The definitive account of the trillion-dollar payment card industry. The payment card business has evolved from its inception in the 1950s as a way to handle payment for expense-account lunches (the Diners Club card) into today's complex, sprawling industry that drives trillions of dollars in transaction volume each year. Paying with Plastic is the definitive source on an industry that has r…
Schiller traces the transformation of the Internet from government, military, and educational tool to agent of "digital capitalism" through three critically important and interlinked realms.The networks that comprise cyberspace were originally created at the behest of government agencies, military contractors, and allied educational institutions. Over the past generation or so, however, a growi…
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Web and Internet Economics, WINE 2015, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in December 2015. The 30 regular papers presented together with 8 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 142 submissions and cover results on incentives and computation in theoretical computer science, artificia…
"Digital entrepreneurship has often been viewed as a game changer for African development. Empowered by a single smartphone, the thinking goes, an individual entrepreneur can lay the groundwork for the next Amazon or Apple, and this will jumpstart economic progress on the entire continent. However, the realities of actual African digital entrepreneurship are much more modest. Yes, individual en…
"An in-depth analysis of Amazon as a ubiquitous brand that has decisively shaped retail, both online and off, and normalized monpoly"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Investigations of what increasing digital connectivity and the digitalization of the economy mean for people and places at the world's economic margins. Between 2012 and 2017, more than one billion people became new Internet users. Once, digital connectivity was confined to economically prosperous parts of the world; now Internet users make up a majority of the world's population. In this book,…
When we think of the Internet, we generally think of Amazon, Google, Hotmail, Napster, MySpace, and other sites for buying products, searching for information, downloading entertainment, chatting with friends, or posting photographs. In the academic literature about the Internet, however, these uses are rarely covered. The Internet and American Businessfills this gap, picking up where most scho…
This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2014, held in Barcelona, Spain, April 2014, organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), and technically sponsored by the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The purpose o…
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, UMAP 2015, held in Dublin, Ireland, in June/July 2015. The 25 long and 7 short papers of the research paper track were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions. The papers reflect the conference theme "Contextualizing the World", highlighting the s…
Romantic rock-perched sea-girt Tintagel is a magical place that resonates with Arthurian associations - and the archaeological reality is no less intriguing than the legend. Investigation of the site began in the 1930s, when Dr Ralegh Radford uncovered remains of buildings with significant volumes of eastern Mediterranean and North African pottery of fifth- to seventh-century date, suggesting a…