Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games

Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games

Internet auctions in marketing: The consumer perspective

Internet auctions for consumer are among the most popular and most successful business models in electronic commerce. Research so far, however, has focused on prerequisites and consequences of auctions as a marketing intstrument of suppliers. Even though it is a key success factor from a marketing perspective, the demand side has not inspired similar attention. This paper focuses on the attitudes, motives, and behavior of auction customers. It shows why ccurrent beliefs about bidder characteristics are myths. Taking these misconceptions as a starting point, the existence of an experiential and a pragmatic type of auction customer is proposed. An explorative empirical study looking for the characteristics of both types of auction customers is described. Results indicate that less than half of auction shoppers in the sudy are experiential oriented. Except substantial additional demand concerning technological and emotional qualities of auctions these shoppers do not differ dramatically from pragmatic oriented shoppers. Both types are open-minded towards further development of consumer auctions to commercial marketplaces. Business models of auctioneers and suppliers should concentrate on the basic utility of the auction algorithm by facilitating individual matchmaking instead of pursuing costly additional utility by promoting the entertainment value of auctions. --

Attitudinal Explanation On Virtual Shopping Intention

Virtual stores provide great efficiency in the retail value chain, and their existence has tremendously paved the way for electronic commerce. Understanding the intention of consumers to shop online in attitudinal perspective will provide important contribution to the area of e-commerce. This research proposes Task Technology Fit, Perceived Ease of Use, and Perceived Usefulness as the factors that drive consumers’ intention. The results from our survey study of 310 online consumers in Indonesia indicate that user TTF is the determinant for PEoU and PU. Our hierarchical model also reports that PEoU is the mediating effect on the relationship between TTF and Intention. The resulting model explains a large portion of the factors that lead a user’s behavioural intention to use a virtual shop. Keywords: Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Task Technology Fit, Virtual Shoppin

Personality in Computational Advertising: A Benchmark

In the last decade, new ways of shopping online have increased the possibility of buying products and services more easily and faster than ever. In this new context, personality is a key determinant in the decision making of the consumer when shopping. A person’s buying choices are influenced by psychological factors like impulsiveness; indeed some consumers may be more susceptible to making impulse purchases than others. Since affective metadata are more closely related to the user’s experience than generic parameters, accurate predictions reveal important aspects of user’s attitudes, social life, including attitude of others and social identity. This work proposes a highly innovative research that uses a personality perspective to determine the unique associations among the consumer’s buying tendency and advert recommendations. In fact, the lack of a publicly available benchmark for computational advertising do not allow both the exploration of this intriguing research direction and the evaluation of recent algorithms. We present the ADS Dataset, a publicly available benchmark consisting of 300 real advertisements (i.e., Rich Media Ads, Image Ads, Text Ads) rated by 120 unacquainted individuals, enriched with Big-Five users’ personality factors and 1,200 personal users’ pictures

Agent Based E-Market: Framework, Design, and Implementation

Attempt has been made to design and develop a complete adoptive Multi Agent System pertaining to merchant brokering stage of Customer Buying Behaviour Model with the intent of appropriate framework. Intelligent agents are autonomous entity which observe and act upon an environment. In general, they are software robots and vitally used in variety of e-Business applications. This paper focuses on the discussions on electronic markets and the adoptive role, which agents can play in information transformation for automating e-market transactions. It is proposed to develop a framework for agent-based electronic markets for buyers and sellers totally with the assistance of software agents.Agent Oriented e-Business, Agent Oriented e-Markets, Buyer/Seller Agents, Java, Multi Agent Systems