International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making

With the increasing popularity of online shopping services, e-stores are experiencing ever more fierce competition. Thus, it is imperative that managers take steps to improve their services and ensure customer loyalty, and this can only be done by understanding their customers' needs and developing appropriate marketing strategies. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a new hybrid gray relational model to enhance strategies by adopting innovation and creativity to achieve the aspiration level in each dimension/criterion of satisfying/promoting human life and convenient service. This new hybrid gray relational model, which can improve the performance of each criteria to close the aspiration level of each reference point, will address interdependent problems among dimensions/criteria in the real world and provide feedback. More specifically, a DANP (DEMATEL-based ANP) and a gray relational assessment model will be combined to produce an influential network relationship map (INRM), showing the influential weights and gaps between the actual performance and the level of aspiration. As such, the contribution made by this research will be to produce the best strategies for e-store managers to improve their business model in order to meet customers' needs, encourage them to repurchase, and to enable stores to provide the most effective and efficient service for their customers.

Companies pursuing extension of their activities and new companies in establishment phase are using various concepts and techniques to consider location decision, because location greatly affects both fixed and variable costs and on the overall profit of the company. This paper suggests a new use of quality function deployment (QFD) for facility location selection problem instead of applying it to traditional product quality promotion. Fuzzy sets concept is also incorporated to deal with imprecise nature of the linguistic judgments of decision makers. First, fuzzy QFD as a stand-alone approach is presented to address international facility location selection decision. To consider resource limitations and operational constraints, fuzzy goal programming is combined with fuzzy quality function deployment to present a developed approach to deal with global facility location-allocation decision. A demonstration of the applicability of proposed methodologies in a real-world problem is presented.

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) is one of the most widely used decision methodologies. Because every kind of MCDM approach has unique strengths and weaknesses, it is difficult to determine which kind of MCDM approach is best suited to a specific problem. Therefore, a new decision-making method is proposed herein, based on linguistic information and intersection concepts; it is called the linguistic intersection method (LIM). Notably, the linguistic variables are more suited to expressing the opinion of each decision maker. There are four MCDM methods: TOPSIS, ELECTRE, PROMETHEE and VIKOR which are included in the LIM. First, each MCDM approach is used to determine the ranking order of all alternatives in accordance with the linguistic evaluations of decision makers. Then, the intersection set is determined with regard to the better alternatives of all methods. Third, the final ranking order of alternatives in the intersection set can be determined by the proposed method. Lastly, an example is given to describe the procedure of the proposed method. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a simulation test is provided to compare the LIM with the linguistic MCDM method. According to the comparison results, the proposed method is more stable in determining the ranking order of all decision alternatives.

Surveillance operators normally analyze vast amounts of sensor data in order to find conflict situations, and threatening or unusual activities while allowing the continuous flow of goods and people. Semi-automatic support may reduce the time needed for the detection of such situations, generating early warnings that can prevent accidents or provide time to prepare countermeasures. In order to provide adequate cognitive support for operators and guide the design of more efficient surveillance systems, this paper investigates the human analytical reasoning process of detecting anomalous behavior through a case study, the surveillance of sea areas. The analysis of data gathered during interviews and participant observations at three maritime control centers and the inspection of video recordings of real incidents lead to a characterization of operators' analytical processes. We suggest how to support these processes using data mining and visualization, and we derive recommendations for designers and developers of future maritime control systems.

A geocollaborative application integrates geographical information with collaboration support. Its implementation involves reasoning about the most adequate mix of technical features, human requirements and collaboration models. This paper proposes a framework for guiding and assessing the design of geocollaborative systems using a set of measurable indicators. We define five key indicators (KI): awareness, mobility, proximity, collaborative visualization and geographic relationships. These KI were derived from an extensive review of the state-of-the-art. The framework was validated in two case studies involving support to geologists working in the field and police agents evacuating crowded places. The case studies elucidate how the framework helps analyzing as-is and to-be collaborative scenarios, which constitute the design cycle posited by the design-science paradigm. This research is relevant to implementers in two ways: highlighting important qualities of geocollaboration systems and offering a structured mechanism to assess the design process.

Social bookmarking Websites are popular nowadays for they provide platforms that are easy and clear to browse and organize Web pages. Users can add tags on Web pages to allow easy comprehension and retrieval of Web pages. However, tag spams could also be added to promote the opportunity of being referenced of a Web page, which is troublesome to users for accessing uninterested Web pages. In this work, we proposed a scheme to automatically detect such tag spams using a proposed text mining approach based on self-organizing map (SOM) model. We used SOM to find the associations among Web pages as well as tags. Such associations were then used to discover the relationships between Web pages and tags. Tag spams can then be detected according to such relationships. Experiments were conducted on a set of Web pages collected from a social bookmarking site and obtained promising result.

Information visualization can accelerate perception, provide insight and control, and harness this flood of valuable data to gain a competitive advantage in making business decisions. Although such a statement seems to be obvious, there is a lack in the literature of practical evidence of the benefit of information visualization. The main contribution of this paper is to illustrate how, for a major European apparel retailer, the visualization of performance information plays a critical role in improving business decisions and in extracting insights from Redio Frequency Idetification (RFID)-based performance measures. In this paper, we identify — based on a literature review — three fundamental managerial functions of information visualization, namely as: a communication medium, a knowledge management means, and a decision-support instrument. Then, we provide — based on real industrial case evidence — how information visualization supports business decision-making. Several examples are provided to evidence the benefit of information visualization through its three identified managerial functions. We find that — depending on the way performance information is shaped, communicated, and made interactive — it not only helps decision making, but also offers a means of knowledge creation, as well as an appropriate communication channel.

We propose a pricing model for convertible bonds based on the utility-indifference method and get access to the empirical results by use of Information Technology. By using the stochastic control theory, the general expression of utility indifference price on convertible bonds is obtained under the CIR interest rate model. Furthermore, using the proposed theoretical model, we present an empirical pricing study of China's market, using three convertible bonds and more than 70 months of daily market prices. The parameters value is estimated by the maximum likelihood method, and the prices of convertible bonds are simulated by the Monte Carlo approach. The empirical results indicate that the theoretical prices are higher than the actual market prices 0.24–4.58%, and the utility indifference prices are better than the Black–Scholes (BS) prices.