This thesis discusses procedural issues relating to the resolution of cross-border business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce disputes by online arbitration. Resolving such disputes in national courts of law creates jurisdictional dilemmas. Online dispute resolution (ODR), on the other hand, avoids the jurisdiction problem, while providing the parties with expeditious and economical solutions to online disputes, given that ODR mechanisms could be fair, .affordable and effective. Amongst various models of ODR, online arbitration could serve as a backbone of an emerging international legal framework for online consumer disputes due to its formal and quasi-judicial nature, as international commercial arbitration has helped create the current international legal system for international business transactions through the accumulation of arbitration practice and case law. However, for online arbitration to take part m resolving cross-border B2C e-commerce disputes, three procedural issues have to be examined. Firstly, online arbitral proceedings have to be fair. The fundamental principles of procedural fairness in adjudicatory processes have to be implemented in order to provide fair treatment for the parties. Secondly, a pre-dispute consumer arbitration agreement has to be enforceable in order for the arbitration to proceed. Factors affecting the enforceability of a pre-dispute consumer arbitration agreement under different legal systems have to be addressed. Finally, an enforcement mechanism for the arbitral awards has to be in place in case of non-voluntary performance by the losing party. As no international enforcement mechanism exists for arbitral awards in the area of international consumer disputes, this thesis proposes a quasi-enforcement procedure via current international credit card clearing networks. Combined with online arbitration this international framework could provide effective and efficient resolution to online consumer disputes while the results of arbitration could be implemented through the established international credit card clearing network via a reversed payment process.

The original contribution of this thesis is that it establishes evidence of the correlation of a personality construct to online purchasing behaviour. The thesis research question is to establish if there is a correlation between personality characteristics and online consumer behaviour variables during the process of online hostel bookings. To establish the validity of the research question the researcher presents evidence of the changes in approach in consumer behaviour in hospitality and tourism by researchers over the years. It establishes the gap of information in the literature and the gap of empirical information about the effects of personality in the consumer behaviour process. The thesis reviews personality schools of thought and establishes the locus of control construct as one of the more appropriate constructs, for the goals of this research. Following from the review of the consumer behaviour models available in literature, the thesis presents evidence for the use of the technology acceptance model in combination with the locus of control. It discusses methodological paradigms and the philosophical approach behind them and sets out the various methods available to the researcher in analysing primary data. The research design utilises a quantitative research tool that engaged with 602 guests of a London based hostel, as well as a qualitative tool with 43 from the same sample. This allows the researcher to establish evidence of a link between the locus of control construct and the technology acceptance model variables. The qualitative data allows for some deeper understanding between the relationships of the variables. The thesis findings suggest a link between personality and the consumer behaviour process. It also suggests that in the context of online consumer behaviour, the locus of control has a significant positive relationship with perceptions of ease of use of a hotel website, and that the online user and the actual consumer can often be two different people, resulting in a higher number of internals appearing as the majority of consumers that utilise the Internet for online purchases. Finally the findings suggest that the technology acceptance model can be extended in certain research contexts (such as non habitual on line purchases of leisure accommodation) to account for personality variables that may enhance the predictability and understanding of the consumer behaviour process. The study concludes that the evidence of this research suggest a high proportion of internal locus of control for hostel guests who engage in online bookings. The study further concludes that consumers with high internal locus of control tend to perceive usefulness of online booking tools in a more positive way thus suggesting some predictability value of this personality construct within the limitations of the research.

This thesis is based on a related set of nine papers I published between 2004 and 2010. Six of these papers are sole authored and I was the lead author for the three joint authored papers. Four underlying themes are identified which underpin the research I have done. Firstly, market entry through the dot com model which was covered in my first published paper (Laffey, 2004). This paper identified my second research theme, network effects in entrepreneurial markets, covered in Laffey (2005.; 2007b) which examined gambling markets and my third theme, the importance of search and paid click concepts, analysed in Laffey (2007a), Laffey and Sharp (2008) and Laffey et al (2009). My third theme of search then led naturalIy to my final theme, the development of online value creation concepts, which was explored through research into comparison websites (Laffey, 2009c, 2010; Laffey and Gandy, 2009b). The thesis shows how these research themes emerged through the selected papers, how they have developed into my current research and how they offer opportunities for further research. Page

The overall aim of this study is to examine the determinants of consumer adoption of apparel mass customisation in the Internet environment. Mass customisation is conceptualised here as a technology-enabled business strategy to provide individualised products/services to consumers on a 'mass' basis. Although much research has been conducted on the supply side of mass customisation (e.g. Pine, 993; Spring and Dakymple, 2000; Piller and Tseng, 2003), the consumer perceptions of such shopping strategy have not received comparable attention.

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The majority of existing e-commerce design guidelines has been derived by conducting heuristic evaluations, without reporting the involvement of the users themselves. This research provides clarification on a number of existing web design guidelines for e-commerce sites based on empirical studies with users. Four studies were conducted and each study focused on a specific set of design guidelines as found in the literature. A combined qualitative and quantitative approach has been used, including a state-of-the-art technique, eye tracking. The eye movement data were complemented by user-profile data elicited through background questionnaires and user-perception data as captured through semi-structured interviews. The first study investigated users’ initial impressions of homepages of e-commerce sites. The second study examined users’ adaptability to persistent or varied placement of design elements. The third and fourth studies explored the effect of the presentation format of e-commerce web pages: the first in terms of the proportion of images, and the second in terms of how key icons related to an e-commerce transaction were presented. On the whole, the results of the studies corroborated existing design guidelines, but they also identified potential refinements. The thesis contributes both methodologically and empirically to Human-Computer Interaction. The combined methodological approach enables insight into the user experience that spans behavioural aspects such as visual search behaviour and visual search performance data, and subjective aspects such as user expectations and preferences. The empirical outcomes amplify the design guidelines from a user’s perspective.

E-commerce now constitutes a significant part of all commercial activity; however the increase in transactions is also leading to more disputes. These disputes are becoming more frequent, more technologically complicated and more difficult in terms of traceability . This thesis focuses specifically on dispute problems related to soft products, i.e. those that are intangible and therefore requiring no physical delivery. With the growing demand for these types of products, e.g. downloadable films, music, software, and prepaid calling time, the prevention of fraudulent transactions is becoming increasingly important. Reasons for the rise in the number of fraudulent transactions include merchants being unable to see the customer to verify an ID or signature and E-commerce enabling soft-products and services to be acquired via soft delivery methods: email, download or logging in. The introductory section provides a critique of current e-commerce fraud detection and prevention techniques and shows that not all are suitable for e-commerce, especially soft-products, and therefore unable to provide complete protection against fraud. The future relating to the detection and prevention of e-commerce fraud is then discussed, leading to suggestions regarding the improvement of the current state-of-the-art technique, the Address Verification Service (AVS), which is used to accommodate the introduction of soft-products. Apart from the exchange process problems, i.e. those involving money and goods, attention is also paid to other important factors such as timing and quality that are usually neglected in these detection and prevention techniques. Dispute scenarios from many different perspectives have been analysed, viz. computer science, business, legal and that of the participants themselves. From the analyses, all possible dispute cases have been formally listed using the 'Truth Table' approach. This analysis has then led to the design of a comprehensive taxonomy framework for dispute in e-commerce. The term Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), is the online technology applied to Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) which is resolving disputes other than via litigation in the courts. Current ODR systems and their suitability for the e-commercial world have been examined, concluding that not all are appropriate for e-commerce situations (since most still involve a human element and often make the resolution process more costly than the actual item under dispute). The proposed solution to the problem is by automating the online dispute resolution process. The total solution is described in two parts (i) an E-commerce Transaction Protocol (ETP) forming the infrastructure where the transaction will take place and be able to accommodate any new improvements in the future, and (ii) an Automated Online Dispute Resolution (AODR) system which should automatically resolve any dispute occurring within the proposed e-commerce model. In order for the AODR to resolve any dispute, a product/payment specific plug-in (add-on) has been incorporated into the system. For illustration purposes, credit cards as a payment method has been selected and the appropriate plug-in specification for soft products and credit cards created. The concept of providing every soft product with a quality certificate has also been discussed. A concluding case study of e-commerce in Saudi Arabia has been used to test the viability of both the e-commerce dispute taxonomy and the proposed model. The case study shows the suitability of using ETP with AODR in order to resolve soft-product disputes automatically. Limitations of the work and further research possibilities have then been identified.

Secure payment is the basis of electronic commerce (e-commerce). A large amount of electronic payments are made via POS (point of sale) terminals using smart cards and legitimate users are usually authenticated by PIN. The security design of POS terminals and authentication methods are increasingly becoming concerns of ebusiness. The major aims and objectives of this industrially oriented research are to investigate a new solution at system level to improve the security of current POS payment systems. The contributions of this thesis include several aspects: 1) An indepth literature survey has been undertaken. The security threats of current POS terminals and available countermeasures have been systematically investigated. The main existing problems have been identified. 2) An innovative scheme, the so-called Supercard, which integrates PIN pad, biometrics and the smartcard, has been proposed. Approaches based on this scheme can meet security challenges posed by attacks such as visual and channel PIN attacks, display attacks, and fake-machine attacks. The scheme also has advantages to prevent the cryptographic key being disclosed by channel or side channel attacks. 3) The Supercard scheme has been examined specifically to improve fingerprint biometrics security. The Capture & Match on Card scheme and corresponding authentication protocol has been designed with the advantage of preventing biometric channel attacks. Biohash is adopted to protect the biometric template. 4) Keystroke dynamics, as a behaviour biometric to strengthen PIN authentication, has been investigated under the specific conditions of a highly limited number of keystrokes. 5) The multimodal signals of PIN, fingerprint and keystroke dynamics have been studied through fuzzy-logic-based information fusion.

While e-commerce has become a significant matter with the advancement of the Internet, there have been inadequate empirical research efforts concerning its acceptance in developing countries, specifically in the Middle East area, and more particularly in Jordan. Previous studies investigated e-commerce acceptance and use extensively, by employing different technology acceptance models in developed countries. However, the application of some technology models successful in developed countries, such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB) have been found to be less predictive when tested in developing countries. This suggests that culture and the empirical setting of the study will have an effect on the technology acceptance and use. Moreover, there are limited studies that investigate the technology acceptance in the tourism sector in both the developing and developed countries. As a result, this study has attempted to fill this research gap by creating a developing country model (using Jordan as a research site) and then comparing this model to traditional models which arc predominantly Western/developed country- in origin. Data was collected from 313 travel agencies 111 the area of Amman through a questionnaire survey, and then the data was analysed through various analytical methods. Data analysis started with the descriptive statistics of the demographic variables, key informants and actual use of the Internet. Then an investigation of the reliability and validity of each construct was conducted using item-to-total correlations and exploratory factor analyses. The results of factor analysis were used as inputs in successive multiple regression analyses. E-commerce use was measured by time and frequency of the Internet use. The research findings indicate that the adapted Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model (UTAUT), which was originally tested in the developed countries, can also explain e-commerce acceptance and use of travel agents. In addition, the study indicates the factors that affect e-commerce adoption in the Jordanian travel agencies, namely performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, perceived risk, government support, competition and external pressure, facilitating conditions and compatibility. The key influence drivers that have affected the behaviour intention to use e-commerce were the construct of competition and external pressure followed by the performance expectancy construct, then the effort expectancy and finally the facilitating condition constructs. Furthermore, the results of the analyses revealed that performance expectancy and effort expectancy along with social influence and competition and external pressure and facilitating conditions were significant factors and had a positive influence on the behaviour intention to use e-commerce. In contrast, perceived risk, along with government support and compatibility, were insignificant factors. In addition, the behaviour intention has a significantly positive effect on intended degree of use. Also, the findings of this study clarify the effects of various moderators on the behaviour intention to use e-commerce. Performance expectancy was not moderated by age and gender. Effort expectancy was moderated by gender with a stronger effect for males, but age did not moderate the relationship between effort expectancy and behaviour intention. Finally, age did not moderate the relationship between social influence and behaviour intention. In contrast, gender moderated this relationship, with a markedly stronger effect for women. The study contributes to the body of literature in the area of technology acceptance in developing countries and in the hospitality industry. The findings suggested that the UTAUT explains e-commerce acceptance and use in Jordanian travel agencies. It also provides several managerial and methodological implications. The study provides a useful model for managers of travel agencies to evaluate the factors that influence the use of e-commerce. It also provides suggestions to help managers to formulate organizational policies and marketing strategies prior to the use of the e-commerce. The limitations of the study together with directions for future research are also considered.