From the editors

Abstract

We are pleased to present the second issue for this year. Three of the four articles deal with trust and other key factors influencing the adoption and acceptance of electronic commerce. The fourth provides and interesting experiment examining potential factors that influence an individual's willingness to report negative status information for an IS project. The first article by Chen, Gllenson, and Sherrell focuses on consumer acceptance of virtual stores by integrating key factors provided in the Technology Acceptance Model and Innovation Diffusion Theory. In addition, the authors examine the role of information richness, perceive trust, and service quality. Among the many interesting findings, the impact of service quality and trust were approximately equal to the traditional factors of compatibility, perceived usefulness, and ease of use. As contrast, Van Slyke, Belanger, and Comunale's article also focuses on the issue of trust on web-based shopping. Their objective is to examine trust as it relates to Innovation Diffusion Theory. Trust again was found to have an impact on use intention even after controlling for most of the key predictors from Innovation Diffusion Theory. Our third article by Kim and Prabhakar examines the role of initial trust on the adoption of B2C e-commerce. They found that initial trust has an impact on adoption behavior. But what are also of interest are the antecedent factors to trust. As the authors note, antecedents to trust must be explicitly identified and considered separate from trust itself. As such, Kim and Prabhakar found that propensity-to-trust, structural assurances, and word-of-mouth referrals were significant predictors. Finally, we present a very interesting article by Keil, Smith, Pawlowski, and Jin that explores the phenomenon of individuals' reluctance to report bad news during the life of a IS project. If we are able to mitigate such reluctance, obtaining such information as soon as possible would be a key factor to avoid sidelining of a project. The authors present a theoretical model drawn from the whistle-blowing literature and test it under controlled experimental conditions using role-playing scenarios. They found a strong relationship between normative perceptions of whether one ought to report problems with perceived personal responsibility. Moreover, they show the inverse relationship between personal responsibility and reluctance to report problems. Beyond that, via agency theory, they show the impact of organizational climate and information asymmetry was found to indirectly impact willingness to report negative project status information. Enjoy.