Situation-Based Shifts in Consumer Web Site Benefit Salience: The Joint Role of Affect and Cognition

This study addresses the process by which differences in web site benefit salience arise in consumers’ minds for different anticipated usage situations. We investigate two routes by which situation may determine consumer benefit salience and find support for both route structures. The results indicate that individuals’ relative benefit importance ratings shift between different anticipated usage situations, both directly, and indirectly, through consumers’ anticipated affective states. Furthermore, the number of benefits that is rated as important by consumers is found to also differ depending on their anticipated affective states, providing further insight into why consumer benefit salience may vary across situations.affective route;cognitive route;situatieafhankelijkheid;usage situation;web site benefit salience;HD9696.82

How Tolerable is Delay? Consumers' Evaluations of Internet Web Sites After Waiting

How consumers’ waiting times affect their retrospective evaluations of Internet Web Sites is investigated in four computer-based experiments. Results show that waiting can but does not always negatively affect evaluations of Web Sites. Results also show that the potential negative effects of waiting can be neutralized by managing waiting experiences effectively. A conceptual framework and formal random utility model is introduced.Marketing;consumer preference models;waiting experiences;Internet marketing

Forecast accuracy, information technologies and the performance of inventory policies under multi-level rolling schedule environments

Our incentive is to study the behaviour of lot-sizing rules in a multi-level context when forecast demand is subject to changes within the forecast window. To our knowledges, only Bookbinder and Heath (1988) have proposed a lot-sizing study in a multi-echelon rolling schedule with probabilistic demands. But their simulation study was limited to two arborescent structures with 6 nodes. By means of an extensive simulation study we show that it is always worth decreasing the error magnitude. This should encourage companies to develop Electronic Data Interchange to ameliorate demand forecast.Although the presence or absence of forecast errors matters more than the error level, we show that lot-sizing rules exhibit significant differences in their behaviour as the level of error is augmented. This paper also provides a clear description of the rolling procedure when applied to general product structures, probabilistic demand within the forecast window and positive lead times.economics of technology ;

Situation Variation in Consumers’ Media Channel Consideration

In this article, the authors investigate consumers’ consideration of media channels during different usage situations. They develop a model that explains consumers’ media channel consideration as a function of the media channel’s perceived benefits. In addition, they hypothesize that the usage situation affects consumers’ media channel consideration and that situation-based benefit requirements moderate the effect of the benefits on their channel consideration. The authors test the hypothesized relationships using survey data from 341 consumers regarding their consideration of 12 different media channels used by manufacturers to communicate product information across three product-related usage situations. The results of the analyses support the proposed model structure and confirm the expected relationships among perceived media channel benefits, usage situations, media channel requirements, and consumers’ media channel consideration.marketing ;

Consumer Preferences for Mass Customization

Increasingly, firms allow consumers to mass customize their products. In this study, the authors investigate consumers’ evaluations of different mass customization configurations when asked to mass customize a product. For instance, mass customization configurations may differ in the number of modules that may be mass customized. The authors find – in the context of mass customization of personal computers – that mass customization configuration affects the product utility consumers can achieve in mass customization as well as their perception of mass customization complexity. In turn, product utility and complexity affect the utility consumers derive from using a certain mass customization configuration. More specifically, product utility has a positive, and complexity has a negative effect on mass customization configuration utility. The effect of complexity is direct as well as indirect, because complexity also lowers product utility. The authors also find that consumers with high product expertise find mass customization configurations less complex than consumers with low product expertise and that for more expert consumers complexity has a less negative impact on product utility. The study has important managerial implications for how companies can design their mass customization configuration to increase utility and decrease complexity.marketing ;

On-Manifold Preintegration for Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry

Current approaches for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) are able to attain highly accurate state estimation via nonlinear optimization. However, real-time optimization quickly becomes infeasible as the trajectory grows over time, this problem is further emphasized by the fact that inertial measurements come at high rate, hence leading to fast growth of the number of variables in the optimization. In this paper, we address this issue by preintegrating inertial measurements between selected keyframes into single relative motion constraints. Our first contribution is a \emph{preintegration theory} that properly addresses the manifold structure of the rotation group. We formally discuss the generative measurement model as well as the nature of the rotation noise and derive the expression for the \emph{maximum a posteriori} state estimator. Our theoretical development enables the computation of all necessary Jacobians for the optimization and a-posteriori bias correction in analytic form. The second contribution is to show that the preintegrated IMU model can be seamlessly integrated into a visual-inertial pipeline under the unifying framework of factor graphs. This enables the application of incremental-smoothing algorithms and the use of a \emph{structureless} model for visual measurements, which avoids optimizing over the 3D points, further accelerating the computation. We perform an extensive evaluation of our monocular \VIO pipeline on real and simulated datasets. The results confirm that our modelling effort leads to accurate state estimation in real-time, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: 20 pages, 24 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO) 201

Shopping Context and Consumers' Mental Representation of Complex Shopping Trip Decision Problems

Depending on the shopping context, consumers may develop different mental representations of complex shopping trip decision problems to help them interpret the decision situation that they face and evaluate alternative courses of action. To investigate these mental representations and how they vary across contexts, the authors propose a causal network structure that allows for a formal representation of how context-specific benefits requirements affect consumers’ evaluation of decision alternative attributes. They empirically test hypotheses derived from the framework, using data on consumers’ mental representations of a complex shopping trip decision problem across four shopping contexts that differ in terms of opening hour restrictions and shopping purpose, and find support for the proposed structure and hypotheses.retailing;consumer decision-making;context effects;mental representations;shopping trip decisions