This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the technical and business implications of adopting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in organizational settings. The year 2004 marked a significant shift toward adopting RFID because of mandates by large retailers and government organizations. The use of RFID technology is expected to increase rapidly in the next few years. At present, however, initial barriers against widespread adoption include standards, interoperability, costs, forward compatibility, and lack of familiarity. This paper describes basic components of an RFID system including tags, readers, and antennas and how they work together using an integrated supply chain model. Our analysis suggests that business needs to overcome human resource scarcity, security, legal and financial challenges and make informed decision regarding standards and process reengineering. The technology is not fully mature and suffers from issues of attenuation and interference. A laboratory experiment conducted by the authors shows that the middleware is not yet at a "plug-and-play" stage, which means that initial adopters need to spend considerable effort to integrate RFID into their existing business processes. Appendices contain a glossary of common RFID terms, a list of RFID vendors and detailed findings of the laboratory experiment.
In this study, we apply the uncertainty reduction theory from communication to delineate the antecedents of consumers' trust in online product reviews. We test the competing effects of information content (argument quality) and social component (perceived background similarity) on consumers' trust in reviews. We also hypothesize that the strength of the effect is moderated by consumers' involvement. To test the hypotheses, we adopted a 2 Â 2 Â 2 repeated measures experimental design. The results show that both argument quality and perceived similarity contribute to increased trust but in varying degrees. The results provide mixed support to the moderating role of involvement. While argument quality played an important role in the high involvement mode, perceived similarity explained more variance in the low involvement mode. We discuss the implications of these results for both research and practice. Statement of exclusive submission: The authors hereby assure that this manuscript neither has been published in any journal nor is currently under consideration for inclusion in any other journal, and that it will not be submitted elsewhere until JCB has completed its review process. Figure 2. Toulmin's (1958) argumentation model applied to online reviews 98 P. Racherla et al.
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