intense. To succeed in this environment, organizations must find new ways to differentiate themselves from their competition. One way to achieve e-business differentiation is to foster trust by building a perception of value congruence and avoiding a perception of value conflict. We explore how value congruence contributes to and how value conflict decreases trust in e-businesses. An experiment was conducted to examine the respective impacts of value congruence and value conflict on trust in an e-commerce setting. Our results show that, for e-businesses, value congruence has an enabling effect on trust while value conflict reduces trust. Such effects are strong enough to suggest that value congruence can be employed as an effective way for e-businesses to differentiate themselves while creating and sustaining competitive advantage. Managerial implications are drawn from our results.

Sharing information and building trust through value congruence

This study explores how value congruence contributes to the formation of trust in e-businesses, and how trust and value congruence influence consumers to share personal information. It is hypothesized that the perceived values of organizations regarding moral, social, environmental and political causes can have an effect on the trusting beliefs of e-commerce consumers and their willingness to disclose private personal information. A total of 775 subjects rated their perceived value congruence with organizations, their trusting beliefs, and the types of information they would be willing to disclose. This study finds that value congruence not only plays a role in mediating the trust of consumers for the organizations, but it also has a strong effect on determining their willingness to disclose personal information. In some cases, the influence of value congruence is greater than that of trust, even though trust has been touted in the literature as one of the most important factors in e-commerce. This research expands prior work by using structural equation modeling to test the relative strength of the effect of value congruence on each dimension of trust and the overall trust level, as well as its direct effect on behavioral intentions in terms of information sharing for non-profit and for-profit organizations.

Password Security: An Empirical Investigation into E-Commerce Passwords and Their Crack Times

Abstract Strong passwords are essential to the security of any e-commerce site as well as to individual users. Without them, hackers can penetrate a network and stop critical processes that assist consumers and keep companies operating. For most e-commerce sites, consumers have the responsibility of creating their own passwords and often do so without guidance from the web site or system administrator. One fact is well known about password creation—consumers do not create long or complicated passwords because they cannot remember them. Through an empirical analysis, this paper examines whether the passwords created by individuals on an e-commerce site use either positive or negative password practices. This paper also addresses the issue of crack times in relationship to password choices. The results of this study will show the actual password practices of current consumers, which could enforce the need for systems administrators to recommend secure password practices on e-commerce sites and in general.

The Role of Privacy Risk in IT Acceptance: An Empirical Study

Privacy risk is increasingly entering the public consciousness when using information technologies. To gain insight into the role of risk in the technology adoption process, we studied the use of information systems for student registration and schedule management at a major U.S. university. We further extended the technology acceptance model (TAM) to include perceptual measures of privacy risk harm and privacy risk likelihood, which apply to the extended model and predict students’ intentions to use technology. Privacy risk factors are found to negatively influence intention and contribute substantially to model predictiveness. This finding underlines the growing importance of privacy risk in the use of information technology.

An Empirical Investigation: Health Care Employee Passwords and Their Crack Times in Relationship to HIPAA Security Standards

The purpose of this article is to examine the passwords selected by health care professionals and the security and privacy standards in relationship to those passwords as addressed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). Examinations of these passwords have illustrated the connectivity between password length and strength and the need to educate employees as to the importance of their password choices. Through an empirical analysis, this article examines whether the passwords created by employees of a health care agency followed “strong†or “weak†password practices. The results should indicate to health care agencies the importance of comprehensive password policies and employee training.

The impact of intrinsic motivation on satisfaction with extrinsic rewards in a nursing environment

Abstract Nurses in a hospital located in Southern US were surveyed to determine their perceptions of the reward structures existent in their hospital. Reward structures were divided into two categories: extrinsic and intrinsic. The cluster analysis procedure partitioned the sample into two clusters based on their level of satisfaction with the hospitals reward structure. The analysis of variance procedure comparing scale responses on comfort, challenge, financial reward, relation with coworkers, resource adequacy, and promotion suggest nurses with a high degree of intrinsic motivation are more satisfied with extrinsic rewards.

An Empirical Analysis of Nurse Retention: What Keeps Rns in Nursing?

OBJECTIVE: This study investigates the effects of stress, economic factors, altruism, and value congruence on intentions to leave jobs and the nursing profession. BACKGROUND: Retaining nurses will be critical for healthcare organizations as the demand for nurses increases. Regulation and cost pressures are changing the nursing work environment. METHODS: We surveyed 861 RNs in the southeastern United States. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the survey. RESULTS: Results confirm the importance of stress and salaries and underscore the impact of both value congruence and altruism. Evidence shows a correlation between altruistic desires and intentions to leave the profession. CONCLUSIONS: Efforts to retain nurses should include matching nurse and organizational values. Initiatives need to be undertaken to increase professional autonomy and provide opportunities for the expression of altruism. Further research is indicated to investigate the unexpected result that highly altruistic nurses are leaving the profession.

The Influence of Media Trust and Internet Trust on Privacy-Risking Uses of E-Health

People claim to be concerned about information privacy on the Internet, yet they frequently give out personal information to online vendors and correspondents with whom they have little, if any, prior experience. This behavior is known as the privacy paradox and is particularly relevant to the context of e-health, due to the special risks of health information exposure. Using data from the 2005 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), this study addresses a key question regarding online health information privacy: Do individuals self-police risky e-health activities (i.e., uses where personal information is given out) or are they indifferent to risk based upon generalized trust in broadcast media and the Internet as sources for health information? Our results show that Internet trust mediates most effects of broadcast media trust on Internet use and that Internet trust plays a much smaller role in motivating Internet uses that are risky than is the case for low-risk uses. These results have important implications for researchers, policymakers, and healthcare administrators in determining the level of privacy protection individuals need in their use of e-health applications.

A practical validation study of a commercial accelerometer using good and poor sleepers

We validated a Fitbit sleep tracking device against typical research-use actigraphy across four nights on 38 young adults. Fitbit devices overestimated sleep and were less sensitive to differences compared to the Actiwatch, but nevertheless captured 88 (poor sleepers) to 98 percent (good sleepers) of Actiwatch estimated sleep time changes. Bland–Altman analysis shows that the average difference between device measurements can be sizable. We therefore do not recommend the Fitbit device when accurate point estimates are important. However, when qualitative impacts are of interest (e.g. the effect of an intervention), then the Fitbit device should at least correctly identify the effect’s sign.

Leisure, wine and the internet: exploring the factors that impact the purchase of wine online

Particular industries face greater challenges when transitioning to the digital economy than others. The wine industry is one of those industries experiencing some difficulty, as it contends with the heterogeneous state laws regulating wine shipments: in some states, the practice is allowed, while in others, it is considered a felony. Additional complexities arise when one considers the issues of taxation, age verification and the great diversity of the wine industry. Thus, the online wine consumer faces a bevy of potential problems when attempting to purchase a specific wine, particularly the first-time online wine buyer. This research examines the factors affecting the wine industry as it attempts to gain a greater presence in the online market. In an effort to further understand purchase intentions, we explored the positive and negative utility factors using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), extending it to include the perceptions of risk harm, risk likelihood and trust.