Internet banking acceptance model: Cross-market examination

This article proposes a revised technology acceptance model to measure consumers’ acceptance of Internet banking, the Internet Banking Acceptance Model (IBAM). Data was collected from 618 university students in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. The results suggest the importance of attitude, such that attitude and behavioral intentions emerge as a single factor, denoted as “attitudinal intentions” (AI). Structural equation modeling confirms the fit of the model, in which perceived usefulness and trust fully mediate the impact of subjective norms and perceived manageability on AI. The invariance analysis demonstrates the psychometric equivalence of the IBAM measurements between the two country groups. At the structural level, the influence of trust and system usefulness on AI vary between the two countries, emphasizing the potential role of cultures in IS adoption. The IBAM is robust and parsimonious, explaining over 80% of AI

Social Mental Shaping: Modelling the Impact of Sociality on Autonomous Agents' Mental States

This paper presents a framework that captures how the social nature of agents that are situated in a multi-agent environment impacts upon their individual mental states. Roles and relationships provide an abstraction upon which we develop the notion of social mental shaping. This allows us to extend the standard Belief-Desire-Intention model to account for how common social phenomena (e.g. cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and negotiation) can be integrated into a unified theoretical perspective that reflects a fully explicated model of the autonomous agent's mental state

Social Influence and the Generation of Joint Mental Attitudes in Multi-agent Systems

This work examines the social structural and cognitive foundations of joint mental attitudes in complexly differentated multi-agent systems, and incorporates insights from a variety of disciplines, including mainstream Distributed Artificial Intelligence, sociology, administrative science, social psychology, and organisational perspectives. At the heart of this work lies the understanding of the on-going processes by which socially and cognitively differentiated agents come to be socially and cognitively integrated. Here we claim that such understanding rests on the consideration of the nature of the influence processes that affect socialisation intensity. To this end, we provide a logic-based computational model of social influence and we undertake a set of virtual experiments to investigate whether and to what extent this process, when it is played out in a system of negotiating agents, results in a modification of the agents' mental attitudes and impacts on negotiation performance

An innovation diffusion model of a local electricity network that is influenced by internal and external factors

Haynes et al. (1977) derived a nonlinear differential equation to determine the spread of innovations within a social network across space and time. This model depends upon the imitators and the innovators within the social system, where the imitators respond to internal influences, whilst the innovators react to external factors. Here, this differential equation is applied to simulate the uptake of a low-carbon technology (LCT) within a real local electricity network that is situated in the UK. This network comprises of many households that are assigned to certain feeders. Firstly, travelling wave solutions of Haynes’ model are used to predict adoption times as a function of the imitation and innovation influences. Then, the grid that represents the electricity network is created so that the finite element method (FEM) can be implemented. Next, innovation diffusion is modelled with Haynes’ equation and the FEM, where varying magnitudes of the internal and external pressures are imposed. Consequently, the impact of these model parameters is investigated. Moreover, LCT adoption trajectories at fixed feeder locations are calculated, which give a macroscopic understanding of the uptake behaviour at specific network sites. Lastly, the adoption of LCTs at a household level is examined, where microscopic and macroscopic approaches are combined

Refactoring Process Models in Large Process Repositories.

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAIS), large process model repositories have emerged. Over time respective models have to be re-aligned to the real-world business processes through customization or adaptation. This bears the risk that model redundancies are introduced and complexity is increased. If no continuous investment is made in keeping models simple, changes are becoming increasingly costly and error-prone. Though refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address related problems, this does not yet constitute state-of-the art in business process management. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or cannot apply respective techniques at all. This paper proposes a set of behaviour-preserving techniques for refactoring large process repositories. This enables process designers to eectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain

Social Network Games with Obligatory Product Selection

Recently, Apt and Markakis introduced a model for product adoption in social networks with multiple products, where the agents, influenced by their neighbours, can adopt one out of several alternatives (products). To analyze these networks we introduce social network games in which product adoption is obligatory. We show that when the underlying graph is a simple cycle, there is a polynomial time algorithm allowing us to determine whether the game has a Nash equilibrium. In contrast, in the arbitrary case this problem is NP-complete. We also show that the problem of determining whether the game is weakly acyclic is co-NP hard. Using these games we analyze various types of paradoxes that can arise in the considered networks. One of them corresponds to the well-known Braess paradox in congestion games. In particular, we show that social networks exist with the property that by adding an additional product to a specific node, the choices of the nodes will unavoidably evolve in such a way that everybody is strictly worse off.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416