社会化电子商务中卖家与非卖家信息分享行为差异

  目前社会化电子商务对用户分享行为的激励措施单一,缺乏吸引力,急需个性化的、有针对性的激励方式。社会化电子商务网站上,除了普通用户分享产品和购物信息外,一些电子商务卖家也分享产品相关信息以吸引消费者,拥有不同身份属性的用户被不同因素所激励。因此,为了设计个性化的激励方式,社会化电子商务平台需要进一步了解激励用户信息分享行为的关键因素的影响强度是否随着卖家与非卖家身份属性的不同而有所差异。         基于社会认知理论提出影响用户分享行为的关键因素,包括预期个人结果、预期社区结果和自我效能。采用目标理论,认为卖家为自我卷入型用户,非卖家为任务卷入型用户,并对卖家和非卖家不同身份用户的信息分享行为影响因素的差异建立理论研究模型。采用问卷调查法收集1 177位社会化电子商务用户的信息分享意愿及其影响因素的相关数据,运用Spss 19.0进行测量模型和t检验分析,以验证假设。         研究结果表明,结果期望和自我效能对信息分享意愿的影响强度在卖家与非卖家之间有显著的差异,卖家的分享意愿更多地受到预期个人结果和自我效能的影响,非卖家的分享意愿受到预期社区结果的影响。         研究结果拓展了社会化电子商务领域关于信息分享行为的相关研究,为后续研究提供了可能性。建议电子商务网站运营者在制定和实施激励计划时,应充分考虑用户的不同身份属性,有针对性地提供激励,以最大化地鼓励用户参与,保障网站健康发展。     

Sustainable consumption and third-party certification labels: Consumers’ perceptions and reactions

Compared with conventional products, sustainable products continue to attract relatively lower market shares. To increase customer acceptance, many sustainable products feature third-party certification labels (TPCL), yet it is unclear whether TPCL are effective and what processes and boundary conditions define their role in consumer decision making. Across three experimental studies, this research determines that sustainable products are characterized by credence qualities, associated with increased perceptions of risk, which negatively influence consumers' purchase intentions. Drawing on signaling theory, this study also shows that TPCL on sustainable products provide brand-like information cues that reduce the perceived risk of sustainable products. Finally, a third experimental study demonstrates that consumers must perceive TPCL as credible for them to reduce consumers’ risk perceptions.     

Risks of Mortality and Morbidity from Worldwide Terrorism: 1968–2004

Worldwide data on terrorist incidents between 1968 and 2004 gathered by the RAND Corporation and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) were assessed for patterns and trends in morbidity/mortality. Adjusted data analyzed involve a total of 19,828 events, 7,401 "adverse" events (each causing >or= 1 victim), and 86,568 "casualties" (injuries), of which 25,408 were fatal. Most terror-related adverse events, casualties, and deaths involved bombs and guns. Weapon-specific patterns and terror-related risk levels in Israel (IS) have differed markedly from those of all other regions combined (OR). IS had a fatal fraction of casualties about half that of OR, but has experienced relatively constant lifetime terror-related casualty risks on the order of 0.5%--a level 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more than those experienced in OR that increased approximately 100-fold over the same period. Individual event fatality has increased steadily, the median increasing from 14% to 50%. Lorenz curves obtained indicate substantial dispersion among victim/event rates: about half of all victims were caused by the top 2.5% (or 10%) of harm-ranked events in OR (or IS). Extreme values of victim/event rates were approximated fairly well by generalized Pareto models (typically used to fit to data on forest fires, sea levels, earthquakes, etc.). These results were in turn used to forecast maximum OR- and IS-specific victims/event rates through 2080, illustrating empirically-based methods that could be applied to improve strategies to assess, prevent, and manage terror-related risks and consequences.     

An immune algorithm with stochastic aging and kullback entropy for the chromatic number problem

We present a new Immune Algorithm, IMMALG, that incorporates a Stochastic Aging operator and a simple local search procedure to improve the overall performances in tackling the chromatic number problem (CNP) instances. We characterize the algorithm and set its parameters in terms of Kullback Entropy. Experiments will show that the IA we propose is very competitive with the state-of-art evolutionary algorithms.     

Competitive and Cooperative Positioning in Supply Chain Logistics Relationships*

Cooperative logistics relationships require the sharing of information, which must be enabled by the integration of disparate information systems across partners. In this article, we theorize business‐to‐business logistics relationships should be managed using cooperative and competitive postures. Based on data from 91 dyadic relationships using interorganizational information technology (IT), we find that performance gains accrue when parties share strategic information and customize IT; mutual trust enables IT customization and strategic‐information flows and equitable relationship‐specific investments positively impact IT customization, mutual trust, and performance. Among other scholarly and practical implications discussed, partners should compete on resources for IT customization and cooperate to share strategic information. Managers tend to think of relationships with firms as polar opposites and view them as entirely cooperative or entirely competitive. Our results support active balancing and understanding of both competitive and cooperative stances. Such an approach enables conditions for participation symmetry that yields greater performance gains.     

Spatial Risk Analysis of Power Systems Resilience During Extreme Events

The increased frequency of extreme events in recent years highlights the emerging need for the development of methods that could contribute to the mitigation of the impact of such events on critical infrastructures, as well as boost their resilience against them. This article proposes an online spatial risk analysis capable of providing an indication of the evolving risk of power systems regions subject to extreme events. A Severity Risk Index (SRI) with the support of real‐time monitoring assesses the impact of the extreme events on the power system resilience, with application to the effect of windstorms on transmission networks. The index considers the spatial and temporal evolution of the extreme event, system operating conditions, and the degraded system performance during the event. SRI is based on probabilistic risk by condensing the probability and impact of possible failure scenarios while the event is spatially moving across a power system. Due to the large number of possible failures during an extreme event, a scenario generation and reduction algorithm is applied in order to reduce the computation time. SRI provides the operator with a probabilistic assessment that could lead to effective resilience‐based decisions for risk mitigation. The IEEE 24‐bus Reliability Test System has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed online risk analysis, which was embedded in a sequential Monte Carlo simulation for capturing the spatiotemporal effects of extreme events and evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

The effect of cognitive diversity on the illusion of control bias in strategic decisions: An experimental investigation

By integrating cognitive diversity into debiasing literature, this paper contributes towards opening the black box of executive judgment. Based on information processing theory we investigate the role of cognitive diversity in strategic decision making. We apply a vignette-based experimental research design to examine the effect of cognitive diversity in teams on decision maker's illusion of control. The results of these experiments provide evidence for a positive influence of high cognitive diversity for debiasing judgment while similarly indicating no such effect for groups with low cognitive diversity. These findings suggest that group composition aspects can play an important role for improving judgment in decision making teams and open promising new avenues for studying debiasing in behavioral strategy research.     

Information and communications technologies, strategic asymmetry and national security

In the history of warfare, there are a number of examples of strategic uses of asymmetric technologies. Consistent with history and theory, individuals, organizations and nations have spotted opportunities to employ information and communications technologies to gain and exploit asymmetric advantages and to counter asymmetric weaknesses. This article discusses various asymmetries associated with institutions, nations and organizations that influence the ICT-national security nexus. Regulative, normative and cognitive institutions in a country provide various mechanisms that affect the nature of positive and negative asymmetries. Nations and organizations also differ in terms of their capability to assimilate ICT tools to gain positive asymmetries and deal with vulnerabilities of negative asymmetries. Integrative approaches that combine policy and technological measures at various levels are likely to make the world more secure.     

Establishing dominance between strategies with interval judgments of state probabilities

In decision-making under uncertainty, a decision-maker is required to specify, possibly with the help of decision analysts, point estimates of the probabilities of uncertain events. In this setting, it is often difficult to obtain very precise measurements of the decision-maker׳s probabilities on the states of nature particularly when little information is available to evaluate probabilities, available information is not specific enough, or we have to model the conflict case where several information sources are available.In this paper, imprecise probabilities are considered for representing the decision-maker׳s perception or past experience about the states of nature, to be specific, interval probabilities, which can be further categorized as (a) intervals of individual probabilities, (b) intervals of probability differences, and (c) intervals of ratio probabilities. We present a heuristic approach to modeling a wider range of types of probabilities as well as three types of interval probabilities. In particular, the intervals of ratio probabilities, which are widely used in the uncertain AHP context, are analyzed to find extreme points by the use of change of variables, not to mention the first two types of interval probabilities. Finally, we examine how these extreme points can be used to determine an ordering or partial ordering of the expected values of strategies.