Assessment of E-Government Portals

This research revealed the importance of public service web portals for an e-government information system. An e-government portal is interacting with its administrators, citizens, businesses and other governments helping them increase their operations performance. The authors have developed, modeled, formulated and compared an efficient assessment framework for e-government portals. In order to accomplish such task many quantitative factors and indicators were taken under consideration; also, other frameworks have been studied and compared. The authors focused on the web portals services quantity that the interested parties should use, in order to create an well designed public services’ web portal. This research provides a framework model to evaluate the basic common digital public services that a government offers to its interactive stakeholders, so that all other countries across the world can predefine weaknesses and strengths, improve existing or formulating new e-services. The importance of the assessment framework model is thoroughly explained through the results.

Understanding the Moderating Impact of Context-Awareness and Ubiquity on Mobile Government Services Adoption

The factors of context-awareness and mobile ubiquity are major components in the development and diffusion of any mobile technology-driven applications and services. Principally in the m-government development space, the issues of context-awareness and ubiquity are crucial if m-government initiatives are to be successful. The moderating effect of context-awareness and ubiquity on mobile government adoption is examined for 409 students from a Chinese University based on the Technology Acceptance Model. Using the Structural Equation Modeling technique, the results indicate that perceived ease of use (PEOU) was significantly related to intention to use, but perceived usefulness (PU) did not have a significant effect on mobile government adoption. The moderating analysis indicated that context-awareness significantly moderated the impact of PU but had no moderating effect on PEOU. Also, it was discovered that ubiquity was significant in moderating both the PEOU and PU on mobile government adoption. Policy implications and directions for future research are presented.

The Effect of Flow on Users’ Social Shopping Intention

The application of mobile technologies such as 4G has triggered social commerce development. However, due to the perceived uncertainty and risk, users may obtain a poor experience when conducting social shopping. Integrating both perspectives of social support and network externality, this research examined users’ flow experience associated with social shopping. The results indicated that both emotional support and network externality affect flow, which in turn affects identification and social shopping intention. The results imply that companies need to create a supportive climate and utilize network externality to improve users’ experience and facilitate their shopping behaviour.

Can Global, Extended, and Repeated Ransomware Attacks Overcome the User's Status Quo Bias and Cause a Switch of System?

Ransomware (RW) attacks’ effectiveness has increased causing far reaching consequences that are not fully understood. The ability to disrupt core services, the global reach, extended duration and the repetition has increased their ability to harm an organization. One aspect that needs to be understood better is the effect on the user. The user in the current environment is exposed to new technologies that might be adopted but there are also habits of using existing systems. The habits have developed over time with trust increasing in the organization in contact directly and the institutions supporting it. This research explores whether the global, extended and repeated RW attacks reduce the trust and inertia sufficiently to change long held habits in using information systems. The model tested measures the effect of the RW attack on the e-commerce status quo to evaluate if it is significant enough to overcome the user’s resistance to change.

Ways to Measure Loyalty of Service Users

The focus of this study was set on the empirical determination of the differences between the methods of measuring the loyalty of users of services. The research reviewed approaches to evaluating the loyalty of taxi service users in Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Moscow (Russia), and Novosibirsk (Russia). The goal implied the segmentation of service users depending on the patterns of conduct and giving advice on the development of loyalty programs. The novelty lies in grouping respondents by age and gender and determining the ways to measure their loyalty. The research findings imply that people under 30 tend to make a choice based on reviews of others. The study developed possible customer behavior models and options for actions depending on their satisfaction and loyalty. This matrix can be used for building a comprehensive strategy to increase the loyalty of their clients. Practical value of the study lies in the possibility of using the data obtained to model the behavior of consumers of different service types based on the proposed loyalty matrix.

Experiential Learning by Business Students on Short Term Study Tours

This study incorporates a qualitative, case study based approach to analyze the impact of a short domestic study tour on business students of a Mumbai based college. The methods for data collection were structured questionnaires, feedback forms, interviews, focus groups, and work diaries. Short and economical study tours within the country have succeeded tremendously in their objective and have provided a very high level of learning experiences. There is strong evidence of experiential learning which seem to produce a significant, almost magical, impact on students.

Aspect-Based and Multi-Level Sentiment Information Applying Contrast Dictionary

The customer feedbacks provide alternative and important sources to discover knowledge supporting the marketers and customers to make better decisions. However, the manual process to extract useful information depends on domain experts. This paper focuses on improving the performance of the automatic sentiment information extraction from customer feedbacks. The article proposes a new extraction method that consider multiple dimensions of feedback information, aspect, word, contrast, sentence or phrase, and document levels. The aspect-based sentiment extraction uses a named entity recognition technique to extract the desired aspects of a target product. The aspect-based sentiment combines with sentiment information from multiple levels of feedback contexts resulting in the fused sentiment information improves the extraction performance. We validate the effectiveness by measuring the accuracy of the sentiment and aspect recognition methods comparing with SentiStrength and Word-Count. This information gives some insights on customer satisfaction and can be applied in an alarming tool.

How KOLs Influence Consumer Purchase Intention in Short Video Platforms——Mediating Effects of Emotional Response and Virtual Touch

In recent years, Key Opinion Leader (KOL) marketing opens up a new mode of social commerce by effectively integrating social networking and marketing since it has been successfully taking advantage of KOL’s high popularity to promote products. This study expands the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model by combining the communication persuasion theory with the flow experience theory. Our model considers the characteristics of KOLs and published content features as independent variables, consumer perception as the mediating variable and consumer purchase intention as the dependent variable. This study also refines the measurement dimensions of each variable and analyzes KOL impacts on consumer purchase intention on short video platforms. After analyzing 357 valid questionnaires, we find that the variables –reputation, perceived fit, aesthetic quality and content richness have significant impacts on consumer purchase intention where virtual touch and emotional response play intermediary roles. This study provides insights into KOL marketing.

Travellers' Intentions to Use Facial Recognition Systems for Authentication in Hotels

With the rapid development of this technology, facial recognition systems have become widely adopted in recent years. The application of the facial recognition systems by the hotel industry has resulted in a novel service model, as well as in high expectations. These systems can be used to improve conventional services and can also enhance hotel security. Based on theory, this paper employs a technology acceptance model to gain a deeper understanding of how travelers' intention to use facial recognition systems for authentication is formed. This paper employed the survey method and used data from 413 subjects to develop a model yielding results with both theoretical and management implications. These results highlight the advantages and potential commercial value of facial recognition systems, and can provide useful analysis and suggestions for the hotel industry.

Evaluation on Risk Factors of Elderly Services From the Perspective of Integrated SCOR Model

Analysing and identifying the risk factors of elderly services is conducive to improving the risk management capabilities of the elderly care industry and maintaining the safety and stability of the elderly care service industry chain. Based on the integrated Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model, a risk indicator system for elderly services supply chain was established from plan, design, supply, implementation, and customer service. The DEA method with Entropy-AHP mixed constraint was introduced to deal with the weight freedom of traditional DEA method. Taking the likelihood, exposure and consequence of risk occurrence as decision variables, the risk evaluation and ranking of the indicators were carried out. According to the empirical analysis based on the data of elderly care institutions in the Pearl River Delta of China, the biggest Pareto risk factors in the first-level and second-level indicators, the risk growth and reduction ratios of the first-level indicators were obtained.