The moderating effects of personal characteristics and motivational factors on the propensity to use sports events tourism websites

Despite plenty of research related to the Internet has been conducted throughout the world, there remains a shortage of knowledge pertaining to personal characteristics and motivational factors as the moderating effects on the propensity to use sports events tourism websites. Thus, this study was conducted to investigate roles of moderating effects on the relationship between customer-perceived value and the propensity to use sports events tourism websites. This study has utilized the Sport Website Acceptance Model (SWAM) and the Uses and Gratification Theory (UGT) as the research background theories. Therefore, four components of customer-perceived value which extracted from the factor analysis were accessibility, flexibility, interactivity and reliability, acted as independent variable. While, motivation in terms of informativeness gratification and entertainment gratification acted as the moderating variables. This study has utilized a self-administered questionnaire adapted from a standardized questionnaire based on the literature review. The sample of the study comprised of 530 sports tourists’ (315 males and 215 females) who participated in three major sporting events conducted in Malaysia in 2013. The probability sampling technique was applied to select the respondent. The results of Pearson correlation analyses showed that there was a significant relationship between customer-perceived value and the propensity to use the websites. The stepwise multiple regression analyses showed that amongst four moderating variables of personal characteristics (age, gender, education, and income) except income did not moderate the relationship between customer-perceived value and the propensity to use the websites. The result of the study also indicates that 14.8 percent of the total variance of the propensity to use the websites was explained by customer-perceived value, entertainment gratification, informativeness gratification, the combination of customer-perceived value and entertainment gratification as well as the combination of customer-perceived value and informativeness gratification. The research findings would be practical and useful for sports tourism organizations in providing distinctive sports tourism websites on how to market their products and/or services effectivel

Online sport consumption : influence of consumers’ motivations and concerns on their actual behavior and future purchase intentions.

Mestrado em Gestão do DesportoO objetivo deste estudo foi examinar o papel das motivações e preocupações dos consumidores online, de produtos e serviços desportivos, nos seus comportamentos atuais e como isso afeta as intenções futuras de compra. Com base no modelo SMOS, cinco tipos de motivação (i.e., a conveniência, informação, diversão, socialização e económica) e quatro tipos de preocupações (i.e., segurança e privacidade, entrega, qualidade do produto e serviço ao cliente) foram examinados para entender a sua influência no comportamento de consumo atual e ainda, sobre as futuras intenções de compra. Os dados foram recolhidos através de um inquérito enviado por correio eletrónico com um retorno de novecentas e quarenta respostas (n = 940). Um modelo de equações estruturais em duas etapas foi realizado e os resultados mostraram que o fator de motivação mais forte para a compra de produtos ou serviços de desporto é "económico", enquanto o tipo de preocupação "qualidade do produto" foi considerado menos preponderante para o consumo online. Os resultados também indicaram que a importância da frequência de compra online se sobrepõe à importância do valor gasto.ABSTRACT: The aim of this study was to examine the role of online sport consumer’s motivations and concerns on their actual behaviors and how it affects future purchase intentions. Based on the SMOS model, five types of motivation (i.e., convenience, information, diversion, socialization and economic) and four types of concerns (i.e., security and privacy, delivery, product quality, and customer service) were examined to understand their influence on actual behavior and on future behavioral intentions. Data were collected through an email survey with a return of nine hundred and forty responses (N = 940). A two-step structural equation model was conducted and the results showed that the strongest motivation for buying sport products or services is ‘economic’, while the concern ‘product quality’ was considered less preponderant for the online consumption. The results also indicated that the importance of purchase’s frequency supersedes the importance of the purchase’s amount spent

Network Performance Management Using Application-centric Key Performance Indicators

The Internet and intranets are viewed as capable of supplying Anything, Anywhere, Anytime and e-commerce, e-government, e-community, and military C4I are now deploying many and varied applications to serve their needs. Network management is currently centralized in operations centers. To assure customer satisfaction with the network performance they typically plan, configure and monitor the network devices to insure an excess of bandwidth, that is overprovision. If this proves uneconomical or if complex and poorly understood interactions of equipment, protocols and application traffic degrade performance creating customer dissatisfaction, another more application-centric, way of managing the network will be needed. This research investigates a new qualitative class of network performance measures derived from the current quantitative metrics known as quality of service (QOS) parameters. The proposed class of qualitative indicators focuses on utilizing current network performance measures (QOS values) to derive abstract quality of experience (QOE) indicators by application class. These measures may provide a more user or application-centric means of assessing network performance even when some individual QOS parameters approach or exceed specified levels. The mathematics of functional analysis suggests treating QOS performance values as a vector, and, by mapping the degradation of the application performance to a characteristic lp-norm curve, a qualitative QOE value (good/poor) can be calculated for each application class. A similar procedure could calculate a QOE node value (satisfactory/unsatisfactory) to represent the service level of the switch or router for the current mix of application traffic. To demonstrate the utility of this approach a discrete event simulation (DES) test-bed, in the OPNET telecommunications simulation environment, was created modeling the topology and traffic of three semi-autonomous networks connected by a backbone. Scenarios, designed to degrade performance by under-provisioning links or nodes, are run to evaluate QOE for an access network. The application classes and traffic load are held constant. Future research would include refinement of the mathematics, many additional simulations and scenarios varying other independent variables. Finally collaboration with researchers in areas as diverse as human computer interaction (HCI), software engineering, teletraffic engineering, and network management will enhance the concepts modeled