The paradigm of mobile agents reached its popularity and attraction from typical application scenarios, which are located in the area of electronic commerce. In these common application scenarios, mobile agents get a task from its owner to buy certain goods. To fulfill this task, the agent wanders to various merchants and collects information about the different offers. In this paper we present...

In the decision-making literature, it is known that preferences between two options can be influenced in different ways by the introduction of a third option. We investigated whether such influences could be demonstrated when making decisions about qualitative aspects of episodic memories. In a baseline condition, participants were asked which of two dissimilar events they remembered more vivid...

This six-year study of the causes of technology adoption and its effect upon new venture growth explains anomalous past findings that new non-technology based ventures have been slow to adopt technology compared with established businesses. In contrast, I found that new ventures invest early in product design technology and low cost marketing technologies; however, they hold off adoption of pro...

In [18], Sighesada, Kawasaki and Teramoto presented a system of partial differential equations for modeling spatial segregation of interacting species. Apart from competitive Lotka-Volterra (reaction) and population pressure (cross-diffusion) terms, a convective term modeling the populations attraction to more favorable environmental regions was included. In this article, we study numerically a...

This work explains the development of a novel approach to beautify a face, merging an evolutionary approach and aesthetics graph drawing. The objective of this work is to build a beautify face seen against the input face. The aesthetics graph drawing algorithm works as the mutation operator. The approach of force-directed graph drawing which in turn is the solution to aesthetical graph drawing ...

This paper introduces an improved electromagnetism-like algorithm (IEM) for recurrent fuzzy neural controller design. The hybrid IEM algorithm combines the advantages of the electromagnetism-like (EM) algorithm and the genetic algorithm (GA). The proposed IEM is composed of initialization, local search, total force calculation, movement, and evaluation. For recurrent fuzzy neural controller des...

A fundamental proposition in marketing strategy is that a market orientation is positively related to firm performance. However, the mechanisms of this relationship have yet to be explored in detail, especially in service industries where intangible assets are relatively more important. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a model that identifies important intermediate variables between...

Recently a high number of new innovative enterprises faced different competitive markets by promoting innovation both in products and services through open innovation web-based platforms, which allow the collaboration of individuals and companies and the so-called crowdsourcing. A key issue concerns the identification of the most important motivations which could attract users with a specific r...

During the last years, there was rapid development in the world port industry which is considered to have resulted from the increase of universal trade. The key to the development of each port is its adaptability to the earliest developments and its resistance to the increasing competition. The influence zones of each port are characterised by instability, while each port authority aims at the ...

Briefly studying names of four members of a hypothetical group produces identification with and attraction to that group, a finding labeled implicit partisanship (IP; Greenwald, Pickrell, & Farnham, 2002). The original demonstration of IP used human groups in a competitive context. Experiments 1 and 2 varied these procedures by using, respectively, a cooperative intergroup context and non-human...