Determinants of consumers’ remanufactured products purchase intentions: Evidence from China

Previous studies have examined the main factors that influence consumer acceptance of remanufactured products based on the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). However, researchers have not yet conducted detailed studies to classify the variables of TPB. In the present research, this gap is addressed by using a TPB model which (1) differentiates attitude into experiential attitude and instrumental attitude, (2) differentiates subjective norm into normative social influence and informational social influence, and (3) differentiates perceived behavioural control into product knowledge, perceived risk, and perceived inconvenience. In this study, past experience and the interaction effect of attitude and subjective norm are also considered. The research results suggest that experiential and instrumental attitude, normative and informational social influence, product knowledge, and past experience are positive determinants of consumers’ purchase intentions toward remanufactured products, while perceived inconvenience and perceived risk are negative determinants. Furthermore, the findings also suggest that the interaction effects of experiential attitude and subjective norms positively affect purchase intentions, whereas the interaction effects of instrumental attitude and subjective norms have a negative effect. Based on the research conclusions, this study concludes with a discussion of proposals for improving consumers’ remanufactured product purchase intentions, implications for product design and manufacturing, limitations of the current study, and recommendations for further research.     

Exploring adoption of augmented reality smart glasses: Applications in the medical industry

This study explores the use of augmented reality smart glasses (ARSGs) by physicians and their adoption of these products in the Turkish medical industry. Google Glass was used as a demonstrative example for the introduction of ARSGs. We proposed an exploratory model based on the technology acceptance model by Davis. Exogenous factors in the model were defined by performing semi-structured in-depth interviews, along with the use of an expert panel in addition to the technology adoption literature. The framework was tested by means of a field study, data was collected via an Internet survey, and path analysis was used. The results indicate that there were a number of factors to be considered in order to understand ARSG adoption by physicians. Usefulness was influenced by ease of use, compatibility, ease of reminding, and speech recognition, while ease of use was affected by ease of learning, ease of medical education, external influence, and privacy. Privacy was the only negative factor that reduced the perceived ease of use, and was found to indirectly create a negative attitude. Compatibility emerged as the most significant external factor for usefulness. Developers of ARSGs should pay attention to healthcare-specific requirements for improved utilization and more extensive adoption of ARSGs in healthcare settings. In particular, they should focus on how to increase the compatibility of ARSGs. Further research needs to be conducted to explain the adoption intention of physicians.     

A new reality: Exploring continuance intention to use mobile augmented reality for entertainment purposes

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that combines virtual objects with the real world. In recent years, the rapid development of smartphones has provided a suitable environment for AR technology. This study aims to explore the continuance intention to utilize AR mobile entertainment applications, using the decomposed theory of planned behavior. The research hypotheses were verified using structural equation modeling, which revealed that: (1) telepresence, perceived mobility, perceived enjoyment, and perceived connectedness exert a positive effect on users' attitude toward AR mobile apps; nostalgia is the only factor not to do so; (2) perceived critical mass has a significant positive impact on subjective norms, whereas peer influence does not; (3) self-efficacy has a significant positive influence on perceived behavioral control but facilitating conditions does not; and (4) users' attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control all have significant positive impacts on users’ intention to continue to use the technology.     

Effects of major-road vehicle speed and driver age and gender on left-turn gap acceptance

Because the driver's gap-acceptance maneuver is a complex and risky driving behavior, it is a highly concerned topic for traffic safety and operation. Previous studies have mainly focused on the driver's gap acceptance decision itself but did not pay attention to the maneuver process and driving behaviors. Using a driving simulator experiment for left-turn gap acceptance at a stop-controlled intersection, this study evaluated the effects of major traffic speed and driver age and gender on gap acceptance behaviors. The experiment results illustrate relationships among drivers' left-turn gap decision, driver's acceleration rate, steering action, and the influence of the gap-acceptance maneuver on the vehicles in the major traffic stream. The experiment results identified an association between high crash risk and high traffic speed at stop-controlled intersections. The older drivers, especially older female drivers, displayed a conservative driving attitude as a compensation for reduced driving ability, but also showed to be the most vulnerable group for the relatively complex driving maneuvers.     

Controversial science-based technology public attitude formation and regulation in comparative perspective: The state construction of policy alternatives in Asia

Past studies of the success of regulation and other forms of state and private sector activity in areas of new technologies have argued these are dependent on a number of factors, one of which is the reaction of public opinion to the innovation concerned. Most existing theories of public acceptance of controversial science-based products are based largely on European and North American case studies and are divided between those which focus on public and consumer knowledge of the science involved – the ‘deficit model’ - and those which stress either the need for trust in regulatory and private sector actors involved in new product development and regulation, or the significance of individual cultural norms on attitude formation. This paper examines two cases of the introduction of controversial science in Asia - wastewater recycling in Singapore and nanotechnology regulation in China in order to assess the influence of these factors in each case. Based on this comparative research, it is argued that models of public acceptance of controversial science-based products must also take into account the state’s ability to define the range of public debate as a key overall parameter of public attitude formation.     

The development of ‘green’ airports: Which factors influence willingness to pay for sustainability and intention to act? A structural and mediation model analysis

The study's purpose was to determine which factors influence a consumer's willingness to pay for sustainability and their intention to take action against climate change related to airports. An expanding body of literature relates to assessing whether consumers would be willing to pay for these ‘green’ practices in the aviation industry, such as biofuels or sustainable airport construction/renovations. While previous studies have experimentally examined these scenarios, we are aware of no prior research that has proposed and assessed a structural model related to determining which factors influence consumer's perspectives on ‘green’ airports. A sample of 722 eligible participants from the United States completed the study using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We examined future time perspective, affect toward climate change, the perceived value of sustainability, and perceptions of climate change on the endogenous variables of willingness to pay for sustainability and intentions to take action against climate change. Six of the seven hypotheses proposed were supported. Affect, perceived value, and perceptions of climate change were all significant and positively related to willingness to pay, which was positively associated with intention to act. Two non-hypothesized paths, between perceived value and future time perspective, were also positively related to intention to act. The model explained 42% of the variance in willingness to pay and 66% in intention to act. These findings offer insights into what factors significantly influence these relationships as they relate to airports. Perceived value and perceptions of climate change had the largest effect sizes in the model and were significantly related to willingness to pay and intentions to act.     

Emotions and caring mediate the relationship between knowledge of sustainability and willingness to pay for greener aviation

Sustainable initiatives continue to be a major focus of worldwide industries, and this has also become relevant within the aviation industry. As the move to incorporate and switch to sustainable practices increases, the question becomes whether passengers will be willing to pay more for sustainable aviation. Building upon prior research, the purpose of the current study was to identify which factors act as significant mediators between a participant's general knowledge of sustainability, their aviation-specific knowledge of sustainability, and their willingness to pay for greener aviation. Two significant mediators, caring and happiness, were found to explain the relationship between both independent variables and willingness to pay. These findings support the idea that the relationship felt toward sustainability is one that is largely connected through and explained by emotions and how much people care about sustainability. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings and the practical applications of these results.     

港澳台个人信息保护法律法规及标准研究

本文对比研究了我国港澳台地区个人信息保护法律法规及标准体系,并分析提出值得我国大陆参考及借鉴的地方。研究表明,港澳台地区已经建立较完善的个人信息保护立法体系及监管机构,尝试制定针对性较强的规范,建立认证体系,并积极参与国际或区域的个人隐私论坛活动。鉴于我国目前个人信息泄露严重的现状,相关部门应加快立法、制定标准规范、着手构建个人信息保护体系,同时加强与国际的或区域的隐私机构的合作。     

基于网上购物情境的消费者行为对口碑影响力的影响

随着网络经济的快速发展,口碑对消费者购买决策的影响越来越重要。口碑活动作为一种以消费者为主导的信息交流渠道,它的传播者和接收者并不受到商家的直接干预。通过研究消费者对抱怨的态度,对互联网商家的态度、感知风险,以及对口碑信息的主动搜寻,探讨这些因素与口碑影响力之间的关系。研究表明：对口碑信息的主动搜寻是各变量对口碑影响力造成影响的关键因素。     

Remanufactured products purchase intentions and behaviour: Evidence from Malaysia

One of the greatest threats to widespread diffusion of closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) practices in support of consumer goods is the lack of consumer acceptance of remanufactured products. Although the preponderance of extant CLSC research historically focused on product reclamation and remanufacturing practices, consumer acceptance of remanufactured products is now receiving more attention. However, significant gaps in the literature remain to include examining actual consumer behaviour in the presence of alternative offerings. Using theory of planned behaviour and data gathered from Malaysia, this research addresses these gaps by examining how consumer attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control with regard to purchasing remanufactured products affect consumer intention to purchase remanufactured consumer electronic products. Then, actual purchase behaviour is compared with purchase intentions to determine if consumers followed through with their intentions. Findings suggest that consumers are most apt to purchase energy-efficient offerings regardless of their original intentions.     

Reliable Medical Recommendation Based on Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) methods are widely adopted by existing medical recommendation systems, which can help clinicians perform their work by seeking and recommending appropriate medical advice. However, privacy issue arises in this process as sensitive patient private data are collected by the recommendation server. Recently proposed privacy-preserving collaborative filtering methods, using computation-intensive cryptography techniques or data perturbation techniques are not appropriate in medical online service. The aim of this study is to address the privacy issues in the context of neighborhood-based CF methods by proposing a Privacy Preserving Medical Recommendation (PPMR) algorithm, which can protect patients’ treatment information and demographic information during online recommendation process without compromising recommendation accuracy and efficiency. The proposed algorithm includes two privacy preserving operations: Private Neighbor Selection and Neighborhood-based Differential Privacy Recommendation. Private Neighbor Selection is conducted on the basis of the notion of k-anonymity method, meaning that neighbors are privately selected for the target user according to his/her similarities with others. Neighborhood-based Differential Privacy Recommendation and a differential privacy mechanism are introduced in this operation to enhance the performance of recommendation. Our algorithm is evaluated using the real-world hospital EMRs dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves stable recommendation accuracy while providing comprehensive privacy for individual patients.     

Service transformation under industry 4.0: Investigating acceptance of facial recognition payment through an extended technology acceptance model

Technological development has drastically changed customers' daily lives by offering them new ways to shop. It also creates more opportunities for business to achieve sustainable success; however, both scholars and managers are still having relative difficulty in fully grasping customer behavior in terms of technology acceptance during the Industry 4.0. This study aims to investigate the possible factors that drive Chinese customers' willingness to utilize facial recognition payment. The findings showed that factors such as perceived enjoyment, facilitating conditions, personal innovativeness, coupon availability, perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived usefulness (PU), and users' attitude are main drivers of customers' decisions to use facial recognition payment. Also, we found that gender differences exist in the adoption of facial recognition payment. Facilitating conditions have stronger effects on men's attitude towards usage, while coupon availability shapes female users' perception of usefulness more powerfully. By testing the extended technology acceptance model (TAM), this study seeks to gain more insight into technological change within society. Overall, investigation of the drivers of customer intention to use facial recognition payment, and exploration of their internal relationships will fulfil theoretical requirements and lead to a better understanding of customers' technology acceptance behavior, which in turn will provide greater theoretical and practical guidance for scholars and managers.     

Large-scale App privacy governance

Recently, the problem of mobile applications (Apps) leaking users’ private information has aroused wide concern. As the number of Apps continuously increases, effective large-scale App governance is a major challenge. Currently, the government mainly filters out Apps with potential privacy problems manually. Such approach is inefficient with limited searching scope. In this regard, we propose a quantitative method to filter out problematic Apps on a large scale. We introduce Privacy Level (P-Level) to measure an App’s probability of leaking privacy. P-Level is calculated on the basis of Permission-based Privacy Value (P-Privacy) and Usage-based Privacy Value (U-Privacy). The former considers App permission setting, whereas the latter considers App usage. We first illustrate the privacy value model and computation results of both values based on real-world dataset. Subsequently, we introduce the P-Level computing model. We also define the P-Level computed on our dataset as the PL standard. We analyze the distribution of average usage and number of Apps under the levels given in the PL standard, which may provoke insights into the large-scale App governance. Through P-Privacy, U-Privacy, and P-Level, potentially problematic Apps can be filtered out efficiently, thereby making up for the shortcoming of being manual.     

Understanding the attitude and intention to use smartphone chatbots for shopping

Using the technology acceptance model and diffusion of innovations theory, this study evaluated the intention of consumers to use chatbots on smartphones for shopping. Chatbot is a relatively new technology and is expected to dominate mobile commerce and shopping applications in future. Hence, this study aimed to determine the association of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, price consciousness, perceived risk, trust, and personal innovativeness with attitude and intention to use chatbots for shopping. Respondents were asked to fill a questionnaire after using a Facebook e-commerce chatbot that was specifically created for this study. In total, 350 responses were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results indicated that attitude toward chatbots was considerably influenced by the variables perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived enjoyment, price consciousness, perceived risk, and personal innovativeness. However, intention to use was directly influenced only by trust, personal innovativeness, and attitude. Mediation analysis indicated that full mediation occurs through the attitude variable for most direct relationships. Moderation analysis by using age, gender, and prior experience with mobile shopping applications indicated considerable differences between the groups in terms of the strength of certain relationships and the mean responses between the variables.     

Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on public managers’ attitudes toward digital transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a process of digital acceleration and has likely changed the attitudes of local public managers toward information and communication technology (ICT). While this attitude change has been reasonably argued, it has not been systematically measured. This study narrows this gap by measuring the attitudes of public managers before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, this study finds that the pandemic has led public managers to be more confident in the capacity of ICT to help cities achieve their economic, social, and environmental goals and respond to challenges. Both explicit and implicit measures confirmed attitude changes. The explicit measures also indicated that the change in public managers’ attitude toward ICT was similar to their change in attitude toward scientific progress and greater than their change in attitude toward other issues that have played a major role during the pandemic, namely, climate change, citizen participation, and privacy.     

Urban drone adoption: Addressing technological,privacy and task–technology fit concerns

Cutting-edge technologies are changing the operations of urban last-mile delivery. In particular, innovative technologies, such as delivery drones, have shown promising results in commercial applications. When considered alongside the ongoing pandemic, contactless technologies have become even more important to the daily lives of consumers in highly urbanized areas. This study investigates underlying factors influencing consumers' acceptance of drone delivery in urban cities amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, a model was created by fusing the technology acceptance model, task–technology fit, and privacy calculus theory. Four hundred and fifty survey responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The findings suggested that perceived usefulness, attitude, and perceived privacy risks directly influence consumers' behavioral intentions. In addition, perceived ease of use, task characteristics, technology characteristics, task–technology fit, and privacy concerns indirectly impact consumers' behavioral intention. This study offers an insightful perspective on consumers’ perception of urban last-mile delivery drones while providing insights into urban transport planning and regulation of drone delivery services.     

The effect of conformity tendency on pedestrians’ road-crossing intentions in China: An application of the theory of planned behavior

This paper presents a survey investigating the effects of age, gender and conformity tendency on Chinese pedestrians’ intention to cross the road in potentially dangerous situations. A sample of 426 respondents completed a demographic questionnaire, a scale measuring their tendency towards social conformity, and a questionnaire based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB). This questionnaire measured people's intentions to cross the road in two different road crossing situations, their attitude towards the behavior, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, anticipated affect, moral norms, and perceived risk. The two scenarios depicted (i) a situation where the crossing was consistent with other pedestrians’ behavior (Conformity scenario) and (ii) a situation where the road crossing was inconsistent with other pedestrians (Non-Conformity scenario). Pedestrians reported greater likelihood in crossing the road when other pedestrians were crossing the road. People who showed greater tendencies towards social conformity also had stronger road crossing intentions than low conformity people for both scenarios. The predictive model explained 36% and 48% of the variance in the Non-Conformity and Conformity scenarios, respectively. Attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and perceived risk emerged as the common predictors for both situations. The results have a number of theoretical and practical implications. In particular, interventions should focus on perceptions of risk that inform road users that crossing with other pedestrians against the signal is also unsafe and prohibited, and may lead to negative outcomes.     

Spying or steering? Views of parents of young novice drivers on the use and ethics of driver-monitoring technologies

In-vehicle technologies that document driving practices have the potential to enhance the driving safety of young drivers, but their installation depends largely on their parents’ willingness and raises ethical dilemmas. This study investigated, using closed and open-ended questions, the views of 906 parents of young drivers in Israel regarding their willingness to install such a technology, and their conceptions of social norms and ethical issues associated with the technology and of factors that would encourage or discourage parents to adopt it. Most believed parents should feel morally obligated to install it. When cost was not a consideration, most said they would, and believed other parents would be willing to install the technology. Fewer (about half) expressed willingness to install it after being told about its estimated cost. Monetary cost was rated as a barrier to install it by about half. Environmental considerations were viewed as an incentive. Parents who supported the installation believed it would serve as a trigger for parent–young driver communication but those who did not thought it would erode trust in the parent–young driver relationship. Most said parents should have access to the monitoring data. Policy implications regarding issues of privacy and resources for parents are discussed.