The focus of the paper is to investigate the design of current merchant reputation systems on shopping agent websites. The study explores their roles and impacts in customer decisionmaking process, identifies their rating methodology and rating reliability. The findings will help industrial practitioners for their design of merchant reputation systems, and will benefit online shoppers and e-mer...

While Hall (1978) argues that the solution for consumption of a life-cycle model with uncertainty and isoelastic preferences evolves as a random walk in first order approximation around small income shocks, I show that it does not. First, I explain that the solution for consumption departs from a random walk because of precautionary behavior. A prudent household facing uncertainty allocates mor...

PURPOSE This research was conducted to compare supine and standing Merchant views, to observe radiographic changes of the patellofemoral joint according to weight-bearing conditions, and to evaluate correlation factors affecting patellofemoral joint indices. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty-four patients without skeletal problems were selected for this study. Patellar tilt angle, lateral patellofe...

The so-called Exclusion argument (Kim 2000; Papineau 2004) about mental causation applies one premise that is typically accepted without much discussion: the thesis of causal completeness of the physical domain (CCP). In part one I evaluate Papineau’s (2001) argument for the CCP. I argue that this argument is not satisfying and that it is incomplete. The rest of the thesis is dedicated to an al...

In this paper we describe a system that uses natural language dialogue to provide customer service for a financial domain both over the phone as well as over the Internet. Some sample transactions include checking one’s account balance, transferring money from one account to another, buying, selling, and trading stocks, etc. The system described is robust enough to handle speech recognition err...

This paper presents a model of a card payment system to address the pricing and rules that govern such systems. It evaluates the social optimality of privately set interchange fees and the adoption of a rule by payment systems to prevent merchants surcharging for card transactions using two extremes of merchant pricing—monopolistic pricing and perfect competition. Both types of merchant pricing...

Inevitably, there is a tension between the provision of services in a market society and the management of crime risks in both public and private sectors. As central media of exchange in global networks, credit, debit and charge cards can never avoid the risk of crime entirely: the primary goals of corporations are profit maximisation rather than maximum crime reduction. There will always be so...

BACKGROUND Over 2300 merchant seafarers are currently employed on board UK Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) ships. However, little is known about work related mortality among these seafarers, and whether it is lower than among seafarers in merchant fleets. OBJECTIVES To establish the causes and circumstances of all work related deaths among seafarers who were employed in RFA ships from 1976 to 200...