Literature has examined the cognitive processes that underlie user evaluation of target websites, apps and information systems (WIS). In general, the studies have found that the consciously reasoning evaluation of a specific WIS¡¦ usefulness and enjoyment can effectively predict the usage that WIS. However, in the trend of consumerzing WIS, users are more likely than before to evaluate WIS by impression, meaning that users browse and appraise multiple novel WISs simultaneously and can pay little attention to each of them. To investigate the impression formation process, the current study develops hypotheses based on social neuroscience literature of emotional processing. This study further captures the transient process of impression formation with the event-related potential (ERP, or the brain wave pattern) methodology. Two ERP experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, 24 subjects made evaluations (like vs. dislike) toward novel website logos that were presented with 200 milliseconds (ms). The results show that, as early as 120 ms after logo appearance, the ERP starts to differentiate between liked and disliked logos. In the second experiment, 18 subjects made enjoyment and usefulness evaluations toward novel logos that were presented with 1 second. The behavior data of the second experiment show that for novel logos, enjoyment and usefulness evaluation scores are correlated. ERP data further indicated that information of both enjoyment and usefulness dimensions are inevitably noticed and processed. These findings suggest that, for WIS, the process of evaluation by impression formation might be different from that by reasoning. The impression formation process might be characterized by the activation of spontaneous emotion and by the interdependence between the enjoyment and usefulness evaluations.

Nowadays, the rapid development of New Technologies of Information such as internet has a tremendous impact on people's life and environment. People now are not only using Blog and social network as a mean to share their life, but also they are using this platform to divulge and promote their diaries, articles, and life experiences. Fashion Guide, the most famous website in Taiwan, combining Blogs, social websites ,discussions forums is an eloquent example. This research is trying to find out whether Fashion Guide website has an influence on Taiwanese female purchasing behavior of cosmetics. This empirical evidence underscoring the impacts of websites such as Fashion Guide on females purchasing decision has the following outcomes: 1-Fashion Guide¡¦s members are over 80 percent and are mostly living in north of Taiwan, most of them are working for IT industries and their age range from 26 to 30 years old.2-The motivation of using the website lies on the fact that they are avoiding risks, above all the risk of getting the products they do not like.3-The members of Fashion guide find the discussion forums more trustworthy than social networks and Blogs.4-Most of members believe that Fashion Guide¡¦s website contents are more reliable than television commercials and suppliers cosmetics websites, therefore in the future marketing can make use of forums, social networks and blogs as a non-negligeable broadcasting platform.

Basically, to evaluate the operational performances of online auction is according to seller¡¦s transaction and investment in the auction website. Thus, how to maintain good relationship with the existing seller switching and attract new seller is the most attention and major care for auction service provider. However, there were few prior researches focused on the topic of online auction switching and examined from real case. In this study, we tried to develop a measuring model and explore the factors that relate to auction seller¡¦s switching. In July 2006, Yahoo! Kimo auction, the largest auction website in Taiwan, announced a new fee scheme which would charge 3 percent transaction handling fee on its sellers from Aug. 10. Many users expressed objection to the new charge scheme. During the same period, Ruten, a new joint venture auction website that combined eBay and Taiwanese portal operator PChome is nearly ready and makes some responding strategic approaches to attract new user. Many sellers of Yahoo! Kimo auction thought to switch auction provider. Base on the background, the study aim to explore auction seller¡¦s switching behavior through switching costs, including procedure costs, financial costs, and relational costs. Moreover, we examined how website quality, fee, anti-lock-in, and anti-switching affect switching intention and behavior. A total of 292 usable questionnaires were gathered through online surveys from auction discussion board and BBS. The data were analyzed by partial least squares (PLS) to test the hypotheses. We find that switching costs, website quality, fee have negative effect on seller¡¦s switching intention. Anti-lock-in and anti-switching have moderating effect in the model. According to the finding, we provide useful guidance for auction seller and auction service provider.

Public services have been provided in an electronic format to reduce time and cost and to improve service quality. In this context, significant investments have been made since 2003 in Turkey and many government agencies started to provide services via the Internet. Government agencies need to learn the effectiveness of the offered services and the benefits of these services to citizens. The purposes of this thesis are to evaluate e-government websites in a comprehensive manner and to identify website design related problems. Especially, the study focuses on user-centered design of the e-government application. For this purpose, 33 e-government websites are evaluated, and an interview was conducted with eight government agencies websites&rsquo / designers. As a result of these studies, the problems encountered while using government electronic services are identified. Also, causes of these problems are found out. The study aims to provide a guideline in order to design user-centered e-government applications.

This study aimed to investigate the influence of the brand-image congruence on consumers¡¦ attitudes toward the sponsor, the advertisement, and the sports website, and it also examined the moderating effect of sports involvement. An experimental design was used to measure the attitudes of 1,063 Internet users. The results of this study showed that higher level of brand-image congruence resulted in more positive attitudes toward the sponsor, the advertisement, and the sports website, whereas the moderating effect of sports involvement was not significant. This study provides brand management implications for both sponsors and sports websites, and suggestions for future research were outlined.

Information systems literature calls for websites providing a site architecture that is as close as possible to the mental model of the user. To assure that users will be satisfied, website designers need to be aware that users interpret elements offered on a website based on their physiological and psychological factors. Creating a compelling online experience for diverse groups of e-customers is a challenge and of utmost importance for a website's success. However, in the field of tourism literature that discriminates between requirements based on motivational or cognitive aspects of certain user-groups is scarce. Therefore, the hypothesis examined in this dissertation is that there are differences between a priori defined user-groups regarding their satisfaction with web 2.0 websites. Further, this research is aimed at not only taking the demand side into account but also the supply side by asking whether the supply side is aware of the increasing importance of web 2.0 contents and its potentials for information presentation and market research. To bring the project into a coherent framework three more aspects are tackled. First, due to the fact that there is no existing typology for travel-blogs this dissertation tries to fill this gap by means of a qualitative approach. Second, an alternative, more parsimonious measurement approach for website performance is proposed. Finally, a study on measuring emotional mental models, a topic which seems to be neglected in information systems literature as well as in the field of tourism, is included. In order to investigate all these issues nine empirical studies are conducted. The approaches used include online surveys, content analysis, and quasi-experimental design. For data analysis methods such as Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, Covariance Based Structural Equation Modeling, and Artificial Neural Network Analysis are applied. The results indicate that there are differences between a priori defined user groups regarding their satisfaction with web 2.0 websites. For instance, the influence of motivational factors on the importance of website features differs between travelers who seek relaxation and those who seek adventure. Moreover, the main drivers for value and satisfaction for a goal-directed search are content quality followed by usefulness. These effects are attenuated for the experiential search. The study focusing on communication modes suggests that for verbalizers content is most essential while for visualizers the most important aspect is design. A further study, investigating the influence of hotel guest reviews on customer hotel preferences, reveals that in certain instances the subjects' willingness to pay is significantly higher than their reference price. Additionally, the findings indicate that people who read consumer reviews online do not belong to only one homogeneous group but perceive the importance of review categories differently. Pertaining to the supply side findings show that managers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland assess user generated content as highly important and that managers have a rather positive attitude towards negative reviews. However, there is evidence that hotels and museums are not seizing opportunities the Internet provides in terms of information presentation. Concerning the formative measurement developed for website performance cross validation proved that the index works well. The last study sheds light on measuring emotional models and gives insights into changes of users' emotional mental models before and after their visitation of a virtual world. The final chapter "Discussion and conclusions" critically discusses the results of the nine studies from a theoretical point of view, debates the approaches used and methods applied, and gives managerial implications and suggestions for future research. (author's abstract)

The Internet is becoming a more and more influencing factor in our everyday life. It affects many of our daily tasks and it is a determining factor we built our decisions on. Especially in Sweden, retrieving information about products or services online prior to the purchase is a matter of course and emphasizes therefore its importance. A website offers a costefficient potential for smaller firms with limited resources to be visible for consumers and to compete on the larger market. However, the website adoption has been neglected amongst 41% of Swedish micro Small- and Medium sized Enterprises (SME), which raises the question why this phenomenon exists. Existing literature does not provide a solid explanation of this occurrence and this is where our study steps in. In order to answer our research question and to fill this gap, the study is designed as a qualitative multiple-case study with twelve semi-structured interviews conducted amongst the owner-managers of micro SMEs in different parts of Sweden. The study aims to fill the theoretical gap by identifying and explaining the reasons why micro SMEs in Sweden do not adopt a website. The empirical contribution is the development of managerial recommendations about how micro SMEs can overcome the barriers to adopt a website.  This research was guided by a conceptual framework, including strategic, consumer and customer, communication and interaction perspectives, as well as the perspective of the perception of websites. In order to carry out a profound analysis, we decided to apply two steps. The first step of the analysis was to connect the themes itself to theory in order to explore what the collected data represents so that reasons explaining why micro SMEs do not adopt a website could be found. The second step of the analysis included the exploration of the identified reasons in order to understand why these exist. The results from this study are expressed as six reasons why the owner-managers of micro SMEs in Sweden have not adopted a website. These reasons are: a wrong perception of a website, the lack of resources and competences, precaution, being a contractor to an umbrella company, being unaware of a website’s impact on the business and having successful network and offline-communication methods. The findings leave practitioners and researchers with an idea about what reasons are leading owners of micro SMEs to neglect a website and why these reasons exist.

Šiame darbe nagrinėjami tam tikri standartai ir technologijos, kuriais remiantis galima pritaikyti interneto turinį skirtingomis savybėmis (palaikoma žymėjimo kalba, formatais, ekrano dydžiu, interneto ryšio sparta) vartotojų terminalams. Darbe išskirtos trys vartotojų terminalų klasės ir analizuojamos ne tik žiniatinklio standartų konsorciumo (W3C) rekomenduojamos priemonės, tačiau ir alternatyvios technologijos. Atsižvelgiant į esamas technologijas suprojektuoti eksperimentiniai modeliai, kurie padeda patikrinti kaip praktikoje veikia pasirinktieji sprendimai. Pirmasis iš jų pagrįstas XSLT transformacijomis. Svetainės duomenys saugomi XML formatu, kuris naudojamas vis plačiau ir yra tapęs duomenų saugojimo standartu. XSLT yra lankstus sprendimas XML formato duomenims konvertuoti į kitus formatus. Antrasis modelis skirtas pademonstruoti skirtingų kaskadinių stilių lentelių (CSS) panaudojimo galimybę, pritaikant svetainės turinį skirtingų techninių charakteristikų terminalams. Trečiasis modelis apjungia šiuos du modelius. Pagrindinis eksperimentinių modelių tikslas yra pademonstruoti pasirinktų technologijų veikimo principą. Suprojektuoti sprendimai palyginami tarpusavyje, pateikiami pasiūlymai interneto svetainių kūrėjams. / In this paper, some particular standards and technologies, by which website content can be adapted to users’ terminals having various characteristics, are analyzed. Three users’ terminal types are characterized in this paper. The paper includes not only the analysis of means, recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but also the analysis of alternative means. Experimental models, which help to test how the chosen solutions work in practice, are designed according to present technologies. The first one is based on XSL Transformations. The website data is saved in XML format, which is widely used and considered as a standard of data storing. XSLT is a versatile solution for converting XML format data into other formats. The second model is designed to demonstrate application possibilities of various Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), by adapting website content to various technical characteristics terminals. The third model is a combination of these models. The main objective of experimental models is to demonstrate how the principle of chosen technologies works. The designed solutions are compared against each other and suggestions for website developers are presented.

Šio darbo tikslas - išanalizuoti visuomenės informavimo ir švietimo atliekų tvarkymo klausimais reglamentavimą teisės aktuose ir įvertinti regioninių atliekų tvarkymo centrų (RATC), savivaldybių tinklalapių išsamumą ir kokybę bei sukurti internetinę svetainę apie atliekų tvarkymą. Naudotas aprašomasis teisės aktų metodas. Palygintas regioninių atliekų tvarkymo centrų ir savivaldybių tinklalapių išsamumas. Magistro baigiamąjame darbe aprašomas magistro darbo autoriaus sukurtas tinklalapis apie atliekų tvarkymą. www.atliekos.visiems.lt . Alytaus, Šiaulių, Tauragės, Telšių, Kauno regioniniai atliekų tvarkymo centrai privalo rengti ir įgyvendinti visuomenės informavimo programas. Pagal pateikiamos informacijos išsamumą, Lietuvos regioninių atliekų tvarkymo centrų tinklalapiai buvo suskirstyti į 4 kategorijas. Šiaulių ir Telšių regiono atliekų tvarkymo centrų tinklalapiai yra išsamiausi tarp visų regioninių centrų tinklalapių. Neissamūs yra Marijampolės, Panevėžio, Tauragės, Utenos regioninių atliekų tvarkymo centrų tinklalapiai. Atliktas tyrimas parodė, kad dažnai savivaldybių tinklalapiuose nėra atskiros skilties apie savivaldybės atliekų tvarkymo sistemą arba tokiose skiltyje informacija neišsami. Suformuluotos 9 rekomendacijos esamai visuomenės informavimo situacijai pagerinti. / The aim of the paper is to analyze the legal aspects of public environmental education and awareness rising on waste management issues, to evaluate the completeness and quality of the websites of regional waste management centers and municipalities and to develop a web site for waste management issues. Methods of the work: descriptive analysis of the legislation, comparative analysis of educational material on the websites of regional waste management centers in Lithuania. Master's thesis describes the website (www.atliekos.visiems.lt) for waste management developed by the author. Alytus, Šiauliai, Tauragė, Telšiai, Kaunas regional waste management centers according to legislation must develop and implement public awareness programs on waste issues. According to the information provided, Lithuanian regional waste management centers, were grouped into four categories. Websites of Siauliai and Telsiai regional waste management centers are the most developed and complete among of all regional centers. The websites of the waste management centers of Marijampolė, Panevėžys, Tauragė, Utena were among those that mostly lacked comprehensiveness. The research revealed that in the websites of municipalities’ there is no a separate column on municipal waste management system or information in such column is not complete. It was formulated 9 recommendations for the improvement of public environmental education and awareness rising on waste management issues.

Magistro baigiamajame darbe išanalizuota nuolatinės buveinės samprata fizinėje erdvėje ir ją nustatantys kriterijai, bei atskleistas minėtų kriterijų turinys. Vadovaujantis nustatytais kriterijais išanalizuota nuolatinės buveinės samprata elektroninėje komercijoje ir pateiktos priemonės, kuriomis remiantis nustatoma nuolatinė buveinė elektroninėje komercijoje, nurodytos galimos problemos ir esami problemų sprendimo būdai, bei identifikuotos, kai kurios naujos problemos, kurios reikalauja tolimesnio tyrimo. Pirmojoje darbo dalyje aptarta nuolatinės buveinės samprata fizinėje erdvėje ir išskirti pagrindiniai kriterijai, turintys įtakos nustatant nuolatinės buveinės buvimo faktą fizinėje erdvėje. Antroje dalyje atsižvelgiant į nustatytus kriterijus išanalizuota nuolatinė buveinė elektroninėje komercijoje ir nustatyti skirtumai ir panašumai su nuolatine buveine fizinėje erdvėje. Trečioje darbo dalyje ištirta užsienio valstybių ir Lietuvos praktika nuolatinės buveinės kontekste. / This master‘s degree thesis is about permanent establishment in physical space and it’s parameters. These parameters and definition of permanent establishment are analyzed in details. In accordance with the criteria laid down in the analysis, conception of permanent establishment in e-commerce was reviewed and remedies for identification of permanent establishment were proposed for e-commerce. Also in this thesis major problems related to permanent establishment and their existing resolutions are considered, including new problems identified that should be analyzed collaterally. In the first chapter of this thesis conception of permanent establishment in physical space is analyzed and main criteria that have direct or indirect impact to identification of permanent establishment in physical space are excluded. The second chapter is dedicated for analysis of permanent establishment in e-commerce and identification of principal discrepancies and similarities, while comparing it with physical space. In the third chapter of this thesis survey of Lithuania’s and other foreign countries’ practices related to permanent establishment is presented.