| The rapid growth of the Internet and other Web based technologies presents organizations with both opportunities and challenges. Under such circumstances, sound and timely e-business strategy plays an increasingly important role for companies to stay competitive in the dynamic electronic marketplace. Due to the unproven e-business models, the fast-changing global business environment, and organizations' lack of experience, the strategy development constitutes a major challenge for e-businesses, and it becomes more important than ever to support the process with comprehensive and effective tools. Unfortunately, there is a lack of quantitative or measurable effective support for e-business strategy development or strategic level decision making.; Through implementing an explanatory study, this dissertation establishes an econometric model to address the problem. Such a model can help companies identify the major factors that will be involved in their overall business strategies, specify the relationships among the factors, and evaluate and generate e-business policies that will improve their overall organizational performance and profitability.; To further test the proposed model, the research carries out two independent empirical studies following a model operationalization methodology, which includes data collection, model estimation, and hypothesis testing. Since the proposed econometric model is a general e-business model, which does not focus on one specific industry or application, the whole model operationalization processes follow a deductive approach: the variable selections and model specifications are guided by the general model while taking into account the unique features of the specific applications. The empirical results show that the proposed model is a good and valid model for the selected applications.; The major contribution of this dissertation is the new econometric model, and this research is among the first attempts to model e-business strategy making with a comprehensive set of knowledge from economics, econometrics, management science, management, marketing, accounting, and other prior research. If such a model is delivered through a decision making support system (DMSS), the whole promise implied by this research can be realized. This dissertation has also developed a prototype of such a DMSS, called E-Business Strategy Planner (EBSP), as a part of future work. |
