Research Topics

Topics of Interest. The 1 st Statistical Challenges in E-Commerce meeting, hosted by Galit Shmueli and Wolfgan Jank at the University of Maryland 's Smith School of Business, laid out some of the specific challenges that warrant our continuing interest. We hope to bring together statisticians, marketers, information systems, economists and computer science researchers to examine the new issues. They include:

• computational difficulties in handling large amounts of data;
• new methodological and conceptual issues related to data structure, origin, and analysis;
• development of approaches to capture dynamic bidding behavior in Internet auctions;
• going beyond the application of small-sample statistical methods and models;
• designing new approaches to statistical sampling on the Internet;
• understanding the role of event and time-dependencies in Internet-based selling;
• new methods to improve computationally-intensive statistical approaches for use with large data sets;
• controlling information loss and dealing with sequential and concurrent events in e-commerce;
• new conceptual approaches to empirical and experimental research in e-commerce.

We embrace the stated purpose of the 1 st Statistical Challenges in Electronic Commerce meeting: “To help us better understand how these various lines of work connect to one another and how, together, they can contribute to the modernization and enhancement of empirical research methods for e-commerce and our digital society.”
Authors should submit short research abstracts of no more than 2 pages in PDF, including text, diagrams, tables and references. Please submit to rkauffman@csom.umn.edu no later than May 5, 2006. Earlier submissions will receive immediate responses on acceptance. PDF is the preferred format. This is a “research development” symposium, so submitted abstracts will be evaluated based on their potential research contribution and the ability of the authors to stimulate interest and discussion during the symposium.