Many small businesses are in need of an administrative e-commerce content management system. Most current e-commerce packages within the open-source community or $500-$1000 price range offer advanced functionality, but most small businesses shy from these packages because of complex interfaces and feature bloat. An example of a complex, existing e-commerce implementation is OS Commerce. It is our intention to explore and design an administrative e-commerce system that is simple and easy to use, aimed primarily at small businesses. This new system will not offer the feature list available in expensive packages; instead, it will offer a capable feature list that meets most small business needs while providing a simple and intuitive user interface.
This system may be extended to accommodate any additional functionality (with plug-ins) that may be required for custom projects. Our concern is reaching a sufficient balance between features and usability. We interviewed small business owners and/or managers on Franklin Street. Some of these persons included owners and managers that currently have an e-commerce system in place; for these businesses, we will explore their current e-commerce implementation while collecting positive and negative feedback. Is their current system satisfactory? Is it intuitive? What can be improved or simplified? We also interviewed small businesses that do not have a current e-commerce implementation. Do they need an e-commerce system? Why do they not have an e-commerce system? What features would they like or need?.
Self-employed individuals are commonly defined as individuals who earn no wage or salary, but derive their income by exercising their profession or business on their own account and/or at their own risk.
The group of self-employed individuals is important both in an economic and a political sense. Their economic significance shows up in the important contribution they make to the overall employment level. In Italy the percentage of entrepreneurs, the self-employed, family workers, professionals and cooperative members in terms of total employment reached 30% in 1996; in the manufacturing sector almost 1/4 of the total employment figure for the male population is accounted for by self-employment (Eurostat, 1997).
A well-documented empirical regularity of U.S. cyclical fluctuations is the fact that the cross-sectional dispersion of economic returns such as labor income, profits, or stock returns increases significantly during economic downturns. These countercyclical changes in the variance of the distribution of returns imply that economic agents make their decisions in an environment of time-varying uncertainty.
The notion of investment irreversibility provides the traditional mechanism through which changes in uncertainty, by altering the “option value of waiting,” affect the macroeconomy; see for example, Bernanke [1983], McDonald and Siegel [1986], Dixit and Pindyck [1994], and Caballero and Pindyck [1996]. As emphasized by Abel [1983], Abel and Eberly [1999], and Veracierto [2002], however, the effect of uncertainty on aggregate investment can be theoretically ambiguous, because it depends importantly on the assumptions regarding the initial accumulation of capital, market structure, and the equilibrium setting. As a result, the literature on irreversible investment lacks a consensus regarding the effect on economic activity from fluctuations in uncertainty.
