Social media are increasingly implemented in work organizations as tools for communication among employees. As these technologies begin to proliferate across the enterprise, it is important that we develop an understanding of how they enable and constrain the communicative activities through...

Homeless Nation (HN) is a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to "democratizing technology" throughout Quebec and elsewhere in Canada. Its primary vehicle for so doing is a website which has been designed "for and by the street community," namely people living on or from the street....

Marketers are being inundated with social media metrics, but there is little consensus on what one should be measuring, let alone how these measures inform marketing strategy. This article attempts to bring clarity to the situation by adopting an integrated marketing communications perspective....

Many researchers have assumed that social media will reduce inequalities between elite politicians and those outside the political mainstream and that it will thus benefit democracy, as it circumvents the traditional media that focus too much on a few elite politicians. I test this assumption by...

We study a model of observational learning in a set of agents who are connected through a social network. The agents face identical decision problems under uncertainty, where they are not aware of the relative profitability of their alternative choices. They choose repeatedly from a common set...

Much debate exists around the impact that illegal file sharing may have on the creative industries. Similarly, opinions differ regarding whether the producers of artistic works should be forced to accept any weakening of intellectual property rights resulting from illegal file sharing, or if...

We explore how the three dimensional (3D) technologies on the Internet, implemented as virtual worlds, can be used to deliver e-service. Our aim is to study how this 3D medium differs from the traditional 2D websites and how this can be exploited to deliver online service. We set up a field...

Social media platforms have proliferated on the Internet and millions of users upload content daily. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, when infringing content is uploaded onto a social media platform, the copyright holder can issue a take down notice, and a platform that...

This thesis aims to analyse consumers’ motivation to contribute financially to a project that wants to create something new. The principle of consumers pooling their money together in order to support a specific project initiated by someone else, is refered to as crowdfunding. From a practical...

Industrial design is migrating to the virtual world, and the design patent system is migrating with it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has already granted several thousand design patents on virtual designs, patents that cover the designs of graphical user interfaces for...