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In the environment of business‐to‐business e‐commerce, both buyers and sellers are uncertain about their roles. Questions abound. What is the role of the Internet in buyer‐seller relationships, and what will be the interface between the Internet and the salesforce as information sources? Data collected from purchasing professionals suggest that traditional information sources, including suppliers’ salespeople, are more useful than the Internet at the present time. Moreover, findings indicate that the Internet plays almost no role in supplier selection decisions and only a moderate role in ongoing buyer‐seller relationships. Additionally, in relationships characterized by high levels of information exchange, trust, cooperation, and/or adaptations, the Internet appears to play a less important role. Based on these findings, implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed.

The primary purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the impact of the internet on teenage childrens' roles in purchase decisions.

Based on a survey administered to 346 parent‐child dyads, regression analysis and ANOVA analysis were employed to analyze the impact of the internet on teenagers' influence on several purchase subdecisions related with purchase of high technology products and vacation planning in urban Indian households.

Results indicate that teenage children in urban Indian households are significantly influenced by the internet, i.e. they perceive and disseminate consumption related information from the internet and, further, this influence is positively related to their role in family purchase decisions. Additionally, statistically significant differences were found on children's participation in decision making across the six subdecisions.

These results are important to academicians, researchers and practitioners because they show that the internet does act as a contemporary influence on consumer socialization of children and impacts the teenage child's participation in family which has been relatively unexplored.

The rise of the Internet has facilitated net activism among many virtual gay communities in Taiwan. The communication role that the Internet plays is in particular vital, because homosexuality is still considered a taboo in Taiwan's society. Cyberspace created by the Internet forms a unique “space” where local homosexuals can share their experience of being gays with each other. The purposes of this chapter are intended to examine how the Internet facilitated the formation, promotion, and success of gay rights movements among homosexual communities in Taiwan. This chapter uses the Chang-Der Street Police Harassment Incident as a case study to elaborate the Internet's communication role in mobilizing local gay populations to pursue their gay rights. It also investigates the Internet's strategic role as a communication medium in gay rights movements. The case analysis and in-depth interviews help identify several key functions that the Internet can play: to exchange and share information, to organize and coordinate gay rights movements, to record and store historical information, and to lead social and value changes in the future. This chapter explores the potential of the Internet in online community mobilization, an early look at virtual community and net activism.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which academic researchers consider the relationship between broadband access and children’s information seeking in the United States. Because broadband has been cited as an essential element of contemporary learning, this study sought to identify gaps in the attention given to the role of broadband in the information seeking environment of youth.

The researchers conducted a mixed method synthesis of academic research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2011 that reported the information seeking of children aged 5–18 years. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from leading databases, analyzed separately, and conclusions drawn from integrated results.

The results of this study indicated that broadband is rarely considered in the design of children’s information seeking published in peer-reviewed research journals. Only 15 studies showed any presence of broadband in study design or conclusions. Due to the small number of qualifying studies, the researchers could not conduct the synthesis; instead, the researchers conducted a quantitative relationship analysis and qualitative content analysis.

Given the focus of policymaking and public discussion on broadband, its absence as a study consideration suggests a crucial gap for scholarly researchers to address.

The data set included only studies of children in the United States, therefore, findings may not be universally applicable.

Despite national imperatives for ubiquitous broadband and a tradition of information seeking research in library and information science (LIS) and other disciplines, a lack of academic research about how broadband affects children’s information seeking persists.

This paper examines a New Zealand website, nzgirl.co.nz, in order to theorise the Internet as a communication tool, the Internet as a marketplace and the Internet as a public sphere. As a communication tool, the Internet serves to foster electronic relationships. A key concept discussed in the context of electronic relationships is interactivity. Within the second section of the paper, the role of public relations practitioners in identity and brand building form the discussion of the electronic marketplace. In particular, the importance of an integrated marketing communications approach to Internet branding is examined. One of the central issues of electronic public relations is the potential role of the Internet as a public arena of the public sphere. In this paper, the role of websites in discursive development, social and political identity formation and the evolution of a sense of community is considered.

This study seeks to explore how students are increasingly using the Internet to support instruction and research needs in addition to heavy e‐mail usage. The extension of this research suggests more positive impact from the Internet in almost every aspect of academic life and suggests the need for more access at reduced costs on and near this campus.

A questionnaire was used to survey a sample of students about their internet practices.

Students are now coming to university with more background in technology and the role of the internet and other ICTs. The demand for internet service will continue to grow and how the university should respond to meet this greater demand is the focus of this research.

Study suggests that the impact of the ICTs and internet service for e‐mail and other research activities related to the role of studying suggests that access is a key problem that must be scaled better so that students and faculty have improved access. This situation should continue to be monitored and the study suggests that more and more university affiliates will need improved access to internet resources.

Endorsement marketing has been widely used to generate consumer attention, interest and purchase decisions among targeted audiences. Internet celebrities who become famous on the Internet are dependent on strategic intimacy to appeal to their followers. Our study aims to examine how multiple exposures to Internet celebrity endorsements influence consumers’ click and purchase decisions in the context of influencer marketing.

Based on a unique and representative dataset, the authors first model consumers’ choices for clicks and purchases with two panel fixed-effect logit models linking clicks and purchases with the frequency of exposure to Internet celebrity endorsement. To further control the endogeneity produced by the intercorrelation between the click and purchase models, the authors also adopt the two-stage Heckman probit structure to jointly estimate the two models using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Robustness checks confirm the effectiveness of the models.

The results suggest that Internet celebrity endorsement plays a significant role in bringing referral traffic to e-commerce sites but is less helpful in affecting conversion to sales. The impact of repetitive Internet celebrity endorsements on consumers’ click decisions is U-shaped, but the role of Internet celebrities as online retailers will “shape-flip” this relationship to a negative linear relation.

Our study is the first to investigate the repetitive exposure effect of Internet celebrity endorsement. The results show a contradictory pattern with a wear-out effect of repetition in the advertising literature. This is the first study to show how the endorsing self, which is a common business model in influencer marketing, moderates the effectiveness of influencer marketing.

This study empirically examines the role of the Internet in global business‐to‐business (B2B) marketing strategies of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) based in the United States and Australia. The results demonstrate that uses of the Internet in a global B2B setting often parallel its domestic uses but that variables that facilitate or inhibit its implementation for global operations are somewhat different in global markets. The findings suggest that MNCs in the two countries are using the Internet in their global B2B operations predominantly for business enhancement purposes as compared to revenue enhancement. Results also show that for global B2B operations, the Internet is viewed by MNCs as a tool to enhance competitive intelligence, streamline operations, and enhance the marketing processes. It is also deemed essential for a firm’s long‐term competitive stance by large as well as small and medium‐sized MNCs.

This study aims to investigate how Internet services can improve the well-being of elderly consumers. Drawing on transformative service research (TSR) and technology adoption literature, it examines the main challenges for the elderly when adopting Internet services and how they and their family members can co-create value to improve the elderly service inclusion and well-being.

A qualitative methodology is used to identify challenges, value co-creation behaviors and well-being outcomes of elderly individuals and their family members when using Internet services. The data collection method involved 24 in-depth interviews with consumers over 75 years of age and their family members.

This research first recognizes specific challenges for the elderly in adopting Internet services related to resistance to technology adoption and health impairments. Second, the findings identify value co-creation behaviors held by elderly consumers of Internet services: learning and formal training, complying with indications and seeking help when they encounter problems with technology. Family members also contribute to elderly well-being through two value co-creation behaviors: helping and supporting elderly relatives with technology and being patient and tolerant when they need support. Finally, these behaviors are found to influence five dimensions of elderly consumers’ well-being: enjoyment, personal growth, mastery, autonomy and social connectedness.

This study addresses a gap in the literature by exploring the value co-creation behaviors of elderly consumers of Internet services and their family members for improving well-being outcomes. Understanding value co-creation and well-being for elderly consumers of Internet services is an emerging and under-researched area in TSR and service inclusion literature.