A Next Generation Multimedia Call Center for Internet Commerce: IMC

Human assistance, as well as automated service, is necessary for providing more convenient services to customers on the Internet-based commerce system. Call centers have been typically human-based service systems. However, the services of existing public switched telephone network-based call centers are not enough to meet the needs of customers on the Internet. Most of them have been designed without considering the interaction involved in shopping on the Internet. In our research, we design a call center named IMC (Internet-based multimedia call center) that can be integrated with an Internet shopping mall. It contains 2 parts: an Internet multimedia dialogue system and a human agent assisting system. The Internet multimedia dialogue system is an Internet and multimedia version of the interactive voice response service of computer telephony integration-based call centers because it provides access to the multimedia Web page along with the recorded voice explanation through the Internet. The human agent assisting system aims to select the most appropriate human agents in the call center and support them in providing high-quality individualized information for each customer. IMC is a real-time, human-embedded system that can provide high-quality services cost-effectively for Internet commerce.     

The Impact of Personality Variables,Prior Experience,and Training on Sales Agents' Internet Utilization and Performance

ABSTRACT

Emerging literature on the impact of the Internet on business-to-business (B2B) marketing has primarily focused on examining this issue from the perspective of manufacturers and buyers. This study focuses on the sales agent, a third prominent actor in B2B markets, and tests a conceptual model that relates a sales agent's personality, demographic, and user-situational constructs to that sales agent's Internet utilization for selling activities. Further, the model tested in this study relates a sales agent's Internet utilization to perceived sales performance. Findings in this study indicate that internal locus of control, learning orientation, and sales related Internet training relate positively to a sales agent's Internet utilization, and that a sales agent's age relates negatively to Internet utilization. Further, the results support a positive relationship between a sales agent's Internet utilization and sales performance. This study emphasizes that the Internet can be a productive tool for sales agents. The implications of the results of this study for sales agents with respect to training and recruitment are discussed and avenues for future research are suggested.     

Inductive Regression Tree and Genetic Programming Techniques for Learning User Web Search Preferences

Most Web search engines determine the relevancy of Web pages based on query terms, and a few content filtering applications allow consumers to block objectionable material. However, not many Web search engines and content filtering applications learn the user preferences over time. In this study, we proposed two machine-learning approaches that can be used to learn consumer preferences to identify documents that are most relevant to the consumer. We test the proposed machine learning approaches on a few simulated data sets. The results of our study illustrate that data mining approaches can be used to design intelligent adaptive agents that can select the relevant Web pages, given query terms, for the user.     

A‐pool: An agent‐oriented open system shell for distributed decision process modeling

An agent‐oriented open system shell, A‐Pool, for distributed decision process modeling in the Internet domain is presented. Unlike most decision support systems, A‐Pool provides a testbed for modeling and understanding the cognitive aspects of distributed decision processes themselves rather than for domain‐specific problem solving. This is achieved with a pool of virtual agents and a pool of cognitive maps of the agents at each A‐Pool node. The virtual agent scheme extends object‐oriented programming to the Internet domain and supports different communication and collaboration protocols with virtual communities, virtual sessions, and virtual conferences. The cognitive map scheme supports perspective sharing and various conflict integration and resolution strategies through cognitive map composition, derivation, and focus generation. Thus each A‐Pool node provides an architecture for modeling interdependencies and for ensuring global coherence; in addition, the communication is asynchronous and the control is distributed, allowing a large degree of autonomy and the examination of various thoughts and social protocols involved in strategic planning in an open system environment. Basic ideas are illustrated with a running example.     

Insurance Sales Agents and the Internet: The Relationship Between Opinion Leadership,Subjective Knowledge,and Internet Attitudes

The Internet offers a number of opportunities and threats for insurance sales agents. On the one hand, the Internet provides opportunities to communicate with and reach customers. However, it also introduces the risk of losing business to insurance providers or competitors. These opportunities and threats create a need to understand the characteristics that may affect the views of insurance agents regarding the Internet and its impact on their business. This paper compares insurance sales agents' scores on an opinion leadership scale (Flynn, Goldsmith, and Eastman 1996) and subjective knowledge scale (Flynn and Goldsmith 1999) with their attitudes toward the Internet. The results suggest that those insurance sales agents with a higher level of subjective knowledge about the Internet are more likely to be opinion leaders about the Internet. Both opinion leaders and those with higher levels of subjective knowledge have a more positive attitude about the Internet, but only the relationship with opinion leadership is significant. In addition, those insurance sales agents who are younger (than the approximate mean age of 46 years old) are more likely to be opinion leaders and have a higher level of subjective knowledge of the Internet. The results suggest that perceived knowledge and the willingness to discuss the Internet with others impact one's attitude of it, and that the younger insurance agents will play a leading role in how the Internet will be used.     

The Connectedness Decision Paradigm: Group Decision, Negotiation and Leadership in World Problems

We discuss connectedness, a dynamic unity relation experience. The Connectedness Decision Paradigm (CDP) is a formal, general systems-spirituality framework, technology-supported, for group decision and negotiation (GDN) and leadership in making “right” decisions. A right problem/solution is validated by a spiritual rationality validation test involving connectedness. A participant (agent) may experience connectedness with purposes (intended results). Purposes for which there is reciprocated (shared) purpose connectedness across agents constitute common ground for these agents. A basic idea is to identify and expand such common ground. Even in difficult problem solving, as with polarization, where there seems to be little or no common ground, a priori there is always the ultimate purpose common ground of connectedness with One (spirituality) from which other common ground as connectedness with the “other” can arise. Common ground can lead to additional common ground and to an agreed problem solution—itself constituting common ground—that can be tested for rightness. Our focus here is on human agents considered as spiritual purposeful complex adaptive systems in multiagent environments. The ideas are applicable to other agents with lesser or greater capabilities than humans according to their capabilities. Expanding earlier work, this commentary on CDP is also based on GDN 2012, 2013 meeting remarks by the author, as well as on a lecture, “Hope on the Edge of Chaos: The New Connectedness Paradigm in World Affairs”, Hamilton Hall, Salem, Massachusetts, February 2012. In presenting CDP, this commentary is also a call for problem solving frameworks for GDN and leadership, and solutions to world problems.     

Intelligent Cyber Logistics Using Reverse Auction in Electronic Commerce

In electronic markets, customers can purchase products online. In addition, the seller or an Internet shopping mall has to deliver the products to the buyers. Transportation agencies can be chosen to deliver the products from an Internet shopping mall. Much research about efficient and automatic delivery scheduling has been carried out on delivery-ordering. By and large, transportation agencies need to maintain not only a cooperative relationship but also a competitive relationship among themselves to meet with customers' preferences for their purchases. This article suggests an intelligent, cyber-logistic framework as a multiagent system and presents designs for an intelligent software-agent structure to maintain this cooperative and competitive relationship. This intelligent cyber-logistic system consists of shopping mall agents, a broker agent, and delivery and scheduling agents. These components, based on the concept of reverse auction, lead to improvement in the overall system efficiency as well as increased profits for each transportation company. Traditionally, in researching vehicle routing problems (VRP), the cooperative and competitive relationships among the transportation companies have not been addressed. However, in this article, we have addressed these issues. We also suggest the reverse method of auction, which solves VRP for their own trucks to provide the transportation of goods for the shopping malls. After finding their own solution, the transportation company can bid with its own cost of delivery. We have used the constraint satisfaction problems solving method to conduct truck scheduling for each transportation agency. To perform the delivery-ordering process between agents, we have defined the logisticsKQML to represent the message protocol of upper level. Finally, we have evaluated the cyber-logistic system using reverse auction by a simulation experiment and have discussed further research and drawn conclusions.     

中小企业学习代理模式与组织学习绩效关系实证研究

中小企业通过学习代理人从组织外部获取知识是促进组织学习的重要途径.因此,如何通过有效学习代理模式获取组织所需要知识,如何处理企业发展过程的学习策略以提高学习绩效,成为目前研究中小企业战略的重要课题.文章从学习代理基本理论出发,分析了学习代理的内涵与构成,提出了中小企业三种学习代理模式,提出了学习代理模式与组织学习绩效的概念模型与假设,通过实证研究对假设进行了统计验证,得出了基本结论与进一步研究展望,最后建议中小企业通过学习代理有效获取知识从而提升学习绩效.     

Meta-level Coordination for Solving Distributed Negotiation Chains in Semi-cooperative Multi-agent Systems

A negotiation chain is formed when multiple related negotiations are spread over multiple agents. In order to appropriately order and structure the negotiations occurring in the chain so as to optimize the expected utility, we present an extension to a single-agent concurrent negotiation framework. This work is aimed at semi-cooperative multi-agent systems, where each agent has its own goals and works to maximize its local utility; however, the performance of each individual agent is tightly related to other agents’ cooperation and the system’s overall performance. We introduce a pre-negotiation phase that allows agents to transfer meta-level information. Using this information, the agent can improve the accuracy of its local model about how other agents would react to the negotiations. This more accurate model helps the agent in choosing a better negotiation solution for a distributed negotiation chain problem. The agent can also use this information to allocate appropriate time for each negotiation, hence to find a good ordering of all related negotiations. The experimental data show that these mechanisms improve the agents’ and the system’s overall performance significantly.     

Quality-adjusted price comparison of non-homogeneous products across Internet retailers

This study compares prices offered by multiple Internet retailers. This task is challenging because e-tailers cannot present their entire assortments to each consumer. Therefore, the quality of the product assortments presented by different e-tailers to each consumer is not directly comparable on an item-by-item basis, resulting in non-homogeneous offerings across retailers. We further consider the interaction between retailers (product information presentation format) and consumers (product information search strategies), which makes price comparisons among the retailers even more non-homogeneous. To grapple with this quality-adjusted price comparison problem for non-homogeneous products, we use a stochastic-frontier hedonic-price regression model to find the “lowest” theoretical price for a product given its characteristics. We then assess the price efficiency of the product as the ratio between this lowest price and the offered market price. This framework allows for the comparison of retailers in their ability to offer the “best deals” even when their actual assortments are not directly comparable in quality. Moreover, this framework provides Internet retailers with a relative measure of price efficiency. This helps them understand when and where they offer competitive prices to consumers. We illustrate our approach empirically in a comparison of price efficiency among three major Internet travel agents on a sample of posted itineraries and airfares. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the price efficiency of an Internet travel agent depends on the format of its website and on consumers' search strategies.     

Consumers engaged in a member-gets-member campaign: an agency perspective

In this article, the use of member-gets-member-campaigns is perceived as an agency problem: the agent (a consumer) is going to take some action on the principal's behalf (a manufacturer). However, before the principal decides to engage the agent in their member-gets-member campaign, the principal needs to know whether a particular agent has the appropriate characteristics and whether the agent will have the proper motivations to behave in accordance with the principal's goals. Moreover, the principal needs to know how the agent's ideas and behaviour can be changed. In this article, concepts from opinion leadership, social network theory and attitude research are used to test and evaluate the characteristics of the agent, who voluntarily participated in a member-gets-member campaign of a large producer of several brands of dog food. The outcomes show that agents that participate in the member-gets-member campaigns have characteristics which might be desirable for the manufacturer: these agents are opinion leaders and have a positive brand attitude. To some extent, these agents also ask permission from the consumer whether they are allowed to make them members and seek membership from people with whom they have close ties. The results also show that the agents positively respond to incentives used by the manufacturer. In general, the agents are not motivated to oversell the membership to the consumers.     

A New Kind of Marketing: Creating Micro-Niches Using Resonance Marketing

ABSTRACT

Marketing has been dramatically changed by the Internet, the old rules do not apply. The Web allows companies to create products using micro-segmentation for target markets that are extremely small. Firms that want to be successful have to learn about resonance marketing. Resonance marketing used in conjunction with cause marketing and/or multicultural marketing can help a company find new market niches, charge premium prices. It can also be of great value to those interested in starting a small business.     

个人保险代理人声誉激励机制分析与设计思路——基于重复博弈视角

在重复博弈下,声誉激励机制将对个人保险代理人的诚信经营行为产生积极的激励作用,但声誉激励作用的发挥有严格的前提条件。在我国目前个人保险代理人声誉激励机制弱化甚至缺失的状况下,要通过减少个人保险代理人的流动性、建立个人保险代理人声誉等级制度、培育完善的个人保险代理人市场等措施建立完善的个人保险代理人声誉激励机制,有效地缓解信息不对称条件下日益严重的个人保险代理人道德风险问题。     

数字营销进化论

互联网和其他数字媒体提供了前所未有的可能性,使得企业可以精准地定位目标人群,然而企业的营销人员也发现,要想利用直接触达微利基市场、甚至可以一对一地触达消费者的这一特性,远比使用传统媒体有更多的事情需要学习。     

It Don't Come Easy: Overcoming Obstacles to Technology Use Within a Resistant Consumer Group

To identify ways in which resistance can be overcome and technology's potential realized, we study acceptance and use of a specific technology, the Internet, by a specific resistant group, older consumers. Using interviews and a survey of consumers who are over 65 years old, we discover that curiosity and proactive coping drive technology optimism, which then predicts adoption and heavier usage. Motivated seniors with technology discomfort get help to adopt and continued assistance to learn usage repertoires. Surprisingly, technology discomfort is positively rather than negatively related to usage enthusiasm. Implications are drawn for consumer groups resistant to technology.     

“I love it” or “I hate it”? The positivity effect in stated preferences for agent evaluation

Consumers often interact with agents to obtain advice about products and services. A consumer’s evaluation of an agent as a source of personalized advice depends, in part, on the extent to which the consumer believes the agent knows and shares her tastes. In this research, we show a positivity effect in the agent evaluation process, whereby consumers perceive alternatives they love (compared to hate) to be more informative to agents about their tastes, and hence more diagnostic to agents for predicting their future evaluations. Further, we show that this positivity effect is moderated by the agent’s level of agreement with the consumer, and is driven by the greater accessibility of information about loved, compared to hated, alternatives. We discuss the implications of these results for interpersonal judgments and agent choice.     

Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms—such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis—to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm's reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don’t understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities.     

Applying game theory to automated negotiation

With existing technology, it is already possible for personal agents to schedule meetings for their users, to write the small print of an agreement, and for agents to search the Internet for the cheapest price. But serious negotiation cranks the difficulty of the problem up several notches. In this paper, we review what game theory has to offer in the light of experience gained in programming automated agents within the ADEPT (Advance Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project, which is currently being used by British Telecom for some purposes. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Planning to please: Following another agent's intended plan

In this article we analyze a particular model of control among intelligent agents, that ofnon-absolute control. Non-absolute control involves a “supervisor” agent that issues orders to a “subordinate” agent. An example might be a human agent on Earth directing the activities of a Mars-based semi-autonomous vehicle. Both agents operate with essentially the same goals. The subordinate agent, however, is assumed to have access to some information that the supervisor does not have. The agent is thus expected to exercise its judgment in following orders (i.e., following the true intent of the supervisor, to the best of its ability). After presenting our model, we discuss the planning problem: how would a subordinate agent choose among alternative plans? Our solutions focus on evaluating the distance between candidate plans, and is appropriate to any scenario in which one agent wants to follow (as much as possible) another agent's plan.     

Trust considerations on attitudes towards online purchasing: The moderating effect of privacy and security concerns

The research examines the relationships between three common trust considerations (vendor, Internet and third parties) and attitudes towards online purchasing. The study incorporates privacy and security concerns as a moderating variable and finds that these relationships vary depending on the level of concerns a consumer has when purchasing online. The study suggests that “fears” surrounding the Internet as a place to do business still hinder the use of it for e-commerce purposes, but that the presence of a reputable agent might in some manner mitigate this risk. In the context of business to consumer relationships trust in the vendor is important for the consumer to accept any risk associated with a transaction. Theoretical implications for online customer behavior theory are also discussed.