The sense of presence, that is, the sense of the website being psychologically transported to the consumer, has been identified as an important factor for bringing back the feeling of sociability and physicality that is lost in online shopping. Previous research has investigated how visual content in the design can influence the sense of presence in a website, but the focus has been limited to the domestic electronic commerce context. In this paper, we conduct an experimental study in a cross-border electronic commerce context to evaluate the effect of country-related pictures on the perception of country presence, visual appeal and trust in a foreign online store. Two experimental conditions were considered: country-related pictures and generic pictures, each one evaluated for Thai and Singaporean websites. It was hypothesized that country-related content in pictures included in the design of the foreign online store would result in a higher level of country presence, and that this would in turn result in higher visual appeal and trust in the website. We conducted a survey among Japanese online consumers, with a total of 1991 participants obtained. The subjects were randomly assigned into four groups corresponding to the combination of country-of-origin of the website and picture condition. We used structural equation modeling in order to analyze the proposed hypotheses. The results showed that for both the Thai and Singaporean websites, country-related pictures resulted in higher country presence, and visual appeal was positively influenced by this increase in country presence. However, country presence did not have a direct effect on trust; this effect was completely mediated by visual appeal. We discuss these results and their implications for cross-border electronic commerce.

New payment technologies are coming that will raise user convenience. To support automatic hands-free payment, merchant devices will collect customer's information from the cloud of payment service providers or customer's smart phones, which should be removed after the transaction. Using Jaccard containment, we propose a proactive security approach of cleaning personal data at merchant-side point-of-sale terminals. We also propose a sampling method to reduce communication overhead by several orders of magnitude.

An electronic ticket is a contract, in digital format, between the user and the service provider, and reduces both economic costs and time in many services such as air travel industries or public transport. However, the security of the electronic ticket has to be strongly guaranteed, as well as the privacy of their users. We present an electronic ticketing system that considers these security requirements and includes the exculpability as a security requirement for these systems, i.e. users and the service provider can not falsely accuse each other of misbehavior. The system ensures that either both parties receive their desired data from other or neither does (fair exchange). Another interesting property is reusability. Thanks to reusability the tickets can be used a predefined number of times with the same security as single tickets. Furthermore, this scheme takes special care of the computational requirements on the users side by using light-weight cryptography. We show that the scheme is usable in practice by means of its implementation using mobile phones with Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities.

Contract signing is a practical application of the fair exchange of digital signatures. This application used to be realized by directly adopting the results of the fair exchange of signatures, which do not completely meet the requirements of the signing of a secret contract. The assistance of a trusted third party (TTP) and some cryptographic technology are required to allow two parties to exchange their signatures through the network in a fair manner because these two parties potentially may be dishonest or mistrust each other. This paper presents a subtle method of preventing the off-line TTP from gaining the exchanged signature and the corresponding message when a dispute occurs between the two parties wherein the TTP is required to take part in the exchange procedure. An advanced concept, the non-disclosure property, is proposed in order to prevent a party from misusing evidence left during the exchange process. Two approaches, namely the secret divide method and the convertible signature are demonstrated. To satisfy the properties of the traditional paper-based contract signing, the technique of multi-signature scheme is used in the proposed protocols.

A fully Internet-connected business environment is subject to frequent changes. To ordinary customers, online shopping under such a dynamic environment can be frustrating. We propose a new E-commerce service called the CIGMA to assist online customers under such an environment. The CIGMA provides catalog comparison and purchase mediation services over multiple shopping sites for ordinary online customers. The service is based on up-to-date information by reflecting the frequent changes in catalog information instantaneously. It also matches the desire of online customers for fast response. This paper describes the CIGMA along with its architecture and the implementation of a working prototype.

Mobile agent systems are essential in the next generation of electronic commercial applications. However, existing solutions for mobile agents to sign documents without user intervention are problematic because there is no restriction on who can generate the signatures. In this paper, we present a modified version of undetachable signature scheme with which the power to generate digital signatures can be designated to a neutral party. We also give a transaction model to support the scheme. Discussions regarding the security of the signature scheme as well as some attacks on its application in our model are presented too.

In this paper, we propose a novel electronic bearer check system (EBC). This system allows the consumer to pay any amount of money below an upper-boundary on the Internet within an expiration period. During each transaction, the consumer does not need to contact the bank's server. Furthermore, this electronic bearer check can be transferred to any third party. The off-line characteristic of our system is very convenient for the consumer. Moreover, the double spending and double depositing problem will not occur in this system. More importantly, the framework of this system provides anonymity to protect customer privacy.

Today software piracy is a major concern to electronic commerce since a digitized product such as software is vulnerable to redistribution and unauthorized use. This paper presents an enhanced electronic software distribution and software protection model. Authentication scheme of the proposed model is based on zero-knowledge (ZK) proof which requires limited computation. The proposed model considers post installation security using authentication agent. It prevents software piracy and illegal copy. It also provides secure and efficient software live-update mechanism based on traitor tracing scheme. Even if software or personal key is copied illegally, a merchant can trace back to its original owner from the electronic license and personal key. The proposed model provides security and reasonable performance and safety.

Decentralized XML databases are often used in Electronic Commerce (EC) business models such as e-brokers on the Web. To flexibly model such applications, we need a modeling language for EC business processes. To this end, we have adopted a query language approach and have designed a query language, called XBML, for decentralized XML databases used in EC businesses. In this paper, we explain and validate the functionality of XBML by specifying e-broker business models and describe the implementation of the XBML server, focusing on the distributed query processing.

We propose a software architecture for one-stop services of electronic commerce (EC). Users currently have trouble using multiple EC services because they are provided independently. Therefore a mediator that combines EC services and provides one-stop services to users would be useful. Service matching and service collaboration are important issues in the mediator because they are the main difficulties for users. The proposed architecture provides solutions to these issues. Multiple service assignment provides suitable combinations of EC services, flow division enables efficient execution of the combined EC services, and dynamic alternative service assignment enables flexible failure avoidance during the execution of combined services. These features make the proposed architecture a suitable mediator for EC services.

Personal identity verification has a great variety of applications including access to computer terminals, buildings, credit card verification as well as EC. Algorithms for personal identity verification can be roughly classified into four categories depending on static/dynamic and biometric/physical or knowledge based. Finger prints, iris, retina, DNA, face, blood vessels, for instance, are static and biometric. Algorithms which are biometric and dynamic include lip movements, body movements and on-line signatures. Schemes which use passwords are static and knowledge based, whereas methods using magnetic cards and IC cards are physical. Each scheme naturally has its own advantages and disadvantages. A new algorithm is proposed for pen-input on-line signature verification incorporating pen-position, pen-pressure and pen-inclinations trajectories. A preliminary experiment is performed on a data base consisting of 293 genuine writings and 540 forgery writings, from 8 individuals. Average correct verification rate was 97.6% whereas average forgery refection rate was 98.7%. Since no fine tuning was done, this preliminary result looks very promising.

In a mobile computing environment, the characteristics of wireless communication and host mobility are important considerations in providing an efficient payment service. Currently, most payment systems were not intended for use in a mobile environment, and as such they inherently possess some inefficient properties. In this paper, we propose a new micropayment system (AMPS), designed for use in a mobile computing environment. AMPS reduces the computational load of mobile hosts by directing operations normally performed by the client to the static portion of the network. With AMPS, a client's request for goods goes to a TTP server, called the AMPS server, using only one message. The client can also be disconnected while the AMPS server deals with the merchant, reducing communication costs and power consumption. User privacy is protected by hiding the details of the payment to the AMPS server. The AMPS server can also provide client anonymity to merchants. Another advantage of AMPS is the provision of transaction atomicity by checking goods and money before forwarding to clients or merchants, and preserving all necessary information for any possible future disputes.

This paper proposes a framework for building a customized comparison-shopping system in which the users are allowed to add their own shopping stores dynamically. In this framework, a shopping agent is implemented with a robust inductive learning method that automatically constructs wrappers for semi-structured online stores. During learning, strong biases assumed in many existing systems are weakened so that the real stores with reasonably complex document structures can be handled.

We propose an agent-based grocery shopping system, which automates grocery shopping process. Agents gather grocery information from several store server agents and compare it with user's preferences of groceries and stores. The agents could adapt to user's up-to-date preferences by learning from his/her evaluation of previous shopping results. The proposed agent-based grocery shopping system is composed of three role agents: a user agent, an information management agent, and a store server agent. These role agents cooperate to buy the best groceries of user preference. A role agent is formed by an organization agent. The organization agent is responsible for organizing primitive agents and coordinating message delivery. A primitive agent executes a specific task/function using the accumulated knowledge to achieve user's goal. We have designed four agent communication protocols to facilitate cooperation between the user agent, the information management agent, and the store server agent. In this paper we focus on the protocols which support the user agent. By implementing a prototype of the agent-based grocery shopping system, we have verified that it is instrumental in purchasing the best groceries of user preference from several grocery stores. We have found that, (1) our agent-based grocery shopping system reduces the user's effort to buy groceries; (2) it saves user's time to buy groceries at a store; (3) it covers functional requirements of grocery shopping system from the user's viewpoint; (4) it supports the five stages of consumer buying behavior model.

A Multi-Agent Learning Language (MALL) is defined as being necessary for agents in environments where they encounter crucial situations in which they have to learn about the environment, other parties moves and strategies, and then construct an optimal plan. The language is based on two major factors, the level of certainty in fully monitoring (surveying) the agents and the environment, and optimal plan construction, in an autonomous way. Most of the work related to software agents is based on the assumption that other agents are trustworthy. In the growing Internet environment this may not be true. The proposed new learning language allows agents to learn about the environment and the strategies of their opponents while devising their own plans. The language is being tested in our project of software agents for Electronic Commerce that operates in various security zones. The language is flexible and adaptable to a variety of agents applications.