Charles S. Chien

A Cross-Cultural Application of a Theoretical Model of Business Ethics: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Data

Hunt and Vitells General Theory (1992) is used in a cross-cultural comparison of U.S. and Taiwanese business practitioners. Results indicate that Taiwanese practitioners exhibit lower perceptions of an ethical issue in a scenario based on bribery, as well as milder deontological evaluations and ethical judgments relative to their U.S. counterparts. In addition, Taiwan respondents showed higher likelihood of making the payment. Several of the paths between variables in the theory are confirmed in both U.S. and Taiwan samples, with summary data suggesting the Hunt and Vitell theory performs well in both U.S. and Taiwan. Some unanticipated linkages within the model were uncovered in the samples. Results and implications are discussed.

Structural equation modelling of overall satisfaction and full use of services for ATMs

Tests an hypothesized model which measures the overall satisfaction gained from, and the full spectrum of services attached to, the use of automated teller machines (ATMs). Sees overall satisfaction as the end result of a combined number of antecedents. Uses a LISREL model to test the structural effects of a number of exogenous variables (i.e. expectations and perceived risk) on a number of latent variables (desires congruency, self‐congruity, perceptions of relative influence and behavioural intentions) to a number of endogenous variables (satisfaction, recommendations to others, full use of services and the frequency of use). Overall, establishes a number of important structural links within the model which suggest that if banks wish to increase customers’ overall satisfaction and the usage of available services they must target factors which directly affect customers’ expectations and perceived risk.

The External Contingency and Internal Characteristic of Relationship Marketing

Exchange is a social as well as economic means that the consumer utilises to secure or manage his/her surroundings. Facilitating exchange is matter of managing relations among the market of networks. This study is a first attempt to pursuing a structural explanation of relationship marketing through a conceptualisation grounded on a higher level metaphor, theorised from derived abstraction and tested on empirical definition. The research findings advance our understanding of the internal characteristics and the external contingency of relationship marketing.

Continuous Tracking of User Emotion in Mandarin Emotional Speech

Emotions play a significant role in decision-making, healthy, perception, human interaction and human intelligence. Automatic recognition of emotion in speech is very desirable because it adds to the human- computer interaction and becomes an important research area in the last years. However, to the best of our knowledge, no works have focused on automatic emotion tracking of continuous Mandarin emotional speech. In this paper, we present an emotion tracking system, by dividing the utterance into several independent segments, each of which contains a single emotional category. Experimental results reveal that the proposed system produces satisfactory results. On our testing database composed of 279 utterances which are obtained by concatenating short sentences, the average accuracy achieves 83% by using weighted D-KNN classifier and LPCC and MFCC features.

Combination of Multiple Classifiers for Improving Emotion Recognition in Mandarin Speech

Automatic emotional speech recognition system can be characterized by the selected features, the investigated emotional categories, the methods to collect speech utterances, the languages, and the type of classifier used in the experiments. Until now, several classifiers are adopted independently and tested on numerous emotional speech corpora but no any classifier is enough to classify the emotional classes optimally. In this paper, we focus on combination schemes of multiple classifiers to achieve best possible recognition rate for the task of 5-classes emotion recognition in Mandarin speech. The investigated classifiers include KNN, WKNN, WCAP, W-DKNN and SVM. The experimental results have shown that classifier combination schemes, including majority voting method, minimum misclassification method and maximum accuracy method, perform better than the single classifiers in terms of overall accuracy with improvements ranging from 0.9%~6.5%.

Comparison of Several Classifiers for Emotion Recognition from Noisy Mandarin Speech

Automatic recognition of emotions in speech aims at building classifiers for classifying emotions in test emotional speech. This paper presents an emotion recognition system to compare several classifiers from clean and noisy speech. Five emotions, including anger, happiness, sadness, neutral and boredom, from Mandarin emotional speech are investigated. The classifiers studied include KNN WCAP GMM HMM and W-DKNN. Feature selection with KNN was also included to compress acoustic features before classifying the emotional states of clean and noisy speech. Experimental results show that the proposed W-DKNN outperformed at every SNR speech among the three KNN-based classifiers and achieved highest accuracy from clean speech to 20dB noisy speech when compared with all the classifiers.

Feature Combination for Better Differentiating Anger from Neutral in Mandarin Emotional Speech

Just as written language is a sequence of elementary alphabet, speech is a sequence of elementary acoustic symbols. Speech signals convey more than spoken words. The additional information conveyed in speech includes gender information, age, accent, speakers identity, health, prosody and emotion [1].

Applying recognition of emotions in speech to extend the impact of brand slogan research

How brand slogans can influence and change the consumers’ perception of image of products has been a topic of great interest to marketers. However, it is a non-trivial task to evaluate how brand slogans affect their customers’ emotions and how the emotions influence the customers’ perceptions of brand images. In this paper we demonstrate the Slogan Validator to evaluate brand slogans by analyzing the speech signals from customers’ voiced slogans. It is arguably the first speech signal based analysis of brand slogans. Our intention was to evaluate whether the signal-based emotion recognition technique can complement the traditional research methodologies, such as survey research method dealing with selfreported measurements, phenomenological research based on physiological measures, and semi-structured interviews, in order to increase the overall effectiveness of advertising copy strategy. The preliminary results of the experiment show that the Slogan Validator yields high consistency with the participants’ actual perceptions of the brand slogans chosen for this research.

Modelling Consumer Views of Automated Banking Channels

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to extend the work of Goode, Chien and Moutinho (1996) by applying their model to a different country, namely Hungary, and then comparing the results obtained from the structural model estimated by LISREL. This structural model links two exogenous variables (expectations and perceived risk) through four latent variables, which in turn impact upon four endogenous variables (overall satisfaction, recommendations to others, full use of services and frequency of use). This paper is divided into four parts, the first of which reviews the literature on customer satisfaction from cross-cultural studies. The second section describes the methodology and data collection. The third section analyses the empirical results derived from applying the model and the final section discusses the results and managerial implications of the results obtained from this study.

Connecting Creativity With Intuitive Knowing

“Eureka!” as he dashed out from the bath, Archimedes shouted, while running naked. This event marked a historical moment of intuition and creativity of human beings. Although modern business leaders value the relation between intuition and creation, there is little guidance on the topic. That is, there does not seem to be sufficient research on the correlation between intuition and creation – especially on the relation between intuition and creative process. By specifying “schematic intuition” and “non-schematic intuition” according to their respective characteristics, this paper will investigate the relation between intuition and creative process, and verify the correlation between the two with questionnaire survey results. The findings of this paper can be summarized as follows: (a) Incubation and illumination are correlated with non-schematic intuition. (b) Schematic intuition has correlation only with illumination. The author investigates the causes of the result and argues that corporate organization can enhance intuition and creativity by ameliorating its environment.