Determinants of consumers’ intentions to share knowledge and intentions to purchase on s-commerce sites: incorporating attitudes toward persuasion attempts into a social exchange model

This research explores s-commerce users’ intentions to purchase and to share knowledge by incorporating ‘attitudes toward persuasion attempts,’ ‘ease of use,’ and ‘perceived usefulness’ into a social exchange theory model. A survey using an on-site purposive sampling technique was used to recruit the respondents, and an interception technique was used to approach the consumers. A total of 471 Korean consumers participated in this research. Based on 471 Korean social-commerce users, our results reveal that social exchange belief factors and a site’s usability affect user satisfaction, which subsequently affects users’ intentions to purchase and to share knowledge. In addition, attitudes toward persuasion attempts moderate the effect of satisfaction on users’ purchase intentions. Keywords: social exchange theory, attitudes toward persuasion attempts, intention to share knowledge, social exchange belief

The impact of electronic media on faculty evaluation

With the proliferation of computer networks and the increased use of Internet‐based applications, many forms of social interactions now take place in an on‐line context through Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC). Many universities are now reaping the benefits of using CMC applications to collect data on student evaluations of faculty, rather than using paper‐based surveys in Face‐To‐Face (FTF) classroom settings. While the relative merits of CMC versus FTF student evaluations have been researched extensively, there is limited research published about the ways students respond to the questions from either mode of data collection. This paper reports on a research study to analyse the communication differences between student scores from FTF student evaluations and CMC evaluation questions from end of semester evaluations from a university in the Middle East region. In addition to the questions about communication mode differences between two evaluation questions, several demographic variables were measured to determine any interaction effects. The results of our study suggest that the type of communication channel mitigates the responses that students make on CMC evaluations vis‐à‐vis FTF evaluations of faculty. In particular, even though there were significant differences found at the aggregate level between CMC and FTF evaluations, when the course and instructor are controlled for, there were no significant differences reported. In addition, several differences were noted depending on the type and level of the course being studied. Also, we found that students are more likely to express more extreme responses to scale questions in CMC than FTF evaluations. Administrators should consider these potential differences when implementing on‐line evaluation system

An Integrative Evaluation Framework for Determining the Value of Group Decision Support Systems

Group-based decision-making situations are relevant to engineering management practice. To assist group decision making, specialized computer-based tools called Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) have been promoted since the late 1980s. Nevertheless, a review of the extensive research on GDSS design and evaluation reveals that an integrated framework is not available to evaluate the decision-making value of a specific GDSS. This article proposes a GDSS-value evaluation framework by considering the process of, and outcomes from, decision making together with the technical capabilities needed to provide them. The framework is implemented with an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model, and its utilization is illustrated with the evaluation of three real GDSS applications. This integrative GDSS-value evaluation framework can be used by engineering managers as a tool to determine the overall decision-making value from an existing or projected GDSS with the aim of selecting the most adequate GDSS for a particular engineering management group-based decision-making situation