An examination of the relationships between consumer benefits, satisfaction, and loyalty in the purchase of retail store branded products

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between consumer benefits (i.e., utilitarian and hedonic) and consumer satisfaction, loyalty, and word of mouth communication in a retail store branded product context. The independent variables examined were the utilitarian and hedonic consumer benefits associated· with a retail store branded product purchase. The dependent variables in the study included retail store brand satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty, behavioral loyalty (share of purchases), and word of mouth communication. A non-experimental survey research design was used to collect data from a college student sample at a major university in the southeast. The final sample consisted of 276 students. The survey included 34 items that measured the independent and dependent variables, as well as demographic questions. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to evaluate five hypotheses. The overall fit of the final structural equation model was supported by a comparative fit index (CFI) of 0.941. Significant positive relationships were found between retail store brand utilitarian/hedonic consumer benefits and satisfaction, satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty, and attitudinal loyalty and word of mouth communication. Non-significant relationships were found between retail store brand satisfaction and word of mouth communication, and between retail store brand satisfaction and share of purchases

The Face of Fakes: U.S. Consumers and Counterfeit Fashion Products

Counterfeit products pose a serious threat to fashion product brand owners and to the world economy. While research on the demand side of counterfeiting has grown over the past two decades, few extant studies have been conducted among non-student consumers outside Asia and Europe and few studies have focused on product categories other than consumer electronic-related items. Using a sample of U.S. consumers (N=305), the current research investigates consumer attitudes in the context of fashion products. Findings suggest that gender and education are the two variables most frequently related to purchase intention for counterfeits, beliefs about counterfeit products, and ethicality. In addition, age appears to affect consumer stance on the social cost of counterfeiting, and education is related to anti-big business attitudes. In contrast, income does not appear to be related to any of the focal variables examined in the study

CageCoach: Sharing-Oriented Redaction-Capable Distributed Cryptographic File System

The modern data economy is built on sharing data. However, sharing data can be an expensive and risky endeavour. Existing sharing systems like Distributed File Systems provide full read, write, and execute Role-based Access Control (RBAC) for sharing data, but can be expensive and difficult to scale. Likewise such systems operate on a binary access model for their data, either a user can read all the data or read none of the data. This approach is not necessary for a more read-only oriented data landscape, and one where data contains many dimensions that represent a risk if overshared. In order to encourage users to share data and smooth out the process of accessing such data a new approach is needed. This new approach must simplify the RBAC of older DFS approaches to something more read-only and something that integrates redaction for user protections. To accomplish this we present CageCoach, a simple sharing-oriented Distributed Cryptographic File System (DCFS). CageCoach leverages the simplicity and speed of basic HTTP, linked data concepts, and automatic redaction systems to facilitate safe and easy sharing of user data. The implementation of CageCoach is available at https://github.umn.edu/CARPE415/CageCoach

Efficacy of Hedonic Shopping Value in Predicting Word of Mouth

This research examines the efficacy of hedonic shopping value in predicting tourists’ satisfaction and word of mouth communication. The data were collected through face-to-face interviews of 506 tourists of whom 383 respondents indicated that they had shopped and made a purchase during their holidays in Turkey. A total of 345 completed interviews were used for analysis. Findings suggest that hedonic shopping value is strongly linked to tourists’ satisfaction and word of mouth. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed within the context of retailing industry in a maturing tourist destination

Caractérisation du ruissellement urbain et évaluation de l'efficacité épuratoire d'un bassin de rétention

Ce projet de maîtrise a comme objectif de caractériser le ruissellement urbain pour un quartier résidentiel de la région de Québec. Un bassin d'orage a été sélectionné dans un quartier résidentiel nouvellement construit et une campagne d'échantillonnage de l'eau de ruissellement a été conduite à l'entrée et la sortie du bassin d'orage existant. L'ouvrage de sortie de ce bassin d'orage a ensuite été modifié pour y augmenter le temps de rétention et en évaluer l'effet sur l'enlèvement de polluants. Il a été trouvé que l'eau de ruissellement présentait des concentrations en polluants, tels les matières en suspension (MeS), métaux lourds et azote ammoniacal, semblables à celles trouvées dans la littérature. Les concentrations plus importantes sont relevées au printemps lors des premiers lessivages de rue après l'hiver. Le bassin d'orage original, ou bassin de rétention, a démontré une efficacité d'enlèvement moyenne de 56% pour les MeS, 20 % pour le zinc et 10 % pour l'azote ammoniacal. Son adaptation a permis de grandement augmenter ces efficacités d'enlèvement. Celles-ci ont atteint 82% pour les MeS, 42% pour le zinc et 84% pour l'azote ammoniacal. L'augmentation du temps de rétention du bassin d'orage permet donc d'améliorer considérablement l'enlèvement des polluants présents dans le ruissellement urbain avant qu'ils n'atteignent le milieu récepteur et permettrait donc d'améliorer la qualité de l'eau des cours d'eau en milieu urbain

Elastic and anelastic relaxations accompanying relaxor ferroelectric behaviour of Ba6GaNb9O30 tetragonal tungsten bronze from resonant ultrasound spectroscopy

Tetragonal tungsten bronze (TTB) structures offer some promise as lead-free ferroelectrics and have an advantage of great flexibility in terms of accessible composition ranges due to the number of crystallographic sites available for chemical substitution. The ferroic properties of interest are coupled with strain, which will be important in the context of stability, switching dynamics and thin film properties. Coupling of strain with the ferroelectric order parameter gives rise to changes in elastic properties, and these have been investigated for a ceramic sample of Ba6GaNb9O30 (BGNO) by resonant ultrasound spectroscopy. Room temperature values of the shear and bulk moduli for BGNO are rather higher than for TTBs with related composition which are orthorhombic at room temperature, consistent with suppression of the ferroelectric transition. Instead, a broad, rounded minimum in the shear modulus measured at ~1 MHz is accompanied by a broad rounded maximum in acoustic loss near 115 K and signifies relaxor freezing behaviour. Elastic softening with falling temperature from room temperature, ahead of the freezing interval, is attributed to the development of dynamical polar nanoregions (PNRs), whilst the nonlinear stiffening below ~115 K is consistent with a spectrum of relaxation times for freezing of the PNR microstructure

DeTorrent: An Adversarial Padding-only Traffic Analysis Defense

While anonymity networks like Tor aim to protect the privacy of their users, they are vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks such as Website Fingerprinting (WF) and Flow Correlation (FC). Recent implementations of WF and FC attacks, such as Tik-Tok and DeepCoFFEA, have shown that the attacks can be effectively carried out, threatening user privacy. Consequently, there is a need for effective traffic analysis defense. There are a variety of existing defenses, but most are either ineffective, incur high latency and bandwidth overhead, or require additional infrastructure. As a result, we aim to design a traffic analysis defense that is efficient and highly resistant to both WF and FC attacks. We propose DeTorrent, which uses competing neural networks to generate and evaluate traffic analysis defenses that insert 'dummy' traffic into real traffic flows. DeTorrent operates with moderate overhead and without delaying traffic. In a closed-world WF setting, it reduces an attacker's accuracy by 61.5%, a reduction 10.5% better than the next-best padding-only defense. Against the state-of-the-art FC attacker, DeTorrent reduces the true positive rate for a $10^{-5}$ false positive rate to about .12, which is less than half that of the next-best defense. We also demonstrate DeTorrent's practicality by deploying it alongside the Tor network and find that it maintains its performance when applied to live traffic.Comment: Accepted to the 24th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2024

Impact of harvest on switchgrass leaf microbial communities

Switchgrass is a promising feedstock for biofuel production, with potential for leveraging its native microbial community to increase productivity and resilience to environmental stress. Here, we characterized the bacterial, archaeal and fungal diversity of the leaf microbial community associated with four switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) genotypes, subjected to two harvest treatments (annual harvest and unharvested control), and two fertilization levels (fertilized and unfertilized control), based on 16S rRNA gene and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region amplicon sequencing. Leaf surface and leaf endosphere bacterial communities were significantly different with Alphaproteobacteria enriched in the leaf surface and Gammaproteobacteria and Bacilli enriched in the leaf endosphere. Harvest treatment significantly shifted presence/absence and abundances of bacterial and fungal leaf surface community members: Gammaproteobacteria were significantly enriched in harvested and Alphaproteobacteria were significantly enriched in unharvested leaf surface communities. These shifts were most prominent in the upland genotype DAC where the leaf surface showed the highest enrichment of Gammaproteobacteria, including taxa with 100% identity to those previously shown to have phytopathogenic function. Fertilization did not have any significant impact on bacterial or fungal communities. We also identified bacterial and fungal taxa present in both the leaf surface and leaf endosphere across all genotypes and treatments. These core taxa were dominated by Methylobacterium, Enterobacteriaceae, and Curtobacterium, in addition to Aureobasidium, Cladosporium, Alternaria and Dothideales. Local core leaf bacterial and fungal taxa represent promising targets for plant microbe engineering and manipulation across various genotypes and harvest treatments. Our study showcases, for the first time, the significant impact that harvest treatment can have on bacterial and fungal taxa inhabiting switchgrass leaves and the need to include this factor in future plant microbial community studies