Category: Uncategorized

This study investigates the impact of Internet of Things (IoT) services from a smartphone app in a retail grocery shopping situation. A scenario was arranged whereby 226 participants were to purchase, among other products, fresh salmon in a grocery store using the store’s smartphone app. Findings from a conjoint study show that the following IoT services; “updated expiry date”, “aggregated national customer experience index”, and “personalized offer based on product in the basket” evoked the approach and abated avoidance tendencies to explore the smartphone app, while simultaneously increasing the likelihood of buying based on information from the app. The IoT service “Real-time price” had a varied impact on participant approach-avoidance tendencies to interact with the app. Scenario simulation analysis shows that some IoT services can be a deal-breaker in a competitive grocery market. The study is published in Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, presented at Forskning.no and Kristiania.no.

This study analyzes online customer reviews in order to investigate customers’ preferences regarding cosmetic products. Based on the marketing firm theory, this research explores the possibility of enhancing the bilateral contingent relationships between the customer and the marketing firm within the cosmetics domain. Hence, this study applies market‐search concepts by extracting customer reviews and employing text analytics to identify reinforcers and factors in cosmetic products, which customers are expecting, and their sentiments towards them. Our results suggest that some reinforcers are shared among all customers, but some vary among the different customer segments based on their age and skin tone. The study is published in Managerial and Decision Economics and presented in Kunnskapsmagasinet Kristiania.

Internet of Things Applications in Healthcare: A Focus on Improving Patient Safety: A special issue of Journal of Healthcare Engineering

Call for papers

This special issue seeks to attract original research articles that discuss emerging IoT technologies with regard to their impact on patient safety in healthcare. This special issue especially welcomes analytical, computational, experimental, and clinical research, state-of-the-art reviews, and conceptual and theoretical developments and designs.

Using the theory of the marketing firm, two articles that discuss how marketers in an organization can respond to behaviors resulting from co‐creational customer–customer exchanges. These two papers examine marketer and customer co‐creation processes within the context of bilateral contingencies. The studies are published in Managerial and Decision Economics; 1 and 2.

This paper responds to a call for research on the context-specific effects of human images in different online contexts. This study investigates how inherent facial expressions in a consultant’s profile image influence the likelihood to contact tendency of small business-to-business website visitors. The results from a conjoint study (n = 67) demonstrate that a consultant’s profile image with a smiling facial expression induced a higher likelihood to contact tendency. While the absence of a profile image reduced this tendency, relatively more than an image with a neutral facial expression. In light of these results, implications for small businesses as well as suggestions for future research are discussed. The study is published in Interacting with Computers and presented at Forskning.no.

This study aims to expand understanding of social business processes for co-creation in the service industry. Findings from a case study showed that the banking and finance company in Norway manage to co-create value together with their users. Several new online products and services have been launched since the co-creation lab was launched. The banking and finance companies’ co-creation lab has a small, but stabile group of users. There are, however, findings that indicate that there could been achieved even more value in co-creation process through more and better interaction from the company’s side, as well as introducing an incentive arrangement for the users of the co-creation lab. This study is published at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM).

This study aims to investigate the influence of a male and female sellers ́ profile image and its expressions on the choices made by the peer user within the context of peer-to-peer accommodation rental. We arranged a scenario in which participants evaluated their likelihood to rent an apartment on Airbnb. Results of the conjoint study (r = 0.967, p = 0.000) show that, relative to price and customer reviews, a seller ́s profile image and its facial expression has a strong impact on the likelihood to rent the apartment on Airbnb. Second, the male seller profile image and its facial expression had the strongest impact in both positive and negative directions. Finally, the absence of a seller’s profile image (head silhouette) had a relatively strong negative impact on the likelihood to rent. Sellers looking to sublet property on Airbnb should be aware that their profile image could potentially influence prospective tenants. The study is published in Procedia Computer Science.

This research investigated public sector websites in Norway by focusing on municipalities. Norway consists of 422 municipalities each of which has its own website. To help inform the increasing investments and use of technologies within eGovernment, this study focused on young people’s perceptions of municipality websites. Today’s young people constitute a key user group in the coming years. An online survey was conducted with undergraduate students in Norway. Findings suggest that young adults do not widely use municipality websites and that they visit primarily to search for specific information or use digital services. Results also suggest that young adults prefer digital interaction over face-to-face communication, and email and chat are their most favored ways to interact with the public sector. They consider paper-based communication undesirable. Participants ranked the quality of municipality websites as moderate to good but were not overwhelmingly positive. This study is published at International Conference on Electronic Government and the Information Systems Perspective.

Consumer behavior in retail is changing due to the adoption of technologies such as the Internet and the smartphone. This study focused on studying the relationship between young consumers’ decision-making styles and their propensity to shop clothing online with a smartphone. The Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) was used as base for a survey with young adult students. The results indicated that four out of eight CSI measurements, namely brand consciousness, fashion consciousness, impulsiveness and recreational shopping behavior, positively correlate with the respondents’ frequency to look at and/or buy clothing online with a smartphone. These findings are important for retailers that strive to increase economic earnings from mobile technology solutions. The study is published in Procedia Computer Science.

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology presents an opportunity for retail groceries to develop an infrastructure that makes physical things such as mobile phone, shopping basket, store shelves, digital display, and, even the product itself smart, allowing real-time interaction with customers both in the physical store and in the virtual store. The aim of this study was to expand understanding of how IoT can create value in the retail grocery choice situation. To investigate the impact of IoT-related information on consumer choice in a shopping situation, we arranged a conjoint experiment in which participants purchased fresh salmon in a grocery store. The results demonstrated that relative to static information about price, expiry date, quality, and offers given, the real-time information was the most salient stimulus when choosing fresh salmon. Moreover, quality ratings by other customers were the most salient stimuli among real-time information, followed by an offer based on a product in the shopping cart, real-time expiry date, and real-time price. The study is published in Procedia Computer Science.