A Combined Routing Method for Ad hoc Wireless Networks

To make ad hoc wireless networks adaptive to different mobility and traffic patterns, we studied in this thesis an approach to swap from one protocol to another protocol dynamically, while routing continues. By the insertion of a new layer, we were able to make each node in the ad hoc wireless network notify each other about the protocol swap. To ensure that routing works efficiently after the protocol swap, we initialized the destination routing protocol\u27s data structures and reused the previous routing information to build the new routing table. We also tested our approach under different network topologies and traffic patterns in static networks to learn whether the swap is fast and whether the swap incurs too much overload . We found that the swap latency is related to the destination protocol and the topology of the network. We also found that the control packet ratio after swap is close to the protocol running without swap, which means our method does not incur too many control packets for swap

The Effects of Physiological Arousal and Message Framing on Fitness App Users’ Privacy Decisions

Privacy issues are becoming prevalent in users’ fitness app usage and hence gaining great attention from users and policymakers. A typical example is inappropriate authorization of access to app data. Yet, it is not clear what factors will influence users’ third-party authorization. Specifically, users’ situational states are rarely considered. This study thus investigates how an important situational state, i.e., physiological arousal, affects users’ decisions of authorizing private data in fitness apps to SNS. We concurrently examine a factor of the decision context, i.e., message framing, a design heuristic to nudge people’s privacy decisions. We hypothesize that both high physiological arousal and loss-framed message increase users’ likelihood to grant third-party authorization, and there is a positive interaction between the two factors. We plan to conduct an experiment to test the hypotheses

Selective Attention in Viewing Webpages: The Effects of Perceptual Salience and Content Relevance on Attention and Memory

It is well acknowledged that viewers’ attention is a scarce resource on the web so that it is of great importance to figure out the factors in determining attention allocation when Internet users are viewing webpages. Current study addresses above question by reviewing prior literature on selective attention and proposing a research model, which emphasizes the roles of perceptual salience and perceived relevance of a visual object in catching and holding viewers’ attention as well as in increasing their memory of the visual object. In addition, our research takes a prevalent online information presentation format into consideration, i.e., a visual object that integrates both pictorial and textual information. We discuss the different roles of pictures and texts in affecting viewers’ attention. A lab experiment is designed to test our hypotheses and we use eye-tracker to record viewers’ attention. We conclude our work by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of this study

The Dark Side of Dark Mode: How Does Screen Display Mode Affect Financial Crimes

There is an emerging trend in digital interface design to include the dark mode (i.e., font in white against a dark background) in addition to the traditional default light mode (i.e., font in black against a white background). While this innovation was motivated by usability considerations, it is unknown whether and how different screen display modes can influence user behaviours. Drawing on the findings from environmental psychology, we propose that screen display mode can influence users’ moral decision making. Specifically, we focus on users’ decisions to conduct financial crimes and predict that users are more likely to conduct financial crimes when using dark (vs. light) mode. We propose perceived anonymity as the underlying mechanism and theorize the moderating effect of screen size. Two laboratory experiments were designed to test on two financial crimes, namely, insurance fraud and insider trading. The potential theoretical and practical contributions are discussed

The Effects of Interactivity and Vividness of Functional Control in Changing Web Consumers\u27 Attitudes

The study proposed will investigate the effects of functional control on online consumers’ attitude formation. Functional control is an interactive interface feature that allows consumers to virtually try different functions of online products. An attitude formation model for analyzing and assessing the influences of functional control is proposed based on existing theories of vividness and interactivity, which are the two fundamental technological characteristics of functional control. The model suggests that functional control has direct effects on both attitudes toward online product presentation and attitudes toward products themselves, and that attitudes toward different online product presentation partly mediate the effects of functional control on attitudes toward products. A laboratory experiment has been designed to test the model. We expect that the results of the study will identify particular areas deserving attention for applying functional control to improve e-commerce environments

ACTIVE PARTICIPATION IN PROBLEM SOLVING VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: A LEARNING PERSPECTIVE

Active participation of members is considered essential to the success of virtual communities. We incorporated the Adaptive Structuration Theory and Expectancy-Value Theory to propose a conceptual model in explaining active participation in problem solving virtual communities from a learning perspective. In this model, learning orientation and learning expectancy were identified as predictors of active participation according to Expectancy-Value Theory. We further analyzed the influence of structural feature (community adaptivity) and structural spirits (leadership and conflict management) based on Adaptive Structuration Theory and suggested that they would affect active participation through learning expectancy. The theoretical model presented in this article provided a fresh perspective on problem solving virtual community and we hope the findings would suggest important implications for the design and management of problem solving virtual communities

Enhancing Shared Understanding in Collaborative Online Shopping

This study explores the emerging phenomenon of collaborative online shopping by comparing three navigation support designs: separate navigation with location cue, split screen navigation, and tightly-bonded shared navigation. The impacts of the three navigation support designs on collaborative customers’ actual and perceived shared understanding were investigated in a laboratory experiment. The moderating effect of shopping group structure was also examined. The experimental results show that (1) split screen navigation leads to more actual shared understanding than separate navigation with location cue; (2) tightly-bonded shared navigation leads to less perceived shared understanding than split screen navigation; (3) in terms of actual shared understanding, the superiority of split screen navigation over tightly-bonded shared navigation is less prominent for customers in co-buyers structure than for those in buyer/advisor structure. The results also indicate that perceived shared understanding influences the perceived decision quality, which further affects customers’ intentions to revisit the online store

Harder and Smoother on Touchscreens? How Interaction Mode Affects Consumer Product Judgment

Emerging technologies, such as touchscreen interaction and mid-air gesture-based interaction, are changing the ways we interact with products virtually. However, despite research on how these technologies can be leveraged to improve consumers’ shopping experience, few studies have explored how they affect consumer product judgment. This study explores how two types of gesture-based human-device interaction modes (i.e., touchscreen interaction and mid-air interaction) influence consumers’ judgment on product haptic attributes (i.e., softness and roughness). Results from a lab experiment reveal that interacting with a product via touchscreen, as compared via a mid-air gesture controller, leads to a lower perception of product softness and roughness. Furthermore, such effects are more salient among users with a higher level of need for touch. The results imply that people may mistakenly use the incidental haptic experience gained from interaction device (e.g., the solid and smooth haptic experience a user feels when interacting with touchscreen surface) in product judgment although such experience is not directly related to the product being evaluated. Theoretical contributions, practical implications, and future research are discussed

Co-Navigability, Tracking Fulfillment and Autonomy in Collaborative Online Shopping

Shopping is generally a social behavior, frequently done while accompanied by friends or family. Lack of social interaction is considered to be a critical barrier that defers customers from shopping online. As a new paradigm of e-commerce, collaborative online shopping (COS), defined by Zhu et al. (2010) as “the activity in which a customer shops at an online store concurrently with one or more remotely located shopping partners”, may dramatically improve customers online shopping experience by fulfilling their needs to shop in a social and collaborative way (O’Hara and Perry, 2001). Collaborative online shopping would not only benefit online customers, but also furnish online vendors with more potential revenues, since shoppers accompanied by others generate more need recognition and spend more than when shopping alone (Kurt et al., 2011). Collaborative online shopping is emerging as an instrumental way to largely increase customer satisfaction and generate more revenues for online vendors. For example, according to Internet Retailer (2010), collaborative online shopping helps drive 15% increase in sales at a leading German skincare website. Although collaborative online shopping is very common in everyday life (Huang et al., 2012), it is not well supported by current systems (Benbasat, 2010). Due to the very few findings on COS, both the guidelines for system designers and our understanding towards theCOSmechanisms are rather limited. To fill this research gap, we argue that when customers collaboratively shop with their companions online, they act both as individuals and as members of the shopping group. As shopping group members, customers require information about each other to maintain awareness; while as individuals, they demand flexible means for interacting with the website and the product information (Gutwin and Greenberg, 1998). In consideration of the paramount benefits for online customers/vendors and the deficiency in research findings, much more effort is desired for researchers to comprehensively explore how systems could be designed to better support COS and improve collaborative online customers’ shopping experience by balancing both the group needs (e.g. share and discuss information with each other) and the individual needs (e.g. freely browse product information without much interruption from partners)

Trading Friendship for Value: An Investigation of Collective Privacy Concerns in Social Application Usage

Online social applications do not only acquire individuals’ personal information but also at times collect the personal information of an individual’s social networks. Despite the importance of protecting collective privacy, this topic has received little attention in the information system community. To fill this gap in the literature, this article focuses on three unique issues pertinent to collective privacy. First, drawing on the Communication Privacy Management theory, we offer a theoretical framework on the dimensionality of collective privacy concerns (CPC). Second, we propose to operationalize the three dimensions of CPC using a second-order reflective construct, and we plan to develop a scale for it. Third, we identify antecedents of CPC pertinent to the context of social application usage and propose to test a research model on the relationships between these antecedents and CPC as well as the downstream effect on behavioral intentions