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The determination of mode-I fracture toughness of brittle structural materials by means of the notched Brazilian disc configuration is studied. Advantage is taken of a recently introduced analytical solution and, also, of data provided by an experimental protocol with notched marble specimens under diametral compression using the loading device suggested by International Society for Rock Mechanics (ISRM) and also the three-dimensional digital image correlation (3D-DIC) technique.

The analytical solution highlighted the role of geometrical factors, like, for example, the width of the notch, which are usually disregarded. The data of the experimental protocol were comparatively considered with those concerning the response of the specific material under uniaxial tensile load.

This combined study provided interesting data concerning some open issues, as it is the exact crack initiation point and the level of the critical load causing crack initiation. It was definitely indicated that the crack initiation point is not a priori known (even for notched specimens) and, also, that the maximum recorded load does not correspond by default to the critical load responsible for the onset of catastrophic macroscopic fracture.

It was suggested that the load considered critical one for the determination of mode-I fracture toughness K_IC is erroneous. At a load equal to about 70% of the maximum one, a process zone is formed (zone of non-reversible phenomena) around the notch's crown, designating termination of the validity of any linear elastic solution used to determine the normalized stress intensity factors (SIFs). Moreover, at a load level equal to about 95% of the macroscopically observed fracture load, crack propagation has already begun. Therefore, the experimental procedure must be monitored with additional equipment, providing an overview of the displacement field developed during loading.

While interactions in the real world shopping are mainly based on face‐to‐face activities between consumers and service personnels, interactions in electronic commerce take place mainly through the retailer’s Web site. This study investigated the relationship between various characteristics of online shopping and consumer purchase behavior. Results of the online survey with 602 Korean customers of online bookstores indicate that information quality, user interface quality, and security perceptions affect information satisfaction and relational benefit, that, in turn, are significantly related to each consumer’s site commitment and actual purchase behavior.

Changes in teaching and learning in higher education, combined with rapid developments in electronic communications and resources, point to a new role for the information intermediary. This can be identified as a new professional practice which is termed ‘networked learner support’ by the authors of the paper and which is closely associated with the support of learning through computer‐mediated communication. The paper examines the background to this emergent practice, and offers a preliminary model for its development. The model involves practitioners' participation in collaborative networked learning, as a means of exploring and developing relevant resource knowledge and support strategies. Fundamental to the model is the view that the new practice needs to be defined from within the profession, and must be capable of taking into account and responding to the specific demands of local circumstances.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of brand familiarity, the number of pieces of product information presented on a web site, and previous online apparel shopping experience on perceived risk and purchase intention.

The experiment was 2 (brand familiarity)×2 (information availability) factorial design and 166 students participated in this study.

Multivariate and univariate analyses found a significant effect of brand familiarity and previous experience on perceived risk and purchase intention, and no effect of amount of information on perceived risk and purchase intention.

Participants may not have carefully considered the product information because the experiment was not an actual purchase situation, although a scenario was given. In future studies, creating an actual purchase situation may be necessary to investigate the effect of the amount of information available on the web sites on perceived risk and decision making.

The present study suggests that internet retailers should capitalize on the power of their brand names. Multi‐channel retailers may be able to derive significant advantages from brand familiarity among their customers.

This study has added to the in‐home shopping literature by extending findings of previous research to internet shopping. Findings suggest that internal information, specifically familiarity with brands offered online and previous experience of shopping online, influence perceptions of risk associated with shopping online, as well as intentions to purchase online.

Measuring service quality in online retail is critical. The purpose of this paper is to put in foreground key methodological issues of prevailing research related to scale development for the measurement of service quality in the context of online retail.

Content analysis of 30 research papers sourced from prestigious databases has been done to detect defects within research and sampling methods, survey administration, item generation and purification, dimensionality analysis, reliability and validity assessment. Also observations regarding dimensionality of online service quality constructs have been highlighted.

Study revealed deficiencies in sample size and composition, quantitative orientation in research methods, leniency in item generation/purification and negligent assessment of reliability and validity. It was found that e-service quality is multidimensional in nature and there is no consensus on number and nature of dimensions, although security/privacy, website design, reliability, responsiveness and information emerged as most cited dimensions. Electronic and traditional service quality dimensions displayed analogy in direct or adapted form.

This paper is first to highlight key methodological issues of prevailing research on e-service quality scale development in context of online retail. Implications for researchers and managers are summarized at the end of the study.

This chapter’s aim is to present the key elements of marketing of tourism services and experiences by taking the perspective of a new tourism entrepreneur. The chapter’s focus is on better understanding and efficient implementation of marketing principles.

This chapter was built on literature review of marketing of tourism services at business level. A practical approach has been adopted and implemented in illustrating the variables of marketing mix.

This chapter highlights the fact that in order to be successful in the field of marketing, tourism entrepreneurs should consider and implement all elements of marketing mix as an integral and comprehensive set; all marketing variables are interlinked and interrelated.

This chapter is explorative in nature, based on a literature review. It takes more entrepreneurial/practical than academic approach.

A marketing plan for tourism services/experiences constitutes a chain of strong bonds that guide the tourism business forward in making the chain stronger and more efficient. When an entrepreneur/manager is considering adding a new feature or changing existing elements, he/she has to consider the whole picture of the actions and the resulting outputs.

This chapter discusses an extended marketing model; the model of 10 Ps – Product, Place, Pricing, Promotion, Partners, Presentation, People, Process, Physical evidence and Passion under two stages, before and during the experience consumption/encounter.

As the number of Internet purchases of fashion items increases, the problem of inaccurate color representation on the Web becomes more significant. Color inaccuracy has many negative consequences for marketers, including loss of sales, increased returns and complaints, and customer defections. This research reports the findings of a survey conducted as part of an initial investigation into consumer opinions about fashion merchandise purchasing over the Internet. Results indicate that companies are losing customers and sales as a result of having colors on e‐commerce sites that do not accurately represent the actual colors of the products being sold. Increased dissatisfaction on the part of consumers leads to greater costs in both customer service and reverse logistics. Further, a majority of the respondents indicated that they would not make additional purchases from an e‐tailer if they received items in colors different than they expected. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

The cost of retaining a customer is lower than that of obtaining a new one, so potential customer defection is an important issue in the fiercely competitive environment of electronic commerce. Accordingly, this paper aims to present a new way for gauging customer loyalty and predicting their possibility of defection reference to a set of quality attributes satisfaction and three types of belief in the theory of planned behavior (TPB).

The performance of the classification utilization artificial neural networks (ANNs) was compared to that of traditional analytic tools, such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) and classificatory data mining technique – decision tree.

The analytical result represented that the predicted accuracy of ANNs is better then MDA and decision tree in both training and testing phases. Degree of repurchase intention has been classified correctly with a success rate of 83 percent using neural networks.

Like all research, this study has its limitations. One such limitation is that the predictive model was designed for application to online bookstores. A further limitation of this survey is that it reflects intentions instead of actual behavior. Finally, despite of ANNs has been applied to numerous areas and have demonstrated a degree of classification success, it is difficult to extract rules for explanation. Therefore, enhancing ability of model explanation would be a valuable work in the future.

The contribution of this paper is to predict how marketing practitioners can tactically market to customers with weak repurchase intentions to prevent defections.

The role of affective states in consumer behaviour is well established. However, no study to date has examined online affective states empirically as a basis for constructing typologies of internet users and for assessing the invariance of clusters across national cultures. This paper aims to address this issue.

Four focus groups were carried out with internet users to adapt a set of affective states identified from the literature to the online environment. An online survey was then designed to collect data from internet users in four Western and four East Asian countries.

Based on a cluster analysis, six cross‐national market segments are identified and labelled “Positive Online Affectivists”, “Offline Affectivists”, “On/Off‐line Negative Affectivists”, “Online Affectivists”, “Indistinguishable Affectivists”, and “Negative Offline Affectivists”. The resulting clusters discriminate on the basis of national culture, gender, working status and perceptions towards online brands.

Marketers may use this typology to segment internet users in order to predict their perceptions towards online brands. Also, a standardised approach to e‐marketing is not recommended on the basis of affective state‐based segmentation.

This is the first study proposing affective state‐based typologies of internet users using comparable samples from four Western and four East Asian countries.

While a large number of consumers in the US and Europe frequently shop on the Internet, research on what drives consumers to shop online has typically been fragmented. This paper therefore proposes a framework to increase researchers’ understanding of consumers’ attitudes toward online shopping and their intention to shop on the Internet. The framework uses the constructs of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a basis, extended by exogenous factors and applies it to the online shopping context. The review shows that attitudes toward online shopping and intention to shop online are not only affected by ease of use, usefulness, and enjoyment, but also by exogenous factors like consumer traits, situational factors, product characteristics, previous online shopping experiences, and trust in online shopping.