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

Examining Loyalty and Situational Value in Green Retail and Service Establishments

This research sheds light on how loyalty and situational value can enhance consumers ’ willingness to pay a higher price (WTPHP) for green products. While loyalty is a function of the individual characteristics of a certain Consumer, which match the characteristics of an Object, “situational” value is a function of a certain Consumer, a certain Object, and a certain Situation. Across two studies, we show that (1) loyalty has an effect on WTPHP that is mediated by reason and (2) situational value has an effect on WTPHP mediated by both emotion and reason. We conclude with discussions and managerial implications

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

Consumer-Driven Sustainability Transitions in the Food Supply Chain: An Initial Simulation Framework

Sustainability in the global food supply chain (FSC) depends on understanding the dynamic interactions among stakeholders. Existing approaches often neglect the ripple effects of consumer-driven behavioral changes on upstream actors, leaving critical gaps in strategies for systemic transformation. This study introduces a system dynamics simulation framework to model the interactions among four key stakeholders: farmers, storage operators, distributors, and consumers. The framework explores how shifts in consumer behavior can drive transitions from unsustainable to sustainable practices. By accounting for temporal delays, the model captures real-world complexities and reveals how consumer actions influence broader stakeholder dynamics. Experimental findings highlight the importance of consumer awareness, influence, and timing in advancing systemic change. A combination of heightened consumer awareness of sustainable practices and the implementation of carbon emission taxation accelerates the adoption of sustainable farming, with noticeable effects on distributors and storage operators within 12 months. This research has the potential to advance sustainability by demonstrating that active consumer participation can promote environmental responsibility within the FSC

ChipNeMo: Domain-Adapted LLMs for Chip Design

ChipNeMo aims to explore the applications of large language models (LLMs) for industrial chip design. Instead of directly deploying off-the-shelf commercial or open-source LLMs, we instead adopt the following domain adaptation techniques: domain-adaptive tokenization, domain-adaptive continued pretraining, model alignment with domain-specific instructions, and domain-adapted retrieval models. We evaluate these methods on three selected LLM applications for chip design: an engineering assistant chatbot, EDA script generation, and bug summarization and analysis. Our evaluations demonstrate that domain-adaptive pretraining of language models, can lead to superior performance in domain related downstream tasks compared to their base LLaMA2 counterparts, without degradations in generic capabilities. In particular, our largest model, ChipNeMo-70B, outperforms the highly capable GPT-4 on two of our use cases, namely engineering assistant chatbot and EDA scripts generation, while exhibiting competitive performance on bug summarization and analysis. These results underscore the potential of domain-specific customization for enhancing the effectiveness of large language models in specialized applications.Comment: Updated results for ChipNeMo-70B mode

Enjoy! Assertive Language and Consumer Compliance in (Non)Hedonic Contexts

This paper is concerned with the tension between consumer persuasion and freedom of choice. We study how assertive language (as in the slogan Just do it!) affects consumer compliance in hedonic vs. utilitarian contexts. Previous literature consistently claimed that forceful language would cause reactance and decreased compliance. However, we find in four studies that assertive persuasion is effective in contexts involving hedonic goods and hedonically framed utilitarian goods. Our hypotheses emerge from sociolinguistic research and confirm the relevance of linguistic research in consumer behavior