Antecedents of Webrooming in Omnichannel Retailing

Although webrooming has become common practice in omnichannel consumer behavior, only a few empirical studies have managed to shed light on the phenomenon. With this research work, we aim to investigate important antecedents of webrooming. We base our conceptual framework on anticipated utility theory and expect that customers’ anticipated utility from using the physical store versus the online store for purchase can be predicted by four groups of antecedents: psychographic variables, shopping motivations, channel-related variables, and product-related variables. With the help of a data set from a large cross-national online survey in which 1497 customers reconstruct their last purchase journey, we differentiate webroomers from pure online shoppers. In addition, we disentangle customers who used retailer-owned, competitor-owned, and independent touchpoints along the search and purchase phase of the customer journey in order to characterize webroomers in an omnichannel context and assess their prevalence in different countries and industries. Our insights on the characteristics and antecedents of webrooming help retailers to detect and better understand the psychology behind the webrooming phenomenon from a consumer perspective in an omnichannel retailing environment. In addition, results from our exploratory analysis on the positive association between webrooming and customer spending contribute to research and practice by providing first evidence on the economic value of webrooming.

E-government Implementation in Spain, France and Russia: Efficiency and Trust Level

The article considers peculiarities of modern information technologies introduction including e-state management (e-government) in government bodies, local authorities and governmental structure. Certain factors, influencing citizen’s intention to use the system of interaction with e-government, taking into account trust, perceived risk and political efficiency on the example of several European countries are described in the article. Attempt to compare different approaches to e-government introduction into countries, having basic differences, influencing e-government introduction, i.e. cultural and historic problem of the country, infrastructure, e-competence and development of citizens, civil servants and technical staff was made by the authors. Advantages of e-government, such as improvement of access to information and services; dropping-out of access limits to authority, improvement the quality of service and reputation; integration of institutions are revealed in the paper. The authors attempt to examine modern conditions of new information technologies introduction; determine anticipated utility of their use; obtain new data of new government services; generalize problems of anticipated risks and threats for citizens, using e-government services and contemplate ways of their prevention.

Insurance Premium Calculations with Anticipated Utility Theory

This paper examines an insurance or risk premium calculation method called the mean-value-distortion pricing principle in the general framework of anticipated utility theory. Then the relationship between comonotonicity and independence is explored. Two types of risk aversion and optimal reinsurance contracts are also discussed in the context of the pricing principle.