Exploring the Darkverse: A Multi-Perspective Analysis of the Negative Societal Impacts of the Metaverse.

The Metaverse has the potential to form the next pervasive computing archetype that can transform many aspects of work and life at a societal level. Despite the many forecasted benefits from the metaverse, its negative outcomes have remained relatively unexplored with the majority of views grounded on logical thoughts derived from prior data points linked with similar technologies, somewhat lacking academic and expert perspective. This study responds to the dark side perspectives through informed and multifaceted narratives provided by invited leading academics and experts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The metaverse dark side perspectives covered include: technological and consumer vulnerability, privacy, and diminished reality, human-computer interface, identity theft, invasive advertising, misinformation, propaganda, phishing, financial crimes, terrorist activities, abuse, pornography, social inclusion, mental health, sexual harassment and metaverse-triggered unintended consequences. The paper concludes with a synthesis of common themes, formulating propositions, and presenting implications for practice and policy.

Has Covid-19 accelerated opportunities for digital entrepreneurship? An Indian perspective.

Covid-19 has challenged many businesses to orient themselves towards digital solutions for their survival. Due to the rising digital wave during Covid-19, there has been a plethora of opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs to enter the market. Hence, this study focuses on understanding emerging areas and technologies for digital entrepreneurship. This study adopted a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews through the lens of the diffusion of innovations theory. A total of 23 entrepreneurs responded and presented their views on Covid-19-induced opportunities for digital entrepreneurship. A structured process of open, axial, and selective coding was adopted for the thematic analysis. The study presents a framework based on four promising propositions. Results of the thematic analysis indicate the emergence of digital entrepreneurship opportunities in technology (EdTech, FinTech, cybersecurity), healthcare (diagnostics, virtual care, fitness), entertainment (over the top, gaming, social media), and e-commerce (contactless delivery, payment methods, augmented reality). In this study, entrepreneurs presented their views based on their experience with the platform or technology they operated. To this end, the present study offers implications both for scholars and entrepreneurs working in and aspiring to digital entrepreneurship along with future scope of research.

Managing buyer experience in a buyer-supplier relationship in MSMEs and SMEs.

Monitoring buyer experience provides competitive advantages for suppliers as buyers explore the market before reaching a salesperson. Still, not many B2B suppliers monitor their buyers' expectations throughout their procurement journey, especially in MSMEs and SMEs. In addition, the inductive research on evaluating buyer experience in buyer-supplier relationships is minimal, leaving an unexplored research area. This study explores antecedents of buyer experience during the buyer-supplier relationship in MSMEs and SMEs. Further, we investigate the nature of the influence of extracted precursors on the buyer experience. Firstly, we obtain the possible antecedents from the literature on buyer-supplier experience and supplier selection criteria. We also establish hypotheses based on transaction cost theory, resource-based view (RBV), and information processing view. Secondly, we employ an investigation based on the social media analytics-based approach to uncover the antecedents of buyer experience and their nature of influence on MSMEs and SME suppliers. We found that buyer experience is influenced by sustainable orientation, management capabilities (such as crisis management and process innovation), and suppliers' technology capabilities (digital readiness, big data analytical capability).

Factors impacting behavioural intentions to adopt the electronic marketplace: findings from small businesses in India.

The pandemic has accelerated e-commerce adoption for both consumers and sellers. This study aims to identify factors critical to the adoption of electronic markets (EM) during the pandemic, from the perspective of small sellers in non-metro cities. The research design utilizes core dimensions of the UTAUT model and selected constructs from protection motivation theory; since business closure vulnerability also triggers electronic market adoption. A questionnaire survey method was used to collect data from 150 sellers from tier-II/III cities of India. Study results identified performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and perceived vulnerability as significant determinants of behavioural intention towards adoption of EM. The findings also explain the moderating impact of sellers' awareness of information technology and merchants' age on behavioural outcomes. Given the growing demands from such cities, the research offers insights for marketers to understand the bottlenecks and ways to motivate small sellers to get associated with EMs.

A Techno-Business Platform to Improve Customer Experience Following the Brand Crisis Recovery: A B2B Perspective.

A platform is a business model that allows business-to-business (B2B) participants to connect, interacts, create and exchange value. B2B exploits social media for brand building and branding is vulnerable to attacks, which leads to a brand crisis. B2B should characterise such crisis and respond proportionally to avert damage to social listening (SL). To diminish damages, the solution is to measure customer experience (CX), especially in a crisis situation. The study proposes an analytics-enabled customer experience (AeCX) platform for emotion detection in social media and measures CX after recovering from such crisis, by exploring recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), techno-business features (TBF), SL and perceived risk (PR). A quantitative research methodology is used on primary data collected from 302 B2B participants. The study reveals improvement in CX and the results provide evidence that social media channels and the TBF of AeCX have become important.

Security, Privacy and Risks Within Smart Cities: Literature Review and Development of a Smart City Interaction Framework.

The complex and interdependent nature of smart cities raises significant political, technical, and socioeconomic challenges for designers, integrators and organisations involved in administrating these new entities. An increasing number of studies focus on the security, privacy and risks within smart cities, highlighting the threats relating to information security and challenges for smart city infrastructure in the management and processing of personal data. This study analyses many of these challenges, offers a valuable synthesis of the relevant key literature, and develops a smart city interaction framework. The study is organised around a number of key themes within smart cities research: privacy and security of mobile devices and services; smart city infrastructure, power systems, healthcare, frameworks, algorithms and protocols to improve security and privacy, operational threats for smart cities, use and adoption of smart services by citizens, use of blockchain and use of social media. This comprehensive review provides a useful perspective on many of the key issues and offers key direction for future studies. The findings of this study can provide an informative research framework and reference point for academics and practitioners.

Advancing the Understanding of the Role of Responsible AI in the Continued Use of IoMT in Healthcare.

This paper examines the continuous intention by healthcare professionals to use the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in combination with responsible artificial intelligence (AI). Using the theory of Diffusion of Innovation (DOI), a model was developed to determine the continuous intention to use IoMT taking into account the risks and complexity involved in using AI. Data was gathered from 276 healthcare professionals through a survey questionnaire across hospitals in Bahrain. Empirical outcomes reveal nine significant relationships amongst the constructs. The findings show that despite contradictions associated with AI, continuous intention to use behaviour can be predicted during the diffusion of IoMT. This study advances the understanding of the role of responsible AI in the continued use of IoMT in healthcare and extends DOI to address the diffusion of two innovations concurrently.

Lockdown and sustainability: An effective model of information and communication technology.

Covid-19, a corona virus, has maintained its momentum in spreading among communities. In this context of social crisis, this study seeks to identify the reasons for the partial failure to fulfill the intended goal of lockdown, and to formulate an inclusive behavioral model reflecting comprehensive human behavior and social psychology. In order to answer the research questions, this study has conducted extensive interviews among individuals who were targets of the lockdown system. From this exploratory and qualitative investigation, researchers have recognized four paradigms as the key to understanding human behavior and social psychology in violating lockdown as a social isolation system during this period of crisis. The identified parameters depicting social behavior are: Derogation and Argument (SDA), Tangible Need and Deficiency (TND), Intangible Desire and Expectancy (IDE), and Evaluation of Benefit and Loss (UBL). Finally, as a comprehensive guideline, a grounded theory of the social behavior 'paradigm for lockdown violation (PLV)' is explored as the reason for the violation of the social system.

A meta-analysis based modified unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (meta-UTAUT): a review of emerging literature.

Over the past more than four decades, several theoretical models have been developed to understand the acceptance and use of information systems. Realising the dilemma in selecting the appropriate theoretical model to assess the acceptance and use of technology and considering the pattern of using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), a modified version (meta-UTAUT) has been developed based on the synthesis of results from 162 existing studies. The aim of this article is to review the emerging literature on meta-UTAUT and offer some future research recommendations. The analysis suggests that studies have started citing the relationships suggested by meta-UTAUT and researchers have reviewed it alongside other alternative models while analysing acceptance and use of technology.