271 research outputs found
The Long-Term Erosion of Repeat-Purchase Loyalty
The study investigates the long-term erosion of repeat-purchase loyalty among consumers who purchase brands in a one-year base period.
The study utilises a five-year consumer panel of continuous reporters. We identify brand buyers in a base year, then calculate the proportion that fail to buy the brand in later years. We analyse the top 20 brands in 10 consumer goods categories
We find pronounced erosion in repeat-buying over the long-term. The proportion of buyers from a base year that fail to buy the brand in a later year increases steadily over time, from 57% in year 2 to 71.5% by year 5. Moreover, we identify brand and marketing mix factors linked to this over-time customer loss, or erosion.
The study provides evidence that consumers’ propensity to buy particular brands changes over a period of years, even though those brands continue to exhibit stable market share. This evidence provides a different interpretation than the literature to date, which has viewed purchase propensities as fixed.
The study finds that store brands and niche brands exhibit lower levels of erosion in their buyer base; that a broad range is associated with lower erosion, and that high price promotion incidence is associated with lower erosion for manufacturer brands.
Loyalty erosion has been reported before (Ehrenberg, 1988; East & Hammond 1996) but only over short periods. This study examines the phenomenon over five years, confirms that the rate of erosion does diminish over time, and that it is related to category and brand characteristics, as well as marketing mix decisions
SEM-POS: Grammatically and Semantically Correct Video Captioning
Generating grammatically and semantically correct captions in video
captioning is a challenging task. The captions generated from the existing
methods are either word-by-word that do not align with grammatical structure or
miss key information from the input videos. To address these issues, we
introduce a novel global-local fusion network, with a Global-Local Fusion Block
(GLFB) that encodes and fuses features from different parts of speech (POS)
components with visual-spatial features. We use novel combinations of different
POS components - 'determinant + subject', 'auxiliary verb', 'verb', and
'determinant + object' for supervision of the POS blocks - Det + Subject, Aux
Verb, Verb, and Det + Object respectively. The novel global-local fusion
network together with POS blocks helps align the visual features with language
description to generate grammatically and semantically correct captions.
Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on benchmark MSVD and MSRVTT
datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach generates more grammatically
and semantically correct captions compared to the existing methods, achieving
the new state-of-the-art. Ablations on the POS blocks and the GLFB demonstrate
the impact of the contributions on the proposed method
CAD -- Contextual Multi-modal Alignment for Dynamic AVQA
In the context of Audio Visual Question Answering (AVQA) tasks, the audio
visual modalities could be learnt on three levels: 1) Spatial, 2) Temporal, and
3) Semantic. Existing AVQA methods suffer from two major shortcomings; the
audio-visual (AV) information passing through the network isn't aligned on
Spatial and Temporal levels; and, inter-modal (audio and visual) Semantic
information is often not balanced within a context; this results in poor
performance. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Contextual
Multi-modal Alignment (CAD) network that addresses the challenges in AVQA
methods by i) introducing a parameter-free stochastic Contextual block that
ensures robust audio and visual alignment on the Spatial level; ii) proposing a
pre-training technique for dynamic audio and visual alignment on Temporal level
in a self-supervised setting, and iii) introducing a cross-attention mechanism
to balance audio and visual information on Semantic level. The proposed novel
CAD network improves the overall performance over the state-of-the-art methods
on average by 9.4% on the MUSIC-AVQA dataset. We also demonstrate that our
proposed contributions to AVQA can be added to the existing methods to improve
their performance without additional complexity requirements.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer
Vision (WACV) 202
Fit to Study: Reflections on designing and implementing a large-scale randomized controlled trial in secondary schools
Background. The randomised controlled trial (RCT) design is increasingly common among studies seeking good-quality evidence to advance educational neuroscience, but conducting RCTs in schools is challenging. Fit to Study, one of six such trials funded by the Education Endowment Foundation and Wellcome Trust, tested an intervention to increase vigorous physical activity during PE lessons on maths attainment among pupils aged 12–13. This review of designing and conducting an RCT in 104 schools is intended as a resource on which researchers might draw for future studies.
Method. We consider intervention design and delivery; recruitment, retention, trial management, data collection and analysis including ethical considerations and working with evaluators.
Results. Teacher training, intervention delivery and data collection during large-scale RCTs require a flexible approach appropriate to educational settings, which in turn entails planning and resources.
Conclusion. Simple interventions, with few outcome measures and minimal missing data, are preferable to more complex designs
Examination of the comfort and pain experienced with blood flow restriction training during post-surgery rehabilitation of anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction patients: A UK National Health Service trial.
Examine the comfort and pain experienced with blow flow restriction resistance training (BFR-RT) compared to standard care heavy load resistance training (HL-RT) during anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR) patient rehabilitation. Randomised controlled trial. United Kingdom National Health Service. Twenty eight patients undergoing unilateral ACLR surgery with hamstring autograft were recruited. Following surgery participants were block randomised to either HL-RT at 70% repetition maximum (1RM) (n = 14) or BFR-RT (n = 14) at 30% 1RM and completed 8 weeks of twice weekly unilateral leg press training on both limbs. Perceived knee pain, muscle pain and rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were assessed using Borg's (1998) RPE and pain scales during training. Knee pain was also assessed 24 h post-training. There were no adverse events. Knee pain was lower with BFR-RT during (p  0.05) for both BFR-RT and HL-RT. ACLR patients experienced less knee joint pain and reported similar ratings of perceived exertion during and following leg press exercise with BFR-RT compared to traditional HL-RT. BFR-RT may be more advantageous during the early phases of post-surgery ACLR rehabilitation. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
The Expression of Inflammatory Mediators in Bladder Pain Syndrome.
Background: Bladder pain syndrome (BPS) pathology is poorly understood. Treatment strategies are empirical, with limited efficacy, and affected patients have diminished quality of life. Objective: We examined the hypothesis that inflammatory mediators within the bladder contribute to BPS pathology. Design, setting, and participants: Fifteen women with BPS and 15 women with stress urinary incontinence without bladder pain were recruited from Cork University Maternity Hospital from October 2011 to October 2012. During cystoscopy, 5-mm bladder biopsies were taken and processed for gene expression analysis. The effect of the identified genes was tested in laboratory animals. Outcome measures and statistical analysis: We studied the expression of 96 inflammation-related genes in diseased and healthy bladders. We measured the correlation between genes and patient clinical profiles using the Pearson correlation coefficient. Results and limitations: Analysis revealed 15 differentially expressed genes, confirmed in a replication study. FGF7 and CCL21 correlated significantly with clinical outcomes. Intravesical CCL21 instillation in rats caused increased bladder excitability and increased c-fos activity in spinal cord neurons. CCL21 atypical receptor knockout mice showed significantly more c-fos upon bladder stimulation with CCL21 than wild-type littermates. There was no change in FGF7-treated animals. The variability in patient samples presented as the main limitation. We used principal component analysis to identify similarities within the patient group. Conclusions: Our study identified two biologically relevant inflammatory mediators in BPS and demonstrated an increase in nociceptive signalling with CCL21. Manipulation of this ligand is a potential new therapeutic strategy for BPS. Patient summary: We compared gene expression in bladder biopsies of patients with bladder pain syndrome (BPS) and controls without pain and identified two genes that were increased in BPS patients and correlated with clinical profiles. We tested the effect of these genes in laboratory animals, confirming their role in bladder pain. Manipulating these genes in BPS is a potential treatment strategy
Australian rural adolescents’ experiences of accessing psychological help for a mental health problem
Objective: This study aims to explore Australian rural adolescents’ experiences of accessing help for a mental health problem in the context of their rural communities. Design and setting: A qualitative research design was used whereby university students who had sought help for a mental health problem during their adolescence were interviewed about their experiences. Interviews were conducted face-to-face at the university. Main outcome measures: A semi-structured interview schedule was designed around the study’s main research questions. Audio-taped interviews were transcribed and thematically coded using a constant comparative method. Participants: Participants were first-year undergraduate psychology students between the ages of 17 and 21 years who sought help for a mental health issue during their adolescence and who at that time resided in a rural area. Results: Participants highlighted various barriers to seeking help for mental health problems in the context of a rural community, including: social visibility, lack of anonymity, a culture of self-reliance, and social stigma of mental illness. Participants’ access to help was primarily school-based, and participants expressed a preference for supportive counselling over structured interventions. Characteristics of school-based helpers that made them approachable included: ‘caring’, ‘nonjudgemental’, ‘genuine’, ‘young’, and able to maintain confidentiality. Conclusions: The findings support previous research that reveals barriers to help seeking for mental health problems that are unique to the culture of rural communities. The study raises questions about the merit of delivery of primary mental health care to young people via GPs alone and suggests that school-based counsellors be considered as the first step in a young person’s access to mental health care.C
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly
observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments
with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they
should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own
individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects:
some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting
cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this
heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We
have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as
a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else
beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous
Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity
aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of
people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with
cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and
cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour
makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think
malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more
Psychological essentialism and cultural variation: children's beliefs about aggression in the United States and South Africa
The present study compared indigenous South African versus African-American schoolchildren's beliefs about aggression. Eighty 7–9 year olds (40 from each country) participated in interviews in which they were asked to make inferences about the stability, malleability, and causal origins of aggressive behaviour. Although a minority of participants from both countries endorsed essentialist beliefs about aggression, South African children were more likely than American children to do so. Results also revealed some degree of coherence in children's patterns of beliefs about aggression, such that children responded across superficially different measures in ways that appear theoretically consistent. The authors consider these findings in light of debates concerning the role of cultural forces in shaping person perception. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/58579/1/537_ftp.pd
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