The decision game: a serious game approach to understanding environmental risk management decisions

Abstract

Here we describe the implementation of an experimental research tool called the Decision Game that we used to collect data on household flood risk management decisions. Participants using this tool play an interactive game that involves making household decisions about place of residence and a variety of household expenditures, including spending on flood insurance and private flood risk mitigation. Participants also answer survey questions before and after playing the game; the pre-game survey collected demographic information, and the post-game survey collected information about participant experiences with flooding and flood mitigation. Online and face-to-face participants showed similar engagement with the experiment, and most participants appeared to have made deliberate and considered decisions about risk mitigation. Online study participants had similar responses to those who participated in person, although face-to-face participants seemed slightly more likely to mitigate against risk. Overall, participants in this research were younger, more educated and more likely to rent a home than the average Canadian. Serious games may be useful for augmenting existing data gathering strategies used in understanding environmental decision making, particularly for rare catastrophic events for which stated preference surveys may be less informative. Serious games allow for sharing a mixture of information with study participants, including maps, video clips, text and even immersive 3D experiences, and can be administered online to increase participation levels. Future research will consider longer duration online experiments and more immersive interaction frameworks.     

学前儿童平板电脑导航按钮交互设计评价研究

学前儿童平板电脑导航按钮交互设计评价指标的建立,有利于交互设计在学前儿童平板电脑中的优化和改良.从学前儿童体验视角出发,创建平板电脑导航按钮交互设计的多维度多层次评价指标,该方法以创建多维度多层次评价指标为基础,根据D-S证据理论设计评价指标的决策矩阵,利用层次分析法确定评价指标权重.最后以优学派儿童平板电脑"童话故事"界面导航按钮8个优化设计方案对比分析与评价为例,验证了所提出方法的合理性与有效性.     

IOS移动平台互动绘本的设计

绘本随着计算机软硬件的发展和无线网络技术的进步，正由纸质图书形式向数字化屏式过渡，其自身可以根据故事的画面与技术手段相结合，从而产生新的绘本形态---互动绘本。在这种应用背景的推动下，指出纸质绘本的优缺点，调查分析IOS移动平台互动绘本发展的前景与优势，从研究互动绘本的设计特征着手，探讨互动绘本设计在数字技术支撑下的设计要素与设计方法，可对互动绘本的设计与发展有所借鉴，并实现其艺术价值与市场应用价值。     

Information asymmetry in the innovation adoption decision of tourism and hospitality SMEs in emerging markets: A mixed-method analysis

Investment decisions, particularly innovation adoption decisions, can sustain long-term viability of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). However, information asymmetry could limit the ability of SME management to make informed innovation adoption decisions. Even though information asymmetry is a multidimensional construct, prior literature has only focused on financial information asymmetry in such decisions. Therefore, the current study fills the research gap by conducting two separate studies: one analyzes World Bank Group data from 1250 observations in 11 emerging markets, and the other interviews eight SME owners and managers. The findings of the mixed-method studies suggest that financial, business regulation, and court information asymmetry decrease the likelihood of SMEs' product innovation adoption. The study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of information asymmetry in SMEs’ decision-making rooted in agency theory. Moreover, its methodological contribution lies in measuring information asymmetry with micro-level data.     

Building internal business scenarios based on real data from a performance measurement system

This paper presents a new methodology to build internal business scenarios from the data gathered by some key performance indicators (KPIs) defined within a performance measurement system. The application of the principal components analysis technique leads to the identification of latent relationships between KPIs that underlies some important business aspects. Further, this methodology allows to represent not only the temporal evolution of the organisation as a function of these business aspects but also the definition and determination of internal business scenarios, being therefore the source of meaningful managerial information. At the end of the paper, results of a practical application are presented and discussed, as well as their importance for the organisation from a decision making point of view.     

Convenience,Price, Product

Abstract

This study examines the factors motivating consumers' purchases of specialty food and beverage products via the Internet. While convenience is often cited as a motivating factor, price and product selection have also been identified. This study considered convenience in terms of time, space, and effort. It also identifies several specific sub-categories for price and products. Among respondents who had made a recent online purchase, convenience-related issues were most frequently cited as being relevant to the purchase decision. Product-related factors were important for nearly one-third of the respondents. Price was of relatively little importance.     

Exploring the core factors of online purchase decisions by building an E-Commerce network evolution model

With the continuous development of the Internet and information technology, online shopping has become a popular purchase mode. The in-depth analysis of consumer decision-making in online shopping is an important issue. Our purpose is to study how the factors of the shopping web pages corporately affect online purchase decisions and determine which are the core factors that affect consumer purchase decisions. We screen the influencing factors on the shopping webpage and deploy e-commerce network evolution based on various weight combinations of these factors to generate sales distributions of online products. By comparing these simulated sales distributions to the real data, the optimal weight of each factor is obtained. The results show that sales volume and the number of high-quality negative comments are the most important factors influencing consumers' decision-making, the number of comments and the number of comments with pictures are relatively minor factors, store type and video presentation of the products have the least impact. The optimal simulated sales distribution is very close to the real case and verifies that the introduced network evolution technology is applicable. The proposed model can be used as a uniform evaluation platform for correlational study, which is an important link in the purchase research chain.     

The effect of shopping goals and in-store mobile device use on purchase outcomes in brick-and-mortar stores

The present study examines the effect of using a mobile device on search and evaluation by a shopper in a brick-and-mortar store. A conceptual model that proposes inter-relationships between shopping goals, the amount and type of in-store mobile device use, and purchase outcomes is developed. Data from a national quota sample of 1034 mobile shoppers is used to test hypotheses derived from the proposed model. The findings provide several new insights into the impact of in-store mobile device use on the consumer decision journey in a brick-and-mortar store. Depending upon the shopping goals of the consumer, the use of a mobile device by shoppers in a brick-and-mortar store can either decrease or increase search, lead to more deferred purchases or in-store-now purchases, and more online or physical store purchases. The study is among the first to model the pathway to purchase for mobile device assisted shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores.     

Uniform or spatially differentiated? Pricing Strategies for Information Goods under simultaneous and sequential decision-making in multi-market context

Product pricing has been one of the central issues in the field of marketing and consumer services for managers and researchers alike. However, pricing of information goods has not been paid much attention in literature. For information goods the marginal costs of production and transportation of information goods (online movies, video games, etc.) is almost zero. Hence, the pricing decisions need to be thought of purely in competitive profit maximizing terms. This paper proposes mechanisms for managers to evaluate and base their pricing decisions on rational frameworks that takes into account various situations when they enter a new market and when they are incumbent in a new market. This paper addresses the research gap of spatially differentiated pricing strategy for information goods that has not been studied in literature so far. We create stylized theoretical models under both, sequential and simultaneous decision-making conditions. We determine the equilibrium price and the equilibrium profit for the two firms for each of the four possible scenarios based on their pricing strategies. Our analysis reveals that the dominance of one pricing strategy over the other depends on product differentiation factor capturing joint effect of the product substitutability and consumer's price sensitivity under sequential decision making and the market size along with consumer's price sensitivity for simultaneous decision making. As an extension, we propose a generalized model demonstrating the uniform and spatially differentiated pricing strategies of the firms under simultaneous and sequential selection for multiple domestic and international markets.