AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES IN PAKISTANI BANKING SECTOR

Customer satisfaction is most important to the concept of marketing with solid evidence of strategic links between overall services quality and customer satisfaction (Truch, 2006), and having a significant theoretical and practical issue for the marketers. The spirit of innumerable researches in diverse cultures endorse that the service provider organizations pay greater attention to satisfy their customer. But lacuna exists in literature for such a key topic in different cultures of developing countries like Pakistan. Accordingly, this current study looks for the impact of customer satisfaction on their behavioral responses in banking sector of Pakistan. Therefore, recognition of significant determinants of customer satisfaction could facilitate the higher management in adoption and implementation their customers’ focus strategies more efficiently and effectively. Practical implication, future research and limitation are also discussed.banking sector, behavioral response, customer satisfaction, Pakistan, services quality.

Improving forecasting accuracy of crude oil price using decomposition ensemble model with reconstruction of IMFs based on ARIMA model

The accuracy of crude oil price forecasting is more important especially for economic development and considered as the lifeblood of the industry. Hence, in this paper, a decomposition-ensemble model with the reconstruction of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) is proposed for forecasting the crude oil prices based on the well-known autoregressive moving average (ARIMA) model. Essentially, the reconstruction of IMFs enhances the forecasting accuracy of the existing decomposition ensemble models. The proposed methodology works in four steps: decomposition of the complex data into several IMFs using EEMD, reconstruction of IMFs based on order of ARIMA model, prediction of every reconstructed IMF, and finally ensemble the prediction of every IMF for the final output. A case study was carried out using two crude oil prices time series (i.e. Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI)). The empirical results exhibited that the reconstruction of IMFs based on order of ARIMA model was adequate and provided the best forecast. In order to check the correctness, robustness and generalizability, simulations were carried out

Improved Web Accessibility Evaluation of Open Learning Contents for Individuals with Learning Disabilities

Web content should be accessible to normal and disabled communities on electronic devices. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has created standard guidelines called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Mobile Web Best Practice (MWBP) is also proposed by WAI for accessibility of websites on desktop computers and mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, iPads, iPhones, and iPods. Educational Resources that provide free licensed learning content are used to test the WCAG. The disabled community also has equal rights to gain access to these learning materials through electronic devices. The main purpose of this research is to evaluate these selected open educational learning materials for individuals with only learning disabilities. This research provides several recommendations to improve the accessibility level of the Learning Management Systems. Future research includes developing a more accessible learning management system with minimized or no accessibility errors. Disability includes physical impairments, mental disorders, lack of cognition, learning and emotional disability. Some individuals have multiple disorders. Learning disabilities are one of them. People have difficulty learning because of an unknown factor or low intelligence quotient (IQ).Comment: 15 page

Determinants of foreign direct investment in five selected West African countries

This study examines the determinants of foreign direct investment inflows (FDI) in West African Countries (WACs) for the period 1998-2013. Analysis of the study used secondary data which obtained from World Bank Development indicators, World Bank Governors Indicators, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Transparency International, and Heritage Foundation. In this study, Dunning’s (1980) eclectic paradigm was used but with modification to include some additional variables. Empirically, Fixed Effects Model (FEM) was suggested by the results of Hausman’s specification test as a preferable model in the estimation. The finding shows that corruption does not influenced the level of FDI inflows into WACs. Specifically, foreign investors were rather discouraged by both corruption and poor regulatory institutions. Other factors like market size, inflation and trade openness of the economy were also found to be positively significant. The findings suggests that governments in WAC need to reform their institutions in order to attract more FDI and benefited from the positive spill overs that accompany FDI inflow into a country. With regards to FDI determinants, the empirical result indicates that the domestic country potential market demand and trade openness are the main determinants of FDI inflows in WACs

Efficient channel equalization algorithms for multicarrier communication systems

Blind adaptive algorithm that updates time-domain equalizer (TEQ) coefficients by Adjacent Lag Auto-correlation Minimization (ALAM) is proposed to shorten the channel for multicarrier modulation (MCM) systems. ALAM is an addition to the family of several existing correlation based algorithms that can achieve similar or better performance to existing algorithms with lower complexity. This is achieved by designing a cost function without the sum-square and utilizing symmetrical-TEQ property to reduce the complexity of adaptation of TEQ to half of the existing one. Furthermore, to avoid the limitations of lower unstable bit rate and high complexity, an adaptive TEQ using equal-taps constraints (ETC) is introduced to maximize the bit rate with the lowest complexity. An IP core is developed for the low-complexity ALAM (LALAM) algorithm to be implemented on an FPGA. This implementation is extended to include the implementation of the moving average (MA) estimate for the ALAM algorithm referred as ALAM-MA. Unit-tap constraint (UTC) is used instead of unit-norm constraint (UNC) while updating the adaptive algorithm to avoid all zero solution for the TEQ taps. The IP core is implemented on Xilinx Vertix II Pro XC2VP7-FF672-5 for ADSL receivers and the gate level simulation guaranteed successful operation at a maximum frequency of 27 MHz and 38 MHz for ALAM-MA and LALAM algorithm, respectively. FEQ equalizer is used, after channel shortening using TEQ, to recover distorted QAM signals due to channel effects. A new analytical learning based framework is proposed to jointly solve equalization and symbol detection problems in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with QAM signals. The framework utilizes extreme learning machine (ELM) to achieve fast training, high performance, and low error rates. The proposed framework performs in real-domain by transforming a complex signal into a single 2–tuple real-valued vector. Such transformation offers equalization in real domain with minimum computational load and high accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed framework outperforms other learning based equalizers in terms of symbol error rates and training speeds