Teaching e-commerce to a multidisciplinary class

A semester-long e-commerce course the authors led in the spring of 1998 at The George Washington University in Wash-ington, D.C., included a Web-based market system that allowed the students to electronically buy and sell goods and services while building an infrastructure approximating real-world technical, marketing, and record-keeping performance. The students, who were from a variety of academic disciplines (see the sidebar " Course Background "), covered a range of e-commerce topics, including network infrastructure, economics, retailing, marketing and advertising on the Net, security and privacy, e-payment systems, the social effects of e-cash, legal implications, public policy, and online publishing (for a complete syllabus, see The students created a functioning online market that was the course's most remarkable and instructive feature. The market gave them firsthand experience using and creating e-commerce technologies, discovering how a market's various players really interact, and addressing the inevitable social and policy tensions. The market project was not a controlled economic experiment designed to predict real-world behavior, so we were surprised when its results mirrored the current state of real-world e-commerce as much as they did. A market involves three phases: pre-purchase deter-minations, purchase consummation, and post-purchase activities. Before a purchase can be made, a consumer searches for information about a product or service, comparison shops and negotiates the price, and then places an order with a vendor. Vendors decide how to market their products or services and inform consumers about acceptable forms of payment. During the purchase transaction, the consumer contacts a vendor to authorize payment. If the payment is in e-cash or e-tokens, the vendor contacts the issuing bank or payment service to verify that the e-cash or e-tokens received from the consumer are valid. In credit or debit transactions, the vendor contacts the payment service or bank to verify that the payment can be made, then debits or credits the accounts of the various participants. Post-purchase activities involve delivering the goods or providing the service. In the course's market, the students were also required to decide how to build the market's infrastructure, including whether to adapt existing technologies or create their own systems for paying for and buying goods and services online The students were divided into six groups, or companies , with at least one computer science student assigned to each group. One group established a bank to maintain consumer and vendor accounts and to