Search results

This study aims to investigate countries without national property insurance and see how experience affects behavior toward higher-risk flood prone property.

Using a unique data set that captures the flood experiences of homeowners that search for new housing, the authors examine the premiums or discounts of such experience on homes at risk. The authors use hedonic property modeling to estimate the effects of experience on values.

The authors find that such experiences play a strong role in convincing buyers of the real risks imposed by climate change and sea level rise and the authors expect these demand-side behavioral changes to persist. This finding is unlike more developed markets where insurance may be subsidized and negative effects on value dissipate within a few years.

The world is starting to pay more attention to climate risk and the results in developed countries have been biased by the extensive insurance provided by the government or emergency funding.

Providing market transparency on climate risks will result in permanent market effects, if not otherwise subsidized.

The governments should encourage market disclosure.

No one has ever had a data set like this before where the authors get to observe the behavior of those already experiencing property losses from flooding.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a usability study of information search on mobile devices, seeking to understand mobile computing best practice in the design of library services.

Three second‐year undergraduate students took part in this semester long study. They are loaned iPods with a Wikipedia copy to use as desired. Usability data are drawn from search logs recording titles of the articles searched and an internet‐based survey completed by students.

Students characterize the nature of information searched for on the Wikipedia iPods as recreational. Students did not utilize the iPods for academic research. Search logs show students viewed articles primarily about objects.

The results of this paper do not show generalized principles of mobile search. More data collected from additional sets of users are needed in order to articulate principles of mobile search.

If it is the case that students will primarily make use of mobile computing for recreational or leisurely purposes then library services on mobile computing platforms must be designed accordingly.

The paper presents methods for the study of information search though mobile computing and poses questions resulting from this paper that require further study.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize the existing evidence on leadership that best matches nursing home care, with a focus on behaviors, effects and influencing factors.

A narrative review was performed in three steps: the establishment of scope, systematic search in five databases and assessment and analysis of the literature identified.

A total of 44 articles were included in the review. The results of the study imply that a stronger focus on leadership behaviors related to the specific context rather than leadership styles could be of added value in nursing home care.

Only articles applicable to nursing home care were included. The definition of “nursing home care” may differ between countries. This study only focused on the academic literature. Future research should focus on strategies and methods for the translation of leadership into behavior in practice.

A broader and more conceptual perspective on leadership in nursing homes – in which leadership is seen as an attribute of all employees and enacted in multiple layers of the organization – could support leadership practice.

Leadership is considered an important element in the delivery of good quality nursing home care. This study provides insight into leadership behaviors and influencing contextual factors specifically in nursing homes.

Within the existing health care system, a significant percentage of Americans over the age of 65 will have need of extended health care. Yet the extended care industry has little information as to how consumers will make a choice among placement options. The results of this study describe both the need recognition and pre‐selection search stages of the decision process and the impact of need recognition on subsequent search activity. The information obtained from an influential person as the problem is being defined appears to have a complex relationship with pre‐selection search, with initial information leading to less search but additional information increasing search activity. Contrary to previous studies, pre‐selection search was found to be fairly extensive, increasing with time availability.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the information search behaviors of mature consumers (age 55 and older) for new service purchases across several contexts.

Almost 200 mature consumers in the Midwestern USA were surveyed regarding new home, medical, or financial service purchases made within the past 12 months. Questions regarding information search, importance of different information sources, satisfaction with the service decision, and demographics were collected.

Mature consumers consulted few information sources for service decisions, irrespective of context. Service context did affect the number of service providers considered; significantly fewer providers were considered for medical and financial services than for home services. Information search was negatively related to age, but unrelated to service outcome satisfaction and responsibility for the decision.

No comparison was made between the search behavior of older and younger consumers. Although the breadth of information search was examined, the depth of search within each type of information source was not. As a descriptive study, it was not possible to address why such little external search was conducted. A convenience sample was used.

Mature consumers conducted more external search for less‐involved service contexts (e.g. home services) than for those more‐involved (e.g. medical and financial services). Companies are beginning to realize the value of maintaining relationships with mature consumers; the results may suggest ways to improve those relationships with mature consumers by detailing the service decision process. Additionally, public policy interventions or education programs based on the work might help mature consumers to learn better service decision strategies.

A large range of ages was sampled in the study (respondents ranged from 55 to 93) and multiple responses were obtained from some participants across several service contexts, allowing for a within‐subjects design of the survey. It was then possible to explore the effect of context on the number of service providers considered and the number of external information sources consulted prior to purchase.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which academic researchers consider the relationship between broadband access and children’s information seeking in the United States. Because broadband has been cited as an essential element of contemporary learning, this study sought to identify gaps in the attention given to the role of broadband in the information seeking environment of youth.

The researchers conducted a mixed method synthesis of academic research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2011 that reported the information seeking of children aged 5–18 years. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from leading databases, analyzed separately, and conclusions drawn from integrated results.

The results of this study indicated that broadband is rarely considered in the design of children’s information seeking published in peer-reviewed research journals. Only 15 studies showed any presence of broadband in study design or conclusions. Due to the small number of qualifying studies, the researchers could not conduct the synthesis; instead, the researchers conducted a quantitative relationship analysis and qualitative content analysis.

Given the focus of policymaking and public discussion on broadband, its absence as a study consideration suggests a crucial gap for scholarly researchers to address.

The data set included only studies of children in the United States, therefore, findings may not be universally applicable.

Despite national imperatives for ubiquitous broadband and a tradition of information seeking research in library and information science (LIS) and other disciplines, a lack of academic research about how broadband affects children’s information seeking persists.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the logical specification, and automated verification, of high‐level robotic behaviours.

The paper uses temporal logic as a formal language for providing abstractions of foraging robot behaviour, and successively extends this to multiple robots, items of food for the robots to collect, and constraints on the real‐time behaviour of robots. For each of these scenarios, proofs of relevant properties are carried out in a fully automated way. In addition to automated deductive proofs in propositional temporal logic, the possibility of having arbitrary numbers of robots involved is considered, thus allowing representations of robot swarms. This leads towards the use of first‐order temporal logics (FOTLs).

The proofs of many properties are achieved using automatic deductive temporal provers for the propositional and FOTLs.

Many details of the problem, such as location of the robots, avoidance, etc. are abstracted away.

Large robot swarms are beyond the current capability of propositional temporal provers. Whilst representing and proving properties of arbitrarily large swarms using FOTLs is feasible, the representation of infinite numbers of pieces of food is outside of the decidable fragment of FOTL targeted, and practically, the provers struggle with even small numbers of pieces of food.

The work described in this paper is novel in that it applies automatic temporal theorem provers to proving properties of robotic behaviour.