This study examines information technology enabled, multi-channel service context from the end-user’s perspective and, more specifically, from the perspective of a consumer, in particular the extent to which the multi-channel interaction experience results in consumer satisfaction and any tradeoffs that consumers make in the evaluation of the context of service. Empirical results from our onlin...

Comparison shopping sites facilitate consumers’ pre-purchase evaluation of alternatives, and draw increasing traffic to merchants’ Web sites. As the main source of revenue, sponsored link advertising has become one of the most important aspects for comparison shopping services. However, little is known about the effectiveness of sponsored links and their effects on consumers’ information proces...

To determine consumer sensory acceptance and value of beef steaks differing in marbling level (high = upper USDA Choice and low = USDA Select), but similar in Warner-Bratzler shear value, consumers in Chicago and San Francisco (n = 124 per city) evaluated two matched pairs of high- and low-marbled strip steaks, and had the opportunity to participate in a silent, sealed-bid auction to purchase s...

This paper examines the relationships between the operating characteristics of the consumer purchase decision process and the channel switching intentions of consumers. A theoretical model that explains consumer channel switching intentions is constructed and tested based on a sample of 337 actual consumers. The analysis indicates that the overall channel-switching tendency from offline to onli...

This article defines a quality model for online consumer health information consisting of five quality criteria constructs. These constructs are grounded in empirical data from the perspectives of the three main sources in the communication process: health information providers, consumers, and intermediaries, such as Web directory creators and librarians, who assist consumers in finding healthc...

Software agents are flexible, autonomous, and dynamic computational entities. For B2C e-commerce applications, the wide variety of choices to the consumers has also introduced the problem of information overloading. Meanwhile, there are so many e-shops and products for the consumers that it has become too time-consuming to find the best deal. In this paper, we present PumaMart, a Parallel and a...

We perform a large-scale evaluation of multiple off-the-shelf speech recognizers across diverse domains for virtual human dialogue systems. Our evaluation is aimed at speech recognition consumers and potential consumers with limited experience with readily available recognizers. We focus on practical factors to determine what levels of performance can be expected from different available recogn...

the popularity of non-dairy probiotic products continues to persist as the consumers prefer functional foods satisfying their health needs. among these promising foods, probiotic grape drink would have beneficial effects on modifying gastrointestinal flora and human health. in this study, the pasteurized grape drink was inoculated by three species of lactic acid bacteria (lactobacillus delbruec...

Market saturation, increased competition, change in tastes and needs of customers have made Iranian companies, especially canned industries, face various challenges in relation to consumers. Under such conditions, cannery companies with the ability for proper use of available facilities and equipment such as design and development of new products, supplying high-quality and economic products an...