29337903
User Response to Free Trial Restrictions: A Coping Perspective
Software vendors often provide software for free download but with restrictions (e.g., time and/or functionality restrictions). The question that arises is to what extent the restrictions should be set to induce users to procure the full version. This study seeks to answer this question by looking from two perspectives: expectation-disconfirmation and coping behavior. Building on these perspectives, we present a research model of user's coping reactions toward software restrictions. We seek to understand user reactions (i.e., derivation of coping strategy) when their expectation toward trial restrictions is negatively disconfirmed. It is further posited that situational control could moderate the relationship between expectation disconfirmation and coping responses. We believe this research will contribute to enrich the current IS field and benefit market practitioners.
16435152
Comparison-Shopping Websites: An Empirical Investigation on the Influence of Decision Aids and Information Load on Consumer Decision-Making Behavior
Rapid advances in Internet commerce technology have brought about the emergence of comparison-shopping Websites, which act as agents to consolidate vast amounts of product information. Researchers have traditionally focused on incorporating the latest database interrogation technology and investigating the economic implications of the existence of comparison-shopping Websites. Little attention has been paid to understanding whether the decision aids provided are capable of assisting a consumer in managing a large quantity of information or, more importantly, are compatible with the decision-making behavior of the consumer. This study surveys several successful comparison-shopping Websites, enumerates two comercially successful forms of decision aids (i.e., screening and sorting), and examines their effects on decision effectiveness under different information loads. Based on a 3×2×2 factorial controlled experiment, we had three major findings. First, more sophisticated screening aids that assist a consumer in filtering a large quantity of information do not necessarily improve decision effectiveness. Surprisingly, our results even suggest that in some circumstances the opposite could be true. Second, the results indicate that the effectiveness of decision aids, to a large extent, depends on the information load. Third, decision makers are adaptive. One may supplement the absence of more sophisticated screening aids with the sorting aid.
18299325
A Human Capital Perspective of Organizational Intention to Adopt Open Source Software
This study adopts the human capital perspective as a theoretical lens to understand the factors that influence organizational intention to adopt open source software (OSS). We posit that availability of internal human capital and accessibility to external human capital significantly affect an organization’s intention to adopt OSS either directly or indirectly through switching cost. We analyze survey responses from 81 chief information officers or information systems managers and the results indicate that organizational availability of internal human capital has an indirect effect on an organization’s intention to adopt OSS through switching cost whereas accessibility to external human capital has a direct effect on an organization’s intention to adopt OSS. This study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, the unique approach from the human capital perspective adds to the extant literature on organizational adoption of innovation and calls for more attention to be directed at understanding the influence of human capital in an increasingly technologically complex environment. Practically, our findings suggest that potential OSS adopters and proponents should develop the human capital necessary for effective exploitation of OSS.
18402501
An Empirical Investigation of the Auction Buyer's Choice to Buy Out or Bid: Cry of Regret or Laugh of Satisfaction?
Online auction buyers often face the predicament of choosing between the buyout strategy and the bidding strategy to acquire an auctioned product. A buyer who chooses to buy out will obtain the item immediately at the posted price while the one who chooses to bid will have to monitor the bidding process in the hope of acquiring the product at a price lower than the posted one. Despite the wealth of auction literature, relatively few studies empirically assess the buyout option. This study seeks to bridge the gap by investigating how the buyout option (permanent or temporary) and price parameters (starting price and buyout price) affect the formation of two emotions, namely anticipated satisfaction of choice and anticipated regret of outcome, which in turn affect the buying strategy (i.e., buy out or bid). We employ laboratory experiments in our study and our results indicate two interesting findings. First, when the permanent buyout option is available, a buyer is more likely to exhibit loss aversion characteristics and prefer to adopt the buyout strategy. Second, when the temporary buyout option is present, the thought that one could avoid premature ending of auction by exercising the bidding option at the start decreases one’s preference for adopting the buyout strategy. Implications of these results for further research and practice are discussed.
17502983
Motivating open source software developers: influence of transformational and transactional leaderships
Open Source Software (OSS) is developed by geographically distributed unpaid programmers. The success of such a seemingly chaotic OSS project will largely depend on how the project leader organizes and motivates the developers to contribute. Grounded on leadership and motivation theories, we proposed and tested a research model that seeks to explain the behavioral effects of a leader on the developers' motivation to contribute. Survey data collected from 118 OSS developers on Sourceforge.net was used to test the research model. The results indicate that leaders' transformational leadership is positively related to developers' intrinsic motivation and leaders' active management by exception, a form of transactional leadership, is positively related to developers' extrinsic motivation.
9855788
An Investigation of Online Group-Buying Institution and Buyer Behavior
This study draws on interdependency theory to propose and assess the effects of two artifacts - conditional purchase and information cue - on decisional choice in the online group-buying context. Our results suggest that buyers presented with conditional purchase options (i.e., of not honoring the purchase when the expected discount price is not met) are more willing to make a purchase choice (i.e., deviate from an inactive inertia). Counter-intuitively, provision of information cues (i.e., information about procurement actions of the other buyers) appears to induce inaction. However, when a choice has to be made between a riskier and a less risky choice, the presence of information cues leads to a higher propensity for the riskier choice. Implications for theory and practice are further discussed.
15280678
Semi-automatic Ground Truth Generation for Chart Image Recognition
While research on scientific chart recognition is being carried out, there is no suitable standard that can be used to evaluate the overall performance of the chart recognition results. In this paper, a system for semi-automatic chart ground truth generation is introduced. Using the system, the user is able to extract multiple levels of ground truth data. The role of the user is to perform verification and correction and to input values where necessary. The system carries out automatic tasks such as text blocks detection and line detection etc. It can effectively reduce the time to generate ground truth data, comparing to full manual processing. We experimented the system using 115 images. The images and ground truth data generated are available to the public.
6005045
Vertical bar detection for gauging text similarity of document images
A new method for gauging text similarity of image-based documents using word shape recognition is proposed in this paper. Image features are directly extracted instead of using OCR (optical character recognition). The proposed method forms so-called vertical bar patterns by detecting local extrema points in word units extracted by segmenting the document images. These vertical bar patterns form the feature vector of a document. The pair-wise similarity of document images is measured by calculating the scalar product of two document feature vectors. The proposed method is robust to changing fonts and styles, and is less affected by degradation of document qualities. To test the validity of the method, four corpora of document images were used and the ability of the method to retrieve relevant documents is reported.
8582128
Warped image restoration with applications to digital libraries
Recently, high resolution digital cameras have made the digitization process more flexible and convenient than traditional scanning technology. Therefore, document image analysis techniques need to be extended to handle images captured using ordinary hand-held cameras under an uncontrolled environment. In this paper, we propose an image restoration technique that corrects various warping distortions such as rolling curl, binding curl and fold distortions in camera images of geometrically distorted documents. Our goal is to restore these arbitrarily warped document images to a planar shape so as to facilitate OCR. Our method uses spline interpolation technique based on a ruled surface model constructed from text lines in the 2D document image. Comparisons on OCR performance using Microsoft imaging software with two existing methods show an encouraging improvement in terms of recall and precision. The OCR precision on the corrected images using our method is improved up to 21.8% comparing to original images with a resolution of 3 mega pixels.
58972218
Restoration of curved document images through 3D shape modeling
In this paper, we address the problem of discovering the 3D shape of a book surface from the shading information in a scanned document image. This shape-from-shading problem is characterized in real world environments by a proximal and a moving light source, Lambertian reflection and a non-uniform albedo distribution. By considering all these factors, we first build the practical model (consists of geometric model and optical model) to reconstruct the 3D shape of book surface. We next restore the scanned image using this shape based on two models, namely de-shading and dewarping models. Finally, we compare the OCR results on the original and restored document image. The experiments show that the geometric and photometric distortions are mostly removed and the OCR results are improved markedly.
15032270
Authenticated Broadcast Encryption Scheme
With the advancement of wireless networks and mobile access devices such as cell phones and PDAs, multimedia services could be offered through wireless broadcast networks to these mobile devices. Therefore, there is a need to securely deliver multimedia content/data to many users over an insecure channel. Broadcast encryption scheme could provide this solution. The first formal study of broadcast encryption scheme is by Fiat and Noar in 1993. Since then, many broadcast encryption schemes have been proposed to improve the efficiency which is measured by three parameters, that is, length of transmission messages, users' storage and computational overhead at a user device. Some broadcast encryption schemes require less users storage, but the length of transmission messages or computation overhead depends on the number of users. In this paper, we proposed an authenticated broadcast encryption scheme which has an additional property than current proposed broadcast encryption schemes, that is, all users can verify who the sender is. The proposed scheme is proved to be secure against chosen ciphertext attacks based on the decision l-bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption. Furthermore, the simulation results, transmission messages nearly independent of the number of users and reasonable user storage show that the proposed authenticated broadcast encryption scheme is efficient and suitable for mobile devices.