Customer Engagement in Online Communities: A New Conceptual Framework Integrating Motives, Incentives and Motivation

Only a match between user’s motives and incentives enables an engaging online community. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the literature on user motivation in online communities into a conceptual framework. The framework categorizes motivational factors along motives and potential incentives and integrates the three major motives need for power, need for achievement and need for affiliation as well as the perspective of outcome- and action-related motivation. Psychological models, which explain motivation as an interrelation between different personal motives and situational incentives, demonstrate that effective incentives have to address matching motives. This paper adds to the existing literature by proposing a conceptual framework, which transfers theory of motivation psychology to the context of engagement in online communities and helps to apply successful incentives

Configuration

Abstract: The article presents essays from the configuration workshop held in August 2006 as part of ECAI in Riva del Garda, Italy. The essays address reasoning techniques, user interaction, business integration, and finally presents a practical case study. These essays aim to give the readers insight into current trends and challenges in configuration. If you order a computer system online, you likely have the opportunity to customize it to your individual needs: you can choose from different CPUs and main memory sizes, select the appropriate graphics card and hard drive, and so on. However, if the ordering system doesn\u27t accept your configuration as is, you\u27ll have to modify it. For example. a large LCD screen might require a special graphics card, or the CPU you\u27ve chosen might require a special main board, With more complex products, such as cars, the situation gets even more complicated - for example, you can choose from hundreds of equipment options when ordering a Mercedes, resulting in millions of possible combinations. Product configuration, the business process that supports these choices, offers both opportunities and challenges

Investigating Compensatory Brain Activity in Older Adults with Subjective Cognitive Decline

BACKGROUND: Preclinical Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one possible cause of subjective cognitive decline (SCD). Normal task performance despite ongoing neurodegeneration is typically considered as neuronal compensation, which is reflected by greater neuronal activity. Compensatory brain activity has been observed in frontal as well as parietal regions in SCD, but data are scarce, especially outside the memory domain. OBJECTIVE: To investigate potential compensatory activity in SCD. Such compensatory activity is particularly expected in participants where blood-based biomarkers indicated amyloid positivity as this implies preclinical AD. METHODS: 52 participants with SCD (mean age: 71.00±5.70) underwent structural and functional neuroimaging (fMRI), targeting episodic memory and spatial abilities, and a neuropsychological assessment. The estimation of amyloid positivity was based on plasma amyloid-β and phosphorylated tau (pTau181) measures. RESULTS: Our fMRI analyses of the spatial abilities task did not indicate compensation, with only three voxels exceeding an uncorrected threshold at p < 0.001. This finding was not replicated in a subset of 23 biomarker positive individuals. CONCLUSION: Our results do not provide conclusive evidence for compensatory brain activity in SCD. It is possible that neuronal compensation does not manifest at such an early stage as SCD. Alternatively, it is possible that our sample size was too small or that compensatory activity may be too heterogeneous to be detected by group-level statistics. Interventions based on the individual fMRI signal should therefore be explored