An Examination of Automobile Online Brand Communities (AOBCs) in the U.S. and South Korea: Linkages among Motivation, Experience, and Satisfaction

This study explores automobile online brand communities in the different cultural contexts between South Korea and the United States. The core assumption is that members of automobile online brand communities in different cultures have different motivation orientations to visit their online communities and have different community experiences. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions were utilized as embedded cultural circumstances in examining relationships between different motivation orientations and community experiences. Two steps of qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted to determine the relationships among community members’ motivation orientations, community experiences, and satisfaction. The study found that Korean automobile online brand community (KAOBC) members have stronger social, business, and communication motivations than American automobile online brand community (AAOBC) members. These community members’ motivations also influenced their community experiences. Both social network motivations and communication motivations are crucial predictors for four community experiences: Community loyalty, trust, membership identity, and word of mouth (WOM). Community members who have a stronger social networking and/or communication motivation are more likely to have a higher level of community loyalty, trust, membership identity, and WOM. Finally, community experiences were the most important indicators of the satisfaction of online community members among nationality, demographic factors, and motivation orientations

The Administered-Price Hypothesis Revisited

The relationship between market structure and firms’ pricing behaviour has been a major and controversial issue in industrial economics. The question of how firms’ pricing behaviour differs across market structures is the focus of the administered-price thesis. In this paper the authors review theories providing rationales for the administered-price thesis and their empirical underpinnings, and methodological controversies concerning price series of differnt industries

Multi-jet electrospinning of polystyrene/polyamide 6 blend: thermal and mechanical properties

Citation: Yoon, J. W., Park, Y., Kim, J., & Park, C. H. (2017). Multi-jet electrospinning of polystyrene/polyamide 6 blend: thermal and mechanical properties. Fashion and Textiles, 4, 12. doi:10.1186/s40691-017-0090-4Polystyrene (PS) has high thermal resistance thus can be applied as thermally comfortable textile. However, the application is limited due its low mechanical strength. In this study, polyamide 6 (PA6) was blended with PS to improve the mechanical strength of PS, by means of a multi-jet electrospinning. Content ratio of the blend web was measured by chemical immersion test and confocal microscopy analysis. Fiber content was in accordance with the number of syringes used for PS and PA6 respectively. The effects of content ratio on the web morphology, thermal resistance, tensile behavior, air and water vapor permeability, and surface hydrophilicity were investigated. The influence of environmental humidity during electrospinning process on three dimensional (3D) web structure was also reported. PS web produced from higher humidity had more pores and corrugations at the surface. The increased surface roughness and porosity led to the increased hydrophobicity and thermal resistance. Though the blending of PA6 with PS enhanced the mechanical strength, the added PA6 decreased air/water vapor permeability and thermal resistance. The lowered thermal resistance by the addition of PA6 was mainly attributed to higher thermal conductivity of PA6 material and lowered air content with PA6 fibers

Factorization of the 3d superconformal index

We prove that 3d superconformal index for general =2 U(N) gauge group with fundamentals and anti-fundmentals with/without Chern-Simons terms is factorized into vortex and anti-vortex partition function. We show that for simple cases, 3d vortex partition function coincides with a suitable topological open string partition function. We provide much more elegant derivation at the index level for =2 Seiberg-like dualities of unitary gauge groups with fundamantal matters and =4 mirror symmetry1114sciescopu

Domain Adaptive Transfer Attack (DATA)-based Segmentation Networks for Building Extraction from Aerial Images

Semantic segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained much attention in relation to remote sensing and have achieved remarkable performance for the extraction of buildings from high-resolution aerial images. However, the issue of limited generalization for unseen images remains. When there is a domain gap between the training and test datasets, CNN-based segmentation models trained by a training dataset fail to segment buildings for the test dataset. In this paper, we propose segmentation networks based on a domain adaptive transfer attack (DATA) scheme for building extraction from aerial images. The proposed system combines the domain transfer and adversarial attack concepts. Based on the DATA scheme, the distribution of the input images can be shifted to that of the target images while turning images into adversarial examples against a target network. Defending adversarial examples adapted to the target domain can overcome the performance degradation due to the domain gap and increase the robustness of the segmentation model. Cross-dataset experiments and the ablation study are conducted for the three different datasets: the Inria aerial image labeling dataset, the Massachusetts building dataset, and the WHU East Asia dataset. Compared to the performance of the segmentation network without the DATA scheme, the proposed method shows improvements in the overall IoU. Moreover, it is verified that the proposed method outperforms even when compared to feature adaptation (FA) and output space adaptation (OSA).Comment: 11pages, 12 figure

Pricing Behaviour of the Monopolistic and Duopolistic Firms in the Long Run with Heterogeneous Products

Scholars have compared the pricing behaviour where a monopolist in the short run produces heterogeneous products 1 and 2, and a duopolist i produces goods i (i = 1, 2), where there are exogenous shocks to marginal cost and/or industry demand. This pricing behaviour is short run in that no entry is considered. However, this paper considers whether the existence of a potential entrant producing heterogeneous goods affects the pricing behaviour of the established monopolist under the same random shocks

Symmetry-protected flatband condition for Hamiltonians with local symmetry

We derive symmetry-based conditions for tight-binding Hamiltonians with flatbands to have compact localized eigenstates occupying a single unit cell. The conditions are based on unitary operators commuting with the Hamiltonian and associated with local symmetries that guarantee compact localized states and a flatband. We illustrate the conditions for compact localized states and flatbands with simple Hamiltonians with given symmetries. We also apply these results to general cases such as the Hamiltonian with long-range hoppings and higher-dimensional Hamiltonian.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Flying path optimization in UAV-assisted IoT sensor networks

AbstractIn this paper, we present an optimal flying path for unmanned aerial vehicle-assisted internet of things sensor networks using a location aware multi-layer information map considering different utility functions based on the sensor density, energy consumption, flight time, and flying risk level. The overall weighted sum of multi-objective utility functions is maximized using the genetic algorithm. The simulation results verify that the optimum solution points can be obtained by adjusting the weights while satisfying the required constraints