The Effect of Affect and Trust on Commitment in Retail Store Relationships

This paper extends the study of relational exchange to retail markets. We propose that certain individual level determinants (perceived differences between stores and prior experience) are determinants of store commitment. Store trust and store affect are also modeled as intervening variables in the process. Survey data of consumers at a retail store with an affective environment provide evidence that experience is both directly and indirectly (through trust) related to store commitment, while perceived differences is indirectly related to store commitment through both trust and affect generated by the store

3-Way Test Suite Prioritization and Fault Detection: A Case Study

GUI and web based applications are becoming universal. Functional accuracy of those applications is vital. Software defects caused by poor software testing can cost billions of dollars. Further, web application defects can be costly due to the fact that most web applications handle regular user interaction. By improving the time efficiency of software testing, many of the costs associated with defects can be saved. Web application users generate large numbers of possible test-cases and out of all those test-cases only some of them are vital for functional testing. Therefore testing correctness of these applications is expensive and time consuming and hence challenging at times. However, software testing is often under time and budget constraints. Earlier studies came up with different abstract models to face this kind of challenges where a tester can select and execute a subset of all the possible test-cases (test-°©‐case prioritization) based on some criterion to assure performance goal. In the context of test suite prioritization, earlier studies showed that 2-way inter-window interaction coverage/criteria are effective at finding faults quickly in the test execution cycle. However, since faults may be caused by interactions between more than 2 parameters, in this project we exercise test suite prioritization by t-way combinatorial coverage of inter-window interactions on an existing web application Music-Store. Our results show that the rates of fault detection for 2-way and 3-way prioritization are very close to each other

IST Austria Technical Report

Concurrent data structures with fine-grained synchronization are notoriously difficult to implement correctly. The difficulty of reasoning about these implementations does not stem from the number of variables or the program size, but rather from the large number of possible interleavings. These implementations are therefore prime candidates for model checking. We introduce an algorithm for verifying linearizability of singly-linked heap-based concurrent data structures. We consider a model consisting of an unbounded heap where each node consists an element from an unbounded data domain, with a restricted set of operations for testing and updating pointers and data elements. Our main result is that linearizability is decidable for programs that invoke a fixed number of methods, possibly in parallel. This decidable fragment covers many of the common implementation techniques — fine-grained locking, lazy synchronization, and lock-free synchronization. We also show how the technique can be used to verify optimistic implementations with the help of programmer annotations. We developed a verification tool CoLT and evaluated it on a representative sample of Java implementations of the concurrent set data structure. The tool verified linearizability of a number of implementations, found a known error in a lock-free imple- mentation and proved that the corrected version is linearizable

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior

Emotion and Reason in Consumer Behavior provides new insights into the effects that emotion and rational thought have on marketing outcomes. It uses sound academic research at a level students and professionals can understand. – Publisher description.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/business-books/1000/thumbnail.jp

A Macro Analysis of the Relationship of Product Involvement and Information Search: The Role of Risk

The relationship of the importance and hedonic dimensions of product involvement to information search is analyzed. Four different models of the role of perceived risk in this relationship are compared and tested. It is expected that perceived risk will mediate the effect of the dimensions of product involvement on information search. Previous investigations have used individual consumers as the units of observation and have, therefore, limited the generalizability of their results to a few products at best. In contrast, the study reported in this paper attempts to determine the relationships of interest with products as the units of observation. It is found that perceived risk fully mediates the effect of the importance dimension of product involvement on information search but not of the hedonic dimension. The effect of hedonic involvement on information search is direct

How Brand Reputation Affects The Advertising-Brand Equity Link

A model of the process of brand equity is proposed that depicts brand reputation as a mediator of the effect of brand advertising, brand familiarity, and brand uniqueness on brand equity outcomes. Brands are used as the unit of analysis in determining the relationships between consumer-level perceptions of brands and market-level data on brand advertising and brand equity outcomes such as market share and relative price. Path analysis of the brand-level data strongly validates the model. It is also shown that brand reputation is a separate construct from brand attitudes and that it performs better than brand attitudes in explaining the effect of brand advertising on brand equity outcomes