Towards agent-based decision making in the electronic marketplace: interactive recommendation and automated negotiation

The bloom of electronic commerce has changed the whole outlook of traditional trading behavior. Through the Internet, different business entities can now easily interact with each other and then have their transactions within a minimum time. However, the advanced hardware facilities for Internet infrastructure and the entrancing Web sites are not the only decisive factors to guarantee a successful business in the electronic market. To enable the transactions, the problems that ensue during the complicated activities in electronic commerce have to be resolved. This paper presents an agent-based system to support two types of activities most related to the decision-making process in the Internet commerce. The first part of our system is for interactive recommendation; and the second part, for automated negotiation. Experiments have been conducted to evaluate their corresponding performance and the results show the efficiency of the proposed system and its potential toward the future electronic market.     

The effects of decision support and task contingencies on model formulation: A cognitive perspective

This paper takes a cognitive cost-benefit approach to understanding model formulation. Work in the behavioral decision literature on the role of effort and accuracy in choice tasks indicates that effort, or cognitive cost, is a key factor in understanding decision behavior. However, the model formulation literature does not discuss how effort interacts with other factors, such as task complexity and decision aids, to influence model formulation. In this paper, based on the work on the cost-benefit theories of cognition, we posit that two types of effort, namely that associated with building or formulating a model and that associated with utilizing that model in the solution of a problem, will influence model formulation. We then examine how the methods used in the behavioral decision making literature and the reported findings concerning the interaction of effort with task and decision aids can be utilized to understand model formulation.     

Reputation,framing strategies and user's choice of content on the Web: an empirical study

Current trends on the Internet indicate an increasing supply of content from anonymous users (e.g. blogs), which may become popular among website visitors. Motivated by these Internet trends, the present study explores the tradeoffs between the source's reputation and the way content is displayed or offered on the web page as well as the effects of both on the Internet user's choice of information services. The study builds upon behavioral economics and focuses on the interaction between background and local context effects on the individual's choice. In particular, the study investigates the tradeoffs between the source's reputation, representing the background context and the provision of enriched content (e.g. source bundled with a picture or a video) representing local context. The research involved a set of experiments based on hypothetical choice or matching tasks. The main findings indicate that there are significant interaction effects between reputation and enriched content, in the form of content related pictures, video and users' recommendations, which affect the user's choice of information services. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A conceptual model for assisting sustainable manufacturing through system dynamics

Industry is confronted with the challenge of balancing economic and financial priorities against environmental and social responsibilities. Current methods are deficient in aiding proactive engineering management decision making and elucidating broader sustainability opportunities within manufacturing systems, often resulting in reactive decisions to circumvent fines, resource costs, or simply poor public perception. While these challenges are long recognized, research has focused on increasing efficiencies toward reducing costs and environmental burdens – individually and simultaneously – with cursory integration of social metrics. This work seeks to facilitate decision making by incorporating systems thinking into sustainable manufacturing assessment and to develop an understanding of the complex interplay of factors from the operational (micro) scale through the enterprise (macro) scale. In this research, a combined approach utilizing principles of sustainable manufacturing and systems thinking (in the form of systems dynamics) is explored, which leads to development of a conceptual model being explored in ongoing research.     

A decision approach with multiple interactive qualitative objectives for product conceptual schemes based on noncooperative-cooperative game theory

Product development based on a morphological matrix involves the process of decision-based design. Although the decision process can generate conceptual schemes under the guidance of qualitative decision objectives, analysis of the interactions among the qualitative objectives is seldom considered, which can lead to unreliable optimal solutions by combining conflicting principle solutions. In addition, due to the ambiguity of the constraints among the qualitative objectives, multiple feasible schemes with equilibrium states are not considered in the concept decision stage. To solve these problems, a decision approach with multiple interactive qualitative objectives is developed for conceptual schemes based on noncooperative-cooperative game theory to consider the tradeoffs among objectives (e.g., cost, quality and operability) using discrete principle solution evaluation data. First, the morphological analysis method can obtain feasible schemes and determine the principle solutions for each subfunction. Second, the principle solutions are quantified using linguistic terms. Then, the subfunctions are categorized through cluster analysis to determine the suitable principle solution. Third, based on the clustering results, a noncooperative game decision model is constructed to identify multiple Nash equilibrium solutions that satisfy the constraints among the objectives. Fourth, a cooperative game decision model is constructed to obtain the optimal scheme as screened by the noncooperative game model. The case study proves that this approach can choose a relatively superior scheme under the existing technical conditions, thereby preventing inconsistency with the actual design expectations.     

Investigating effects of interactive signage–based stimulation for promoting behavior change

In recent years, many types of research and developments on behavior change have been conducted. The purpose of behavior change is to improve people's lifestyle pattern or to maintain the improvement for a long time with the aim to achieve a goal such as promoting health condition improvement. To achieve the foundation of a new lifestyle, it is necessary to recognize the daily life patterns of users and give triggers for behavior change to users in their daily life. To realize this, in our research, we develop an interactive signage which is able to identify and actively talk to the passing user and try to induce behavior change by sending visual and auditory stimulation. Then, we record users' reactions and upload them to the server. In this paper, we report the investigation result on users' reactions and feelings to the developed interactive signage. As a survey experiment, we set up four interactive signs on a floor of our university and asked 15 participants to carry a name tag with a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon during their daily life. Five kinds of tasks based on dialogue scenarios are posted to the approaching participants. Participants can respond to these tasks through a touchscreen. The period of the experiment was three weeks. To get the data in an ideal environment, during the first week, we asked all the participants to respond to the utterance from the interactive signage whenever they hear the voice message. During the next two weeks, participants were not asked to respond to the task definitely to get the data in the real environment. The result of the experiment showed that our proposed interactive signage could induce behavior change effectively. Based on the result of experiment, we updated our interactive signage system by adding response time (the time passed from showing contents until user respond), record function, and voice feedback function. Furthermore, to collect the data of response time that is considered as a part of users' reactions, we conducted an additional experiment with the same participants in previous experiment (except for one missing participant) for one week after updating the system. In the additional experiment, the participants were not asked to respond to the utterance definitely. As a result, it is shown that the behavior change by the proposed signage is still effectively induced. We also analyzed the relationship between the day passed and the response rate of each task type. The result shows that the number of ignorance of personal task and check task does not rise even as the time passes.