Consumers increasingly obtain direct consultations from experts, thanks to the prevalent use of Information Technology and the Internet. Motivated by the online consultation practices of reputed institutions such as Harvard University hospitals and the Cleveland Clinic, we develop a duopoly model and study the strategies of high-quality experts in business-to-consumer consultation markets. Expe...

Today very popular Web portal sites, social networking sites, online media sites, commerce sites, etc., provide platforms for millions of visitors to visit daily and express their opinions on a wide variety of subjects. The site operators strive to increase the number of visitors, and the visitors often make use of several means at their disposal to participate in the formation of collective op...

Recently, Hummel and Landy proposed a variation on the Dempster/Shafer theory of evidence that tracks only the first and second order statistics of the opinions of sets of experts. This extension permits the tracking of statistics of probabilistic opinions, however, as opposed to tracking merely Boolean opinions (or possibilities within the "frame of discernment"). Both the Dempster/Shafer form...

Telehealth interventions (TI) are broadly defined as the use of information and communication technologies to deliver information, diagnosis, or educational services. While TI was previously just a choice support children with special needs their families, they have become necessity nowadays when performing face-to-face education training practices almost impossible. The current qualitative stu...

The complexity of the environment demands a well-constructed composite environmental index (CEI) to provide a useful tool to draw attention to environmental conditions and trends for policy purposes. Among the common difficulties in constructing a proper CEI are uncertainties due to the selection of the most representative underlying variables or indicators. A degree of uncertainty accompanies ...