Business Ethics and the Electronic Economy

The internet and the electronic economy are a technological revolution whose secular importance is apparent. The internet eliminates the temporal and spatial constraints on the exchange of information. It changes deeply the world of production and of labour. It transforms the exchange relationships between producers and consumers as well as between the suppliers within the supply-chain. The electronic economy is able to generate more accurate con sumer profiles and, therefore, a more powerful and effective marketing di rected to the individual consumer. There is no industry that is not undergoing thorough changes caused by the internet. The volume at hand gives an analysis of the internet revolution. It covers questions reaching form the highly controversial thesis of the end of property rights in the internet caused by the non-rivalry of the "consumption" of in formation to questions regarding the repercussions of the internet on our understanding of the human person. Technological changes like the introduction of the electronic economy pose the question of how to handle it and how to manage reasonably its ethi cal problems and dilemmas. The ethical problems and the business ethics of the electronic economy in the fields of production and labour, of consump tion, and in handling trust and the abuse of trust are analysed by the contribu tions from applied ethics and business ethics.

1 The Evolution of the E-Economy: Consequences for Theory Building in Economics and in the Economy. - 2 Optimizing Individual Communication Reducing Institutional Communication? The Necessity of a New Form of Business Ethics in the E-Economy Era. - 3 Changes in the Producer-Consumer Relationship in Electronic Commerce Examples from Book Publishing and Trade. - 4 The End of Consumption in Information Society. - 5 Consumer Profiles in E-Commerce: How Companies Form Identities. - 6 Virtual Reality as a Problem of the Electronic Economy. - 7 Tricksters on the Internet: eCommerce , Data Mining and the Parallel Context. - 8 Power Redistribution and Ethical Challenges in E-Commerce. - 9 Transcultural Ethics: Beyond the Electronic Economy of MTV. - 10 Consumers vs. E-Business: Who Should Pay? An Ethical Discourse on the Right to Privacy. - 11 Ethical Crisis on the Internet: the Case of Licra vs. Yahoo! . - 12 A Sketch of Consumer Ethics with Particular Emphasis on Virtual Options. - 13 Building Consumer Trust in Online Markets. - List of Authors. - Index of Names.