An E-Business Model Facilitating Service Provider Selection in B2C E-Commerce

The advent and expansion of the Internet and its applications, among them e-commerce, has provided new opportunities for the emergence of novel e-business models. A portion of these models are in the form of performing a mediatory role to provide some services for customers or businesses, and to facilitate transactions between them. In B2C e-commerce, often, a service consumer may supply his service demand from a range of providers and when he doesn\u27t have any transaction with many of them making an accurate decision becomes challenging. Therefore, he would need to interact with others to acquire relevant information. Current approaches for addressing this issue are generally rating-based and perform poorly. Recently, an experience-based approach has been proposed by ensoy et al [1]. This paper reviews this approach, analyzes its weaknesses and problems and proposes a new model to eliminate those problems, in which a third party assists the consumers in choosing their desired service providers

A new methodology to study customer electrocardiogram using RFM analysis and clustering

One of the primary issues on marketing planning is to know the customer's behavioral trends. A customer's purchasing interest may fluctuate for different reasons and it is important to find the declining or increasing trends whenever they happen. It is important to study these fluctuations to improve customer relationships. There are different methods to increase the customer's willingness such as planning good promotions, an increase on advertisement, etc. This paper proposes a new methodology to measure customer's behavioral trends called customer electrocardiogram. The proposed model of this paper uses K-means clustering method with RFM analysis to study customer's fluctuations over different time frames. We also apply the proposed electrocardiogram methodology for a real-world case study of food industry and the results are discussed in details

Robust solutions to the pollution-routing problem with demand and travel time uncertainty

Freight transportation activities could potentially lead to detrimental effects on the natural and built environments and pose health risks. The importance of the present study is to consider demand and travel time uncertainty in green transport planning by proposing several robust optimization techniques; soft worst case, hard worst case and chance constraints. These techniques provide the most reliable solutions with very limited increase in the objective function related to fuel consumption and CO2-equivalent emissions

Patients' and Physicians' Viewpoints on Interns' Professional Outfit: A Survey in an Iranian Teaching Hospital

Background: A person’s appearance and his/her adherence to the dress code standards are essential in the medical profession. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate patients’ and physicians’ viewpoints on interns’ professional outfits. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study, with the participation of patients and physicians of general departments in a teaching hospital of Kerman University of Medical Sciences in 2018. The patients and physicians were selected through convenience and census method, respectively. To examine the participants’ perspectives on the professional dressing, six schematic images, three for males (1, 2, 3) and three for females (A, B, C) were designed. Data were collected through a structured interview in this way, the schematic images were displayed to the participants and they were asked to express their perspective using a series of questions. Data analyzed using SPSS version20. Results: Totally, 381 patients and 34 physicians participated. The majority of the Participants preferred the professional outfit A for female interns and the professional outfit 1for male interns in response to questions regarding the knowledge, responsibility, patient-care, hygiene, reliability of diagnosis and treatment of diseases, giving emergency consultations, the possibility for discussing sexual and psychiatric problems, as well as life problems. The physicians and patients had the same perspective except for the item about knowledge. (P<0.05). Conclusion: Our study shows that the outfits of physicians were considered by the participants in forming an effective relationship between the doctor and the patient, and the amount of patients' trust.Therefore, training interns for dressing professionally and complying with the necessary standards should be considered. Keywords: Professional Outfits, Hospitals, Physicians, Patients, Professio

The Trend of Disruption in the Functional Brain Network Topology of Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive disorder associated with cognitive dysfunction that alters the brain’s functional connectivity. Assessing these alterations has become a topic of increasing interest. However, a few studies have examined different stages of AD from a complex network perspective that cover different topological scales. This study used resting state fMRI data to analyze the trend of functional connectivity alterations from a cognitively normal (CN) state through early and late mild cognitive impairment (EMCI and LMCI) and to Alzheimer’s disease. The analyses had been done at the local (hubs and activated links and areas), meso (clustering, assortativity, and rich-club), and global (small-world, small-worldness, and efficiency) topological scales. The results showed that the trends of changes in the topological architecture of the functional brain network were not entirely proportional to the AD progression. There were network characteristics that have changed non-linearly regarding the disease progression, especially at the earliest stage of the disease, i.e., EMCI. Further, it has been indicated that the diseased groups engaged somatomotor, frontoparietal, and default mode modules compared to the CN group. The diseased groups also shifted the functional network towards more random architecture. In the end, the methods introduced in this paper enable us to gain an extensive understanding of the pathological changes of the AD process

The trend of disruption in the functional brain network topology of Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive disorder associated with cognitive dysfunction that alters the brain’s functional connectivity. Assessing these alterations has become a topic of increasing interest. However, a few studies have examined different stages of AD from a complex network perspective that cover different topological scales. This study used resting state fMRI data to analyze the trend of functional connectivity alterations from a cognitively normal (CN) state through early and late mild cognitive impairment (EMCI and LMCI) and to Alzheimer’s disease. The analyses had been done at the local (hubs and activated links and areas), meso (clustering, assortativity, and rich-club), and global (small-world, small-worldness, and efficiency) topological scales. The results showed that the trends of changes in the topological architecture of the functional brain network were not entirely proportional to the AD progression. There were network characteristics that have changed non-linearly regarding the disease progression, especially at the earliest stage of the disease, i.e., EMCI. Further, it has been indicated that the diseased groups engaged somatomotor, frontoparietal, and default mode modules compared to the CN group. The diseased groups also shifted the functional network towards more random architecture. In the end, the methods introduced in this paper enable us to gain an extensive understanding of the pathological changes of the AD process

Offering a model of evaluation of trust suggesting between customers and e-stores (B2C) based on approaches of fuzzy logic

To succeed in the e-commerce depends on lots of factors; one of the important and vital ones is trust. In this Paper, we will suggest a model of Fuzzy Logical System which depicts some of the hidden relationships between the critical factors such as security, familiarity, and designing in a B2C commercial website on the one hand, and the competitive factor to other competitors on the other hand. We are going to find the impact of these factors on the decision-making process of people to buy through the B2C commercial websites, and we also will analyze how these factors influence the results of the B2C trading. The study also provides a device to sellers in order to improve their commercial websites; in addition, it provides on-line customers a helping device to buy through the commercial websites. In the study, the sample in the first questionnaire was the investigation of experts of e-commerce, and in the second one was the customers of commercial websites. Also, we have used the Expert Choice software to determine the priority of factors in the first questionnaire, and the SPSS and Excel software for sampling and analysis procedures to find the Fuzzy rules. Finally, we used the Fuzzy logical kit in the MATLAB software to analyze the factors which generate the model

Investigating the Impact of Virtual Communities on Furtherance of Customers’ Buying Behavior

In recent years, virtual communities have been significantly popular and almost all of them are targeted for business profitability. In our study, the profitability of these communities for businesses has been analyzed from a commercial perspective. The study considers virtual community as a business model which can have a great impact on consumer purchase decision process. With respect to reference groups and word-of-mouth recommendations in virtual communities, contributing factors have been detected and a model of impacts and relationships between these factors has been presented. Hypotheses of the mentioned model are evaluated by making use of a questionnaire completed by 110 members of virtual communities. Using AMOS program and path analysis method, statistical analysis of received responses showed that factors such as virtual community's information quality, trust between people, sense of belonging, virtual community members’ perceived benefit and members’ permeability are effective to different degrees, and there is no significant relationship between social identity of members and their permeability

Hybrid Electromagnetism-Like Algorithm for Dynamic Supply Chain Network Design under Traffic Congestion and Uncertainty

With the constantly increasing pressure of the competitive environment, supply chain (SC) decision makers are forced to consider several aspects of business climate. More specifically, they should take into account the endogenous features (e.g., available means of transportation, and the variety of products) and exogenous criteria (e.g., the environmental uncertainty, and transportation system conditions). In this paper, a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for dynamic design of a supply chain network is proposed. In this model, multiple products and multiple transportation modes, the time value of money, traffic congestion, and both supply-side and demand-side uncertainties are considered. Due to the complexity of such models, conventional solution methods are not applicable; therefore, two hybrid Electromagnetism-Like Algorithms (EMA) are designed and discussed for tackling the problem. The numerical results show the applicability of the proposed model and the capabilities of the solution approaches to the MINLP problem