In recent years, virtual play spaces have become enormously popular among young children around the world. As yet, though, there has been relatively little research into the ways in which children interact on such sites and what they learn in the process. This article describes a study of kids' experiences with one such virtual world, Club…

In product design, there is often a disconnect between the engineers creating the product and the marketing team determining the best characteristics for the product. The research areas of "design for market systems" and "decision-based design" seek to bridge that disconnect through quantitative approaches that facilitate…

We describe lessons learned from one-and-a-half decades of global virtual immersion practices in subsistence marketplaces, and explore implications for international business teaching and learning in the post-pandemic world. Global virtual immersion refers to bottom-up learning experiences, typically in contexts much different than what we may be…

The present study investigated the phenomenon of buying "virtual assets" for game avatars. Virtual Assets are items that are bought with real-world money for an avatar in-game. Weapons, items, pets, mounts and skin customisations are the most popular examples. Using a qualitative methodology--in this case Interpretative phenomenological…

Credit card debt is of increasing concern among college students, but reasons for it are not well understood. In a simulated shopping experiment based on a hyperbolic discounted utility model, 21 participants could either save money for a new model of their favorite mobile phone brand and get it in the future or buy the product on credit and get…

In teaching software engineering, it is often interesting to introduce real life scenarios for students to experience and to learn how to collect information from respective clients. The ideal arrangement is to have some real clients willing to spend time to provide their ideas of a target system through interviews. However, this arrangement…

Software agents are computer programs that run in the background and perform tasks autonomously as delegated by the user. This paper blends models from marketing research and findings from the field of decision support systems to build a framework for the design of software agents to support in e-commerce buying applications. (Contains 35…

Computer-based video instruction (CBVI) was used to teach verbal responses to questions presented by cashiers and purchasing skills in fast food restaurants. A multiple probe design across participants was used to evaluate the effectiveness of CBVI. Instruction occurred through simulations of three fast food restaurants on the computer using video…