EM – Electronic Markets 20
fies the identity of business parties in e-
commerce. Digital certification fosters trust
between buyers and sellers. Thus this
proves that building a third party registry
is necessary to solve the most serious prob-
lem that South Korean e-commerce faces
which is lack of trust.
Who will be the third party registry, the
government or private industry? The CA
in Japan is established by the Japanese
government. And even in US, EFT (Elec-
tronic Fund Transfer) which is a method
for transferring money automatically by
computer during e-commerce transactions
is run by the Automated Clearing House
which is closely associated with the Fed-
eral Reserve Bank of US (Lieberman, 1997).
Thus we propose that the third party reg-
istry should be the government, especially
for South Korea where a few conglomer-
ates take up most of businesses. In South
Korea, people’s trust in those big busi-
nesses is much lower than in the govern-
ment particularly since the economic tur-
moil of 1997. When the most important
thing while doing e-commerce is trust, the
government of South Korea is more trust-
able than private industry. Thus in South
Korea where the whole IT infrastructure
building was a government project, it
would be more beneficial to have a gov-
ernment agency that functions as the third
party registry of all e-contracts in
cyberspace in Korea.
Conclusion
Electronic negotiation through e-mail
proves that e-mail can be an information
rich medium through which people can
negotiate not just price but other complex
items such as subscription terms. Elec-
tronic negotiation can be automated by
implementing the Intelligent NSS which
understands e-mail messages and negoti-
ate with the customer using case-based
reasoning.
Electronic contract through e-mail and
web sites needs a third party registry which
can verify and confirm the contract. But
in a country such as South Korea where
the national IT infrastructure is not as well
developed as in developed countries such
as the US, an organization like the