Online shopping experience in an emerging e‐retailing market: Towards a conceptual model

We develop a comprehensive and integrated framework of online shopping experience (hereafter OSE) from an emerging market perspective. Using a netnographic research method, we content analysed 284 experiential reviews of 2 leading Nigerian e‐retailers. Augmented by the theory of customer engagement, we identify 8 dimensions of OSE that activate shoppers' affective and cognitive states, which consequently lead to 4 behavioural outcomes, namely, internal responses to service experience, external responses to service experience, repurchase intentions, and word of mouth intentions. The proposed dynamic and comprehensive framework reflects all phases of the consumer decision‐making process and demonstrates that OSE has both perceptual and behavioural components. We make 3 important contributions. First, the paper provides a comprehensive and dynamic model of customer experience that encompasses all the stages in the customer decision‐making process by drawing on a new theoretical perspective to demonstrate how the unique attributes of OSE contribute to extant customer experience research. Second, we advance experiential consumption theory by incorporating attributes of OSE evolved through a unique qualitative research method into existing frameworks of customer experience. Third, we compare and contrast findings from an emerging market with research from more mature markets, when they were undergoing similar development patterns. From a managerial perspective, we illustrate how online retailers operating in emerging markets can draw from the experiences of mature markets and understand the key differences between markets so that they can develop customer experience management strategies by concentrating on the most important components of customer experience.     

Impulsive versus premeditated aggression: implications for mens rea decisions

Science can provide more information about the nature of aggressive acts, and therefore the mens rea of criminal offenses, than is commonly assumed. For example, progress has been made in classifying aggression as impulsive or premeditated within the context of the role of conscious experience in controlling behavior. This review of the status of the scientific ability to distinguish conscious from unconscious acts and more specifically impulsive from premeditated aggressive acts is organized around four themes: (i) How is aggression defined and measured in general? (ii) How does the distinction between impulsive and premeditated aggression relate to the legal concept of mens rea? (iii) How do various scientific disciplines contribute to the mind/body discourse? (iv) What risk factors are associated with impulsive and premeditated aggression respectively? The authors conclude that the most promising approach to researching the nature of behavioral intention and motivation is to apply a discipline neutral model that integrates the data from multiple disciplines, collectively designated the cognitive neurosciences.     

Mapping is not sufficient for specifying position in visual space

The general view is that one knows where an object is located in visual space on the basis of which neurons it activates. But there is reason to believe that a radically different method of specifying position is needed, one which identifies the position using coordinates. Those who study motor systems assume such coordinates, but the question of how the sensory system could derive these values is given no attention.     

Nature unmirrored,epistemology naturalized

A. Knowledge and Justification: The nature of epistemic justification and its supervenience.B. Understanding and Validation: Two projects of epistemology, one to understand justification, the other to promote it.C. Epistemic Rationalism: A simple foundationalism of intuition and deduction.D. Reliabilism: A broader foundationalism.E. Foundationalism Assailed.F. Nature Unmirrored: Rorty reviewed.G. Reliabilist Foundationalism: Two problems.H. Coherence: A more radical response to the failure of rationalism.I. Perspectival Coherence: The requirement of an epistemic perspective and its relation to foundationalism.J. Epistemology of Epistemology.K. How to Naturalize Epistemology: Quine reviewed.L. Epistemology Naturalized: Through the Project of Validation.     

Anger-Related Traits and Response to Interpersonal Conflict Among New York City Traffic Agents1

This study evaluates the psychosocial correlates of anger-related traits. Participants include New York City traffic enforcement agents (TEAs), who issue summonses for vehicular and parking violations and are frequently confronted by angry motorists. This sample of TEAs is 53% African American and 57% female. Participants completed surveys at 2 points, 4 months apart, which measured attitudinal, affective, and expressive components of hostility and anger, as well as dimensions of workplace psychosocial response. Results indicate that trait anger-in was positively associated with frequency of conflict, anger intensity, and burnout in cross-sectional analyses; and positively associated with frequency of conflict in prospective analyses. Trait anger was positively associated with an increase in burnout over a 4-month period. These findings provide support for the transactional model of hostility and health and have implications for worksite interventions promoting cardiovascular health.     

Representing approximate ordering and equivalence relations

The central question considered is: given appropriate precisations of the ideas of an empirical system's approximately satisfying laws of measurement with error at most ? (for some ? ≥ 0), and of a real-valued function over its domain providing an approximate representation of its basic operations and relations with error at most δ, can it be shown that satisfaction of the laws with ‘sufficiently small’ error insures numerical representability with arbitrarily small error? Positive answers are given in the cases of ordinal and nominal measurement, together with some indications of the sizes of the errors involved. Problems of extending the theory to more complex types of measurement are discussed, some open problems and conjectures are formulated, and a relation between the ‘approximate representation’ and ‘stochastic choice model’ approaches to measurement with fallible data is established.     

Sex differences in the perception of touching

Sex differences in the perception of touching were investigated by having 25 male and 25 female college students rate how likeable a touch would be under different conditions. The women produced a more favorable affect than the men when they touched, and women were perceived as liking to be touched more than men. Perception of touching in general was correlated positively with Self-esteem for men, negatively with Machiavellianism for women, and positively with Trust for women. Results were discussed in terms of traditional sex-typing of touching behavior.     

EXTERNAL REALISM AND PHILOSOPHY IN TRANSITION

This paper was written for a panel session, in which I was asked to represent an analytic perspective. On reflection I found that there is no such thing, however, and that what best unifies the analytic traditions is not even a set of questions, much less a set of answers, but only agreement on certain standards of clarity and argumentation, and an interest in dialectic and debate. Certain issues have long dominated the analytic agenda, it is true, and I see no better way to represent an analytic perspective than to enter into a bit of dialectic and debate on one of these, in a way that I hope will be clear and cogent.