Unless otherwise noted, the tips are from IU's Bloomington campus. The next wave in e-commerce is digital receipts, and Raymond Burke, director of Customer Interface Research in IU's Kelley School of Business, is part of it. Burke is working with the Association for Retail Technology Standards of the National Retail Federation in advancing an XML-based standard for delivering receipts over the Internet. It enables retailers to reach each customer individually, creating a more useful and convenient medium for reaching online consumers, and ultimately, a more loyal online customer base for retailers. While Digital Receipt technology enables retailers and consumers to have greater interaction, it also enables retailers to narrow the flow of information to suit the profile of each customer.
Retail customers have a diverse set of preferences and needs.
Two IU scholars studied insider trading laws in 103 countries and examined whether the existence of such regulation lowered or raised the cost to companies of financing themselves by raising equity. As outlined in the Jan. 22 issue of The Economist , their research found that those countries which enforced their insider-trading laws had a lower cost of equity. On average, enforcing insider-trading laws reduced the cost of equity by 5 percent. It is the first-ever survey of every stock exchange worldwide regarding insider trading laws and whether these laws are enforced. Collecting the data on each market was a monumental task, and some stock exchanges were less than cooperative, but in the end the researchers obtained 100 percent participation.