3D avatar seller's effect on online consumer's purchasing behavior: a trust transference perspective

The emerging 3D virtual worlds attract more and more people to participate in the virtual environment, creating a new market for business to sell their products. In 3D virtual worlds, members mainly interact with each other through avatars. The selling process is fulfilled through the shop avatars. How businesses sell their products successfully to the potential customers and eventually persuade the customer to purchase the product is an essential question. Trust played a key role in the selling process. In the general selling process, trust was established through the sales person. In the virtual world environment, could the trust be established between the sales avatars and customer avatars This paper aims at answering this question by examining the trust transference process in the 3D virtual world environment. An experiment was conducted to categorize the avatars into attractive and expert ones. The research result first suggest that trust formed in a 3D avatar seller could be transferred to a selling company and a product but for an expert 3D avatar seller, trust transferred to the company and product results in intent to purchase. Trust in a 3D avatar seller is transferred to trust in a product and a company and furthermore, an expert avatar can affect a consumer's intent to purchase. In the case of an attractive 3D avatar, although trust is transferred, it is only to the point of intent to purchase

A Unified Gas-kinetic Scheme for Continuum and Rarefied Flows IV: full Boltzmann and Model Equations

Fluid dynamic equations are valid in their respective modeling scales. With a variation of the modeling scales, theoretically there should have a continuous spectrum of fluid dynamic equations. In order to study multiscale flow evolution efficiently, the dynamics in the computational fluid has to be changed with the scales. A direct modeling of flow physics with a changeable scale may become an appropriate approach. The unified gas-kinetic scheme (UGKS) is a direct modeling method in the mesh size scale, and its underlying flow physics depends on the resolution of the cell size relative to the particle mean free path. The cell size of UGKS is not limited by the particle mean free path. With the variation of the ratio between the numerical cell size and local particle mean free path, the UGKS recovers the flow dynamics from the particle transport and collision in the kinetic scale to the wave propagation in the hydrodynamic scale. The previous UGKS is mostly constructed from the evolution solution of kinetic model equations. This work is about the further development of the UGKS with the implementation of the full Boltzmann collision term in the region where it is needed. The central ingredient of the UGKS is the coupled treatment of particle transport and collision in the flux evaluation across a cell interface, where a continuous flow dynamics from kinetic to hydrodynamic scales is modeled. The newly developed UGKS has the asymptotic preserving (AP) property of recovering the NS solutions in the continuum flow regime, and the full Boltzmann solution in the rarefied regime. In the mostly unexplored transition regime, the UGKS itself provides a valuable tool for the flow study in this regime. The mathematical properties of the scheme, such as stability, accuracy, and the asymptotic preserving, will be analyzed in this paper as well