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Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) involved in the production of natural essential oils can reduce market accessibility challenges by trading through electronic marketplaces (e-marketplaces). However, trust is a barrier that SMEs should overcome in order to successfully trade in e-marketplaces. The agricultural sector presents a unique challenge to the subject of trust and e-marketplaces. It is difficult for SMEs in the agricultural sector to provide the level of assurance of product quality that their buyers expect. Trust between buyers and sellers during the earliest stages of e-marketplace interaction can pave the way for future trust in a seller on an e-marketplace. Thus, this study uses the uncertainty reduction theory (URT) to investigate factors that could influence the initial trust and pave the way for future trust in a seller on e-marketplaces. This study assumes a qualitative research methodology in which a multiple-case study approach is adopted. The study focuses on SMEs that produce natural essential oils in South Africa. Open-ended interviews were conducted with companies involved in buying or selling natural essential oils in South Africa to determine the factors that influence their decision to buy or sell in an e-marketplace. Findings from data were used to inform the development of a model of trust in sellers of natural essential oils in e-marketplaces. The proposed model recommends trust factors that should be considered during the entry, personal, and exit phases of the URT. The model identifies common and unique trust factors that relate specifically to businesses trading natural essential oils on e-marketplaces. The study found that some SMEs face challenges in coming up with an effective model for selling agricultural produce on e-marketplaces. Hence, they often resort to face-to-face interaction when it comes to product inspection, especially when dealing with first-time buyers. However, this study presented measures put in place by other SMEs suggesting how such challenges could be addressed. Nevertheless, a lack of trust in technology remains a cause for concern to some SMEs selling natural essential oils.

Academic library consortia activity has become an integral part of academic libraries’ operations. Consortia have come to assert considerable bargaining power over publishers and have provided libraries with considerable economic advantage. They interact with publishers both as consumers of publishers’ products, with much stronger bargaining power than individual libraries hold, and, increasingly, as rival publishers themselves. Are consortia changing the relationship between academic libraries and publishers? Is the role of academic library consortia placing academic libraries in a position that should and will attract the attention of competition policy regulators? Competition policy prohibits buying and selling cartels that can negatively impact the free market on which the Canadian economic system, like other Western economies, depends. Competition policy as part of economic policy is, however, only relevant where we are concerned with aspects of the market economy. Traditionally, public goods for the greater social and cultural benefit of society are not considered part of the market economic system. If the activities of academic library consortia are part of that public good perspective, competition policy may not be a relevant concern. Using evidence gained from in-depth interviews from a national sample of university librarians and from interviews with the relevant federal government policy makers, this research establishes whether library consortia are viewed as participating in the market economy of Canada or not. Are consortia viewed by librarians and government as serving a public good role of providing information for a greater social and cultural benefit or are they seen from a market-economic perspective of changing power relations with publishers? Findings show government has little in-depth understanding of academic library consortia activity, but would most likely consider such activity predominantly from a market economic perspective. University librarians view consortia from a public good perspective but also as having an important future role in library operations and in changing the existing scholarly publishing paradigm. One-third of librarian respondents felt that future consortia could compete with publishers by becoming publishers and through initiatives such as open source institutional repositories. Librarians also felt that consortia have had a positive effect on librarians’ professional roles through the facilitation of knowledge building and collaboration opportunities outside of the home institution.

Today, millions of exporters and importers are using hundreds of business-to-business (B2B) electronic marketplaces to buy or sell goods and services. With this reason, this study aims to provide the related literature sufficient information concerning the most appropriate and beneficiary criteria which should be taken into consideration in the web pages of B2B companies via applying a content analysis method. The analysis results exhibit that globally oriented websites like B2B marketplaces must contain at least two or three language options, since people from different parts of the world speak and learn different languages according to their geography; and that B2B websites which do not provide trade assurances must consider adding this feature to attract more customers. In the scope of the study, it has been found out that all the selected websites take a good care of the information they share. When visiting these companies, it is really easy to learn everything about industries and international trade relations. Some of them even share information about the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak on industries. Among all the websites analyzed in the scope of the study, only Alibaba.com meets all the criteria taken into consideration. Moreover, it would be appropriate to suggest that Turkish B2B e-marketplaces, such as Tradeatlas.com, ptttrade.com, and steelorbis.com, should have these criteria to become leading B2B e-marketplaces in the world. Finally, it can be suggested that websites should prepare specific pages for newcomers to enlighten them in the best way they can do.

The level of trust in a service provider is an important decision factor when buying industrial services. Especially, the outcome uncertainties of services, its individuality, and asymmetric information between buyer and seller are some reasons that the evaluation of trust is a key component in service trading. Consequently, searching of potential new suppliers involves examining providers’ trustworthiness. This paper focuses on the study of online trust signals used by buyers, to assess provider’s trustworthiness in the context of industrial services. The main research objective is to propose the basis for a digital tool, which helps buyers to assess provider’s trustworthiness by providing a “standardized trustworthiness signal description” and “trust functionalities.” A particular approach is used, wherein different methods are mixed such as a case study, expert interviews, and a quantitative method following the guideline of the design science paradigm. The aim is to propose a useful tool for trustworthiness assessment to enhance e-markets for industrial services.

An important precondition for resource redeployment is that firms are aware of the commercial applications for which their resources can be used. We take an inventing-firm perspective and ask: how many new commercial applications will a firm associate with an existing technological invention? We note that both technological and organizational characteristics determine the number of distinct applications firms consider feasible for a given technological invention. In particular, we suggest that inherently fungible technologies, that is, technologies that have a broad impact on other technological fields (highly general technologies), will be associated with a larger set of commercial applications. We also suggest that linking applications to an inherently general technology can be challenging when the technology is already embedded in organizational (commercial) routines. Proprietary data from an online marketplace allow us to investigate the applications firms consider feasible for their technological inventions. In line with extant work, a firm assigns a greater number of applications to more general technologies. As expected, however, this relationship is shaped by how the technology is embedded within the organization. Our results have implications for redeployment as firms may face challenges in the initial step of redeployment when fungible resources need to be linked to emerging market opportunities.