abstract: States place a heavy reliance on sales tax revenues to finance government activities. The rise in e-commerce, coupled with constitutional restrictions on imposing sales tax nexus, has resulted in a decline in sales tax revenues in many states. States have responded by enacting legislation and reinterpreting existing statutes to curb these declining revenues. This study provides evidence that sales tax revenues are larger after states enforce some, but not all, sales tax measures aimed at imposing nexus on Internet retailers. Further evidence suggests a shift in consumer preferences to local consumption in states enforcing broadened nexus, as evidenced by greater state-level retail gross domestic product (GDP) after states enforce broadened sales tax nexus. Additionally, the number of physical establishments of Internet retailers is lower after states expand sales tax nexus, suggesting these retailers remove their physical presence in states to avoid collecting sales taxes. Finally, the increase in retail GDP has a spillover effect on corporate income taxes, with states enforcing broader sales tax nexus on Internet sales realizing larger corporate income tax revenues. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Accountancy 2017

Internet is fundamentally transforming the nature of the relationship that businesses have with consumers and the public. While e-commerce has witnessed extensive growth in recent years, consumers concerns regarding ethical issues surrounding online shopping also continue to increase. With increasing acceptance of the internet as a source for retail, ethical issues concerning internet usage have prompted serious concerns to consumers and created new challenges for practitioners. These growing concerns about safety and ethical behavior in online retailing can harm and restrain internet retail growth and deter consumers from online activities. Marketers must understand how these ethical challenges relate to dissatisfaction and distrust in the online retailing environment to foster further growth. The vast majority of earlier research on this area is conceptual in nature and limited in scope by focusing on consumers’ privacy issues. In an online context, this study proposes and tests a conceptual model that will discover the relationships between ethical factors associated to online providers’ web sites (e.g. security, privacy, non-deception, fulfilment, service recovery, shared value, and communication) and customer satisfaction to online providers’ web sites. It also explores a mediating role of trust and commitment on the link between ethical factors and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the current study examines the differences between e-commerce ethics between the UK and Egypt in the context of B2C and B2B e-commerce. The conceptual model is then tested with a total of 980 completed questionnaires collected from two sample countries; namely, Egypt and the UK. These were analysed through a multivariate analysis using a variance-based statistical technique known as Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling. The findings of this study show significant support for the proposed model. As predicted, BPSE is a second-order construct composed of seven dimensions (i.e., security, privacy, fulfilment, non-deception, service recovery, communication, and shared value). Trust and commitment mediate the relationship between BPSE and satisfaction. In addition, II reliability/fulfilment and non-deception are the most effective dimensions in BPSE. Byer’s perceptions regarding sellers’ ethics (BPSE) has a significant influence on consumer satisfaction. No major differences between the two country models were found. These findings have both theoretical and practical implications in that the results have provided empirical evidence on the indirect impact of BPSE on customer satisfaction and can serve as an indication in practice for both online service providers managers and policy makers in understanding consumers’ perceptions about e-commerce ethics and its effects on customer satisfaction.

Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo’s writing economy comprised the longstanding manuscript industry, the governmental printing industry from the 1820s, and the for-profit private press printing industry from the 1850s. I investigate these industries’ functions, interactions, and reputations to explore why Cairene printing developed and how contemporaries ascribed meaning to textual production during this period of flux. This study relies on the texts themselves to generate the history of their production. I aggregate the names, dates, and other information contained within their openings, contents, and colophons to chart the work of their producers and vendors for the first time. I then contextualize this information through contemporary iconographic and descriptive depictions of Cairene texts. My sources are drawn from libraries and private collections in America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. They include formal and ephemeral manuscripts and printings. Against narratives that invoke printing as a catalyst for modernity, I argue that printing was simply a tool. Its adoption increased because it was useful for different actors like the state, private entrepreneurs, and scholars who employed it to respond to specific political, economic, and intellectual needs. My argument reverses the causality of modernization narratives, in that I establish that printing was the result of practical demands instead of the origin of new demands. As a tool, printing was deployed by Cairenes flexibly. Some used it to appropriate western norms, including the idea that printing is a civilizing force. Others used it to enact manuscript tradition. The history of this process is important to social practices, like the creation of new professions. But it is also important to historical legacy. Nationalism, Enlightenment, and civil society are assigned their origins and proof in Cairene printings from the 1870s and 1880s. Yet this narrative of the Middle East’s generic print modernity draws from the expectation for printings to engender public discourse and galvanize society, instead of from the words that these texts actually contain or an understanding of who made and consumed them and why. To counter the prevailing idea that printing is fixed and universal in its value and effects, Meaningful mediums examines printing as both a social and economic practice, and itself a space for ideas. It therefore emphasizes the significance of human agency, local context, constraints, and continuity during a period of momentous technological, textual, and cultural change. In conclusion, this study documents Cairenes’ incorporation of printing into their political economy of writing and revises the widely held notion that this process was an agent of social change, a marker of modernity and colonial restructuring, and a foreign disruptor of local textual tradition. / Middle Eastern Studies Committee

This thesis posits that governments around the world have failed to account for a vast percentage of the economic output of their citizens in their recordkeeping and policy-making. Through ineffective measures such as the GDP, governments have long attached their nation’s value to arbitrary measures of “growth,” which reflect average wealth, or unsustainable industrial output, or other shortsighted and unreflective measures. The rise and popularity of Bitcoin and other digital age “crypto-currencies” reflect both the convenience and ease of use of these new systems, but also an impulse toward moving past government as an economic gatekeeper. The last decades, which have been tracked with the rise of GDP as a measurement of economic wellbeing, have seen the general failure of government to take into account measures aside from economic output – such as happiness, childcare, and housework – when it tallies up the nation’s values and sets its economic policies and priorities. In addition to Bitcoin and other “crypto-currencies,” this work will examine the history and current ramifications of policies that are reflective extensions of the growth- at-all-costs model of governance seen in GDP, particularly through fiat currency, economic deregulation, as well as the social ramifications of heedless growth on often- spurious grounds, which has characterized the last decades. Through an unwise and irrational adherence to growth-oriented policies (reflected in GDP), the U.S. government has – perhaps unwittingly – ignored the true needs and welfare of the American people. Yet Bitcoin, which is unregulated and stateless, may represent by its now years-long popularity a testament to millions of economic actors who feel that government has failed to focus its attentions and energies on proper measures of economic output and wellbeing. Bitcoin – by its true value, as opposed to the “fiat” nature of conventional currencies – may yet prove a means by which economics again reflects reality.

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The thesis focuses on creating a business plan for e shop with business accessories and verification of its competitiveness and potential for further development. The thesis is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part provides basic theoretical knowledge needed to develop the business plan. The practical part is focused on writing the business plan for the e shop BusinessStyle.cz. The plan includes an introduction, purpose and position of the document, summary, description of business opportunities, company and key personalities and analysis of market, customers, competitors and suppliers. Marketing and sales strategy and implementation project plan is based on this information. The thesis is closed by financial plan that allows evaluation of the project.

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No description available.