This paper examines the motivations for the construction of consumer decision tools (CDTs). CDTs are Web-based decision support systems aimed at improving the quality of consumer decisions. CDTs are useful for high involvement choices, such as car or university programme selection, where the consumer is strongly affected by the outcome. Firms will supply CDTs only when they desire informed, mut...

Previous research has found that iconic gestures (i.e., gestures that depict the actions, motions or shapes of entities) identify referents that are also lexically specified in the co-occurring speech produced by proficient speakers. This study examines whether concrete deictic gestures (i.e., gestures that point to physical entities) bear a different kind of relation to speech, and whether thi...

This paper investigates bloatware bundling and product pricing decisions of a monopolistic firm when consumers can remove the bloatware from their electronic devices after purchase. We show conditions under which it is optimal for the firm not to bundle bloatware with their products. Furthermore, we show that even if the firm can make it harder for consumers to remove bloatware, the firm is not...

The Busse-Heikes dynamical model is described in terms of relaxational and nonre-laxational dynamics. Within this dynamical picture a diverging alternating period is calculated in a reduced dynamics given by a time-dependent Hamiltonian with decreasing energy. A mean period is calculated which results from noise stabilization of a mean energy. The consideration of spatial-dependent amplitudes l...

In this paper, we  study the Arens regularity properties of module actions. We investigate some properties of topological centers of module actions ${Z}^ell_{B^{**}}(A^{**})$ and  ${Z}^ell_{A^{**}}(B^{**})$ with some conclusions in group algebras.

Let  be a local Cohen-Macaulay ring with infinite residue field,  an Cohen - Macaulay module and  an ideal of  Consider  and , respectively, the Rees Algebra and associated graded ring of , and denote by  the analytic spread of  Burch’s inequality says that  and equality holds if  is Cohen-Macaulay. Thus, in that case one can compute the depth of associated graded ring of  as  In this paper we ...

the purpose of this paper was to see whether any significant relationship exists among efl learners’ autonomy, left/right brain dominance, and reading comprehension of the academic reading and general reading modules of ielts examination. to this end, 100 female efl learners were randomly selected from those who were attending ielts preparatory courses at a language school in tehran. all partic...

Classification of heart arrhythmia is an important step in developing devices for monitoring the health of individuals. This paper proposes a three module system for classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) beats. These modules are: denoising module, feature extraction module and a classification module. In the first module the stationary wavelet transform (SWF) is used for noise reduction of ...

The evolutionarily conserved Mediator complex is required for transcription of nearly all RNA Pol II-dependent promoters, with the tail module serving to recruit Mediator to active promoters in current models. However, transcriptional dependence on tail module subunits varies in a gene-specific manner, and the generality of the tail module requirement for transcriptional activation has not been...