Assistive technology has become one of the most powerful tools in assisting people with disabilities fight for social equality both in Puerto Rico as well as in other cities worldwide. In spite of this, the availability of assistive technology equipment does not constitute reason enough for people with disabilities to have all the technology resources for making them independent and productive ...

Widely explored in literature, yet it is unclear which food quality cues consumers find most relevant. The increasing consumers’ concern for sustainability aspects their buying decisions warrants special attention to environmental-social as indicators. Consequently, this study explores consumer evaluation of and highlights the role evaluation. A cross-national perspective was adopted, using a s...

Received: 22 August 2008 Revised: 29 August 2009 Accepted: 3 September 2009 Online publication date: 11 February 2010 Abstract Consumers’ conceptions of a market’s institutional logic affect mechanisms of firm–consumer relationships, but are generally neglected in comparative studies of international marketing. This study bridges institutional and relationship marketing theories to examine two ...

While the growth of business-to-consumer electronic commerce seems phenomenal in recent years, several studies suggest that a large number of individuals using the Internet have serious privacy concerns, and that winning public trust is the primary hurdle to continued growth in e-commerce. This research investigated the relative importance, when purchasing goods and services over the Web, of fo...

One crucial decision firms or government agencies must make is the selection of the alternatives, e.g., the characteristics and/or the number of products, to offer to consumers or citizens. The selection of the set of alternatives to offer should not only take into account the potential preferences of the consumers and firms, but also the evaluation costs of the economic agents. This may lead t...

In this paper we derive and apply a product evaluation process that can be used by software consumers or developers to evaluate and select products or off-the-shelf components without the need for a predefined requirements list. The process consists of eight phases and offers a number of advantages: it needs no requirements list, much of the information generated can be reused, it provides a me...

Introduction "Long long ago, when wishing still could lead to something, there lived a king whose daughters all were beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, who has seen so many things, simply marveled every time it shone on her face." (Grimms' Fairy Tales, No.1, The Frog King) From this brief snippet of a fairy tale and its title, we already know and understand much o...