There has been tremendous growth in electronic commerce over the past few years. This growth is expected to sustain momentum in the future. Hence, the Internet has become an essential tool for business and customers. However, unlike traditional retailers, it lacks key aspects of a shopping experience like interacting with customer sales people and being physically in a store. A well-designed us...

The author presents an experiment which critically examines whether current state of the art text to speech synthesisers and web based VRML style graphics can be utilised to provide a multimodal persona presence in less than ideal user conditions. Audio visual anthropomorphised representations of online agents are becoming more common and their use in commercial systems has to be examined in or...

This paper proposes a framework for building a customized comparison-shopping system in which the users are allowed to add their own shopping stores dynamically. In this framework, a shopping agent is implemented with a robust inductive learning method that automatically constructs wrappers for semi-structured online stores. During learning, strong biases assumed in many existing systems are we...

This dissertation describes an approach on how to exploit the so called paralinguistic information contained in the speech for estimating the speakers’ age and gender. The technical constraints are given by mobile speech-based dialog systems, which shall acquire user models in a non-intrusive fashion. According to the main speaker characteristics age and gender, the approach was developed under...

Current search engines can hardly cope adequately with fuzzy predicates defined by complex preferences. The biggest problem of search engines implemented with standard SQL is that SQL does not directly understand the notion of preferences. Preference SQL extends SQL by a preference model based on strict partial orders (presented in more detail in the companion paper [Kie02]), where preference q...

This article addresses the different levels of pricing strategies for an online knowledge market. Based on the best practice from Google Answers, an online knowledge market is modeled as a marketplace where consumers ask and researchers answer questions to make knowledge transactions. Consumers optimally price their questions to obtain answers, and a firm maintains the online knowledge market b...

E-commerce has boosted in the last decades because of achievements information and telecommunications technology along with changes society life-style. More recently, groceries online purchase (or e-grocery), also prevailed as a way making weekly shopping, particularly, one including fresh vegetables fruit. Furthermore, this type virtual shopping supermarkets is gaining importance most efficien...

Immigrants gaining economic security tend to reinforce—not relinquish—their ethnic identification [Halter M. Shopping for identity: the marketing of ethnicity. New York: Schoken Books, 2000. p. 256.]. Shopping is one avenue where people affirm themselves. Mall shopping has become an expression of personal values. In this research, the authors investigate shopping values [J. Consum. Res. 20 (199...

The decline of shopping streets and the rise of shopping malls have been major trends in European retailing for decades. So far, research has failed to investigate this shift of agglomeration format (AF) patronage from a marketing perspective, including the consumers’ point of view. This paper presents a theoretical comparison of generic similarities and conceptual differences between shopping ...

This paper discusses and empirically evaluates the relevance of shopping-related logistics for consumers of store-based retail formats. Based on a literature review a conceptual model was developed and subsequently tested using a survey of more than six hundred consumers in the grocery retail sector. Respondents were those primarily responsible for grocery shopping in their households located i...