ROBERT SPRAGUE, University of Wyoming College of Business
Email: spraguer@uwyo.edu
MARYELLEN WELLS, Alvernia University
Email: MaryEllen.Wells@alvernia.edu

There has been a significant convergence of communications approaches on the Internet: individuals have embraced the Internet as a medium to share ideas and opinions. Contemporaneously, marketers are embracing peer promotions, sometimes stealthily, to enhance the marketing of their products. The emergence of information sharing platforms on the Internet, particularly blogs and social networking sites, has allowed buzz and stealth marketing to flourish; marketers have discovered the Internet is an excellent interactive medium to promote goods and services. This article examines legal issues associated with online buzz; particularly stealth marketing, the Federal Trade Commission’s newly revised guidelines to regulate online marketing efforts, and the obstacles the Commission may face in implementing and enforcing the guidelines. This article concludes with proposed solutions to those obstacles, with the goal that the Commission will be able to effectively regulate against deceptive online marketing efforts without unduly stifling speech on the Internet.

CHRIS WARD, University of Utah - School of Accounting and Information Systems
Email: chris.ward@business.utah.edu
PAUL J. HU, University of Utah - School of Accounting and Information Systems
Email: paul.hu@business.utah.edu
CHIH-PING WEI, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: cpwei@mx.nthu.edu.tw

Building on extant literature in innovation management and marketing, we develop a factor model for explaining firm value innovation that can be reflected in their systems project management. Our model focuses on value innovation and analyzes it from the aspect of willingness-to-cannibalize affected by firm size and inter-firm linkages. We highlight the mediating role of willingness-to-cannibalize that may reconcile the different views about the roles of firm size and inter-firm linkages in firm innovation. We test the model by conducting a survey involving 113 Taiwanese software firms. Our data show a good fit to the model and support all but two of the hypotheses it suggests. The model can explain a significant portion of the variance in value innovation as well as willingness-to-cannibalize. Our findings have several implications for systems project management that we also discuss.s.