What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying:A Saaty scale-based VIKOR (SSC-VIKOR) approach from after-sales textual perspective?

Purpose: The increasingly booming e-commerce development has stimulated vehicle consumers to express individual reviews through online forum. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the vehicle consumer consumption behavior and make recommendations for potential consumers from textual comments viewpoint. Design/methodology/approach: A big data analytic-based approach is designed to discover vehicle consumer consumption behavior from online perspective. To reduce subjectivity of expert-based approaches, a parallel Naïve Bayes approach is designed to analyze the sentiment analysis, and the Saaty scale-based (SSC) scoring rule is employed to obtain specific sentimental value of attribute class, contributing to the multi-grade sentiment classification. To achieve the intelligent recommendation for potential vehicle customers, a novel SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to prioritize vehicle brand candidates from a big data analytical viewpoint. Findings: The big data analytics argue that “cost-effectiveness” characteristic is the most important factor that vehicle consumers care, and the data mining results enable automakers to better understand consumer consumption behavior. Research limitations/implications: The case study illustrates the effectiveness of the integrated method, contributing to much more precise operations management on marketing strategy, quality improvement and intelligent recommendation. Originality/value: Researches of consumer consumption behavior are usually based on survey-based methods, and mostly previous studies about comments analysis focus on binary analysis. The hybrid SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to fill the gap from the big data perspective

Relation Discovery from Web Data for Competency Management

This paper describes a technique for automatically discovering associations between people and expertise from an analysis of very large data sources (including web pages, blogs and emails), using a family of algorithms that perform accurate named-entity recognition, assign different weights to terms according to an analysis of document structure, and access distances between terms in a document. My contribution is to add a social networking approach called BuddyFinder which relies on associations within a large enterprise-wide "buddy list" to help delimit the search space and also to provide a form of 'social triangulation' whereby the system can discover documents from your colleagues that contain pertinent information about you. This work has been influential in the information retrieval community generally, as it is the basis of a landmark system that achieved overall first place in every category in the Enterprise Search Track of TREC2006

The Economic Dimension of Social Trust

The statistical analyses performed demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between the examined phenomena and proved that the highest developmental level is a characteristic feature of the districts with a high level of social trust. This conforms the claims of Polish and international scholars who see trust as a non-economic determinant of economic development

Absorptive Capacity for Firms Development: Impending Factors for Small and Medium Sized Construction Firms

The concept of Absorptive Capacity (AC) emanated from the presumptions of macroeconomists, who described it as the capability of an economy to adapt and absorb external knowledge. The concept was engrossed into firms through the capacity to identify the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to business perspectives. However, this study sought to explore on issues concerning AC on development of Small and Medium Sized Construction Firms (SMCFs) in Nigeria. Through qualitative interviews and quantitative survey protocols of 100 respondents, relevant responses were obtained from participants in the construction industry and research institutions. The questionnaire used was designed to obtain responses using closed ended questions for easy analysis through the Likert Scale and ranking system.  The data obtained were subjected to a computer based Statistical Package for Social Scientist (SPSS) Version 17. Other open-ended responses and interviews were thematically analyzed to determine the distribution of responses to the variables under investigation. The study finds that SMCFs in Nigeria have a mean awareness index of 4.38 out of a scale of 5.0. This finding indicates that construction firms in Nigeria are highly aware of the prospects of the implementation of AC concept for the development of SMCFs. In addition to this, the study also has identified the factors affecting the implementation of AC concept in Nigeria. Keywords: Absorptive capacity, Small and medium sized firms, Service Organizations; Construction firms, Knowledge management, Nigeria