The study was designed to construct an instrument which could measure enthusiasm and caution in decision makers. A second purpose was to determine if instrument results could identify a decision maker's style as either enthusiastic or cautious.There were 688 instruments mailed to Superintendents of Indiana Public Schools. Superintendents selected school employees as participants. The 226 selectees who returned usable survey instruments constituted the study population.The first primary purpose of the study was to construct an instrument which could measure enthusiasm and caution in decision makers. Validity of the instrument as used to measure enthusiasm and caution in decision makers was; tested with confirmatory factor analysis. Findings revealed the instrument did validly measure both enthusiasm and caution in decision makers.The second primary purpose of the study was to determine if instrument results could identify a decision maker's style. Concurrent validity of the instrument as an identifier of a decision maker's style as either enthusiastic or cautious was tested with discriminatory analysis. Findings disclosed the instrument could identify at the .01 level which style decision makers had used.A secondary purpose of the study was to discover what has been reported regarding effects of enthusiasm or caution in decision makers. Scholarly sources were examined to locate reports regarding effects of enthusiasm or caution in decision makers. Each report found was assigned to a category representing various behaviors expected from either enthusiastic or cautious decision makers. Frequency counts were made for all sources in which reports were found, for all reports found, and for all categories to which reports had been assigned.

The incident, "Sanlu¡¦s poisonous powdered milk" was discovered in September in 2008. It was harmful to many baby's health and made them in risk. Thus, this event evoked the public's fears to milk products. And it also make public to pay attention to the test standard of food safety. And then Melamine derivatives out of the crisis had extended to the cream, protein powder, biscuits and other related food. It is also the most severe issue of public food safety incidents that public concern in recent years. The food safety crisis has expanded to the whole world, and caused panic across the consumer in many nations. Taiwan is also one of the countries affected by the incident. Therefore, this study intends to analyze and compare how the crisis affects consumer purchasing decisions before and after the incident, and to further explore the differences of decision factors among different groups of consumes. In this study, the "Consumer Purchasing Decision Model (EKB Model)" proposed by Engel, Kollat and Blackwell (1978) is adopted as a theoretical basis, "Information search" and "Select assessment" are selected from their third stage of "decision-making process" as two key decision objectives, then the impact of "Involvement" and "Lifestyle" to consumer purchasing decisions is analyzed. We try to collect the primary data through online and paper questionnaire surveys, and the qualified respondents are constrained to those consumers who have experience to buy melamine-contaminated milk products. Some statistical methods such as factor analysis, cluster analysis, ANOVA and T-test are used to analyze the effective survey data, and to explore the key factors that influence consumer purchasing decisions. In this study, some appropriate market segments are first determined by clustering the involvement of consumers of milk products and consumer lifestyle, and then consumer behavior characteristics are analyzed for each market segment. Some research key findings and suggestions are stated as follows. 1. In-depth understanding of the differences and needs of different market segments, and prepare different marketing activities to different types of customers. 2. To increase consumer brand reliance by tagging food compliance certification on packaging or by providing after-sales warranty. 3. In addition to advertisement on general media, consumers are more and more relied on network evaluation. Hence, we can strengthen the marketing network by taking the advantages of internet promotion.

A Study of Venture Capitals¡¦ Investment Decision-Making and Performance in Taiwan: A Case of C Venture Capital Abstract Info-tech industry plays an important role in Taiwan¡¦s economic development, and for the last eighteen years a huge amount of capital invested in domestic high-tech industry by Taiwan¡¦s venture capitalists has been spurring capital formation of its high-tech industry. Moreover, the investment by venture capitals in earlier technology companies provides technology start-up teams with outstanding capital backup for management, which thus effectively promotes innovation and development of technology industry. Also, the provision of capital by venture capital industry, the talented technicians trained by ITRI, and the cluster of vertically related industries in Hsinchu Science-based industrial park jointly offer advantaged conditions for the development of such tech industries as semi-conductor, electronics information, and opto-electronic, which makes Taiwan one of the major manufacturing countries in global info-tech industry. However, venture capital is a high-risk, high-stakes investment industry; issues such as whether domestic venture capitalists have preferences in investment decision-making in terms of investing in high-tech companies at stages of seed, early, expansion, and mature, as well as which one¡¦s performance will be better when it comes to investing in domestic or foreign (mainly in America) high-tech companies are worth investigating. Still, little research on venture capitals was conducted to explore key decision factors for whether to invest and what factors cause investment projects to succeed or fail. Using C venture capital as a case, the primary purposes of this study are therefore to examine if there exists any one certain preferred decision factor for investment, to follow up the outcomes of investment projects, and to seek the factors of success and failure for these projects. The results of this study show that venture capitalists do prefer to invest at the stages of expansion and mature, for it is easier to predict the outcomes of investment projects. In addition, as a result of Taiwan¡¦s tech industry relocating to mainland China, venture capitalists¡¦ being still forbidden to invest in China, and the significantly decreasing number of domestic profitable projects, the ratio of increasing investment at the seed and early stages has been rising accordingly. Furthermore, it can be found that the investment performance on foreign high-tech companies is better than that on domestics, the ratio of investment continues rising year by year, and venture capital is moving toward globalization. In this study, the decision factors directing the investment decision-making of the board of directors in the case company are based on four dimensions of evaluation principles: (a) business starter & management team; (b) industry & market; (c) product & technology; and (d) financial planning & reward. The findings of this study show that investment target companies are more likely to be invested if they possess better technology platforms or patents than their competitors, or their products are more unique. But they are unlikely to be invested if their industrial future is uncertain or the product market is small. Also, according to the analysis of factors for the outcomes of investment projects, projects invested based on their advantaged conditions in the dimensions of industry & market and product & technology have better chance to succeed; while those invested due to being advantageous in the dimensions of business starter & management team, and financial planning & reward are more likely to fail. This study indicates that although the two decision factors of finance and management team have advantages, without the matching of industry & market and product & technology, high-tech industry is not necessarily able to gain profit; but if there are problems with the latter two factors, the companies will definitely fail, leading to bankruptcy and liquidation. To sum up, having advantages in both factors of industry & market and product & technology is more likely to profit a company, but only with the positive incorporation of management team and financial planning can it further ensure a company¡¦s success.

Abstract Taiwan, on Pacific Ocean in mainland China edge islands area, in north and south Asia's central position and Penghu is located on the southwest side channel of the Taiwan main island. The sea water limpid, the geology special, the sand beach extends, the coastline is long, the natural rich resources adds on the near millennium the humanity lives the history, is the best place to develop tourism and traveling. Penghu goes tourism promotes for nearly 30 years. According to the basis officially data, people who visit or travels around Penghu in 2004 is more than 500 thousand. In recent years, times changed and our personal income increase; therefore, there are more and more Taiwanese people like to spend their weekend to travel around Taiwan. People like to spend more time with family, or maybe self-service traveler. Penghu is a good place for self-service traveler, especially for Taiwanese people and there are many chances for Penghu to develop this industry. Penghu also had the development space in the self-service travel population aspect, especially domestic self-service travel population. According to some data, the self traveler who comes into Penghu is more than the groups to visit here; therefore, has the necessity thoroughly to study its destination choice behavior, why analyzes its decision-making process? What is the travel motive? What is the destination attribute? All the researches could take as reference as the correlation need. This research by the quantification primarily, and the ideas of the questions are based on Boyd (1991) and some person¡¦s criterion designed. It focuses on the self-service traveler who is coming in to Penghu. We¡¦ll give them the survey in the Hotel, car rental shop, or information center. The main material analysis method has the number of times to assign, the simple percentage, the single factor variation number analysis, the factor analysis, the secondary material analysis. The results of self-service traveler are: 7. Sex: Feamle 8. Age: 20~29 9. Education: University or above 10. Occupation: Office Lady 11. Marriage: No marriage 12. Income per month: $40,000 ~ $59,999 It¡¦s about 81.78% people who are the first time to travel to Penghu which is very high. Their first consideration is the impression of Penghu. Most of them will do some research before they come to Penghu. The resource is mainly from the travel books or magazines, the television, the radio commercial and the internet. Those self-service travelers has different characteristic: Has by the occupation to the travel season reveals the difference. The traveller attribute to the travel motive, has to the interesting business and the elimination pressure two aspects reveals the difference obtained, the education level height, to the rest charge, the occupation, the marriage, also to is enjoying satisfied, the rest charge, looked the interesting business also has reveals the difference. But the traveller attribute not reveals the difference to the destination attribute. Respectively is "the pleasure" and "relaxes" by the factor analytic method extract two travel motives, a destination attribute factor, the naming is "the sum total factor", basically is worthy of looking at is pure to self-service travel factor the Penghu, does is the travel destination, to Penghu by leisure primarily. The secondary material analysis shows the similar result as the survey we done, such as the traveler¡¦s characteristic and motivation. However, it is very different between travel around overseas and Penghu. Penghu needs to develop more traveling flavor and facilities to attract more domestic and international traveler then become an international scenic site.

With limited information processing capacity, people often rely on heuristics, or rule of thumb, to make decisions. In most situations, these heuristics are useful, however, it is possible to result in systematic biases. One of the biases is framing effect, which refers to the phenomenon that the framing message significantly affects how decision maker infer meaning and hence understand the situation. When a specific attribute is framed in positive or negative terms and result in different decision outome, the attribute framing effect occurs. Although a large amount of studies on framing effect has been cumulated, related works on debiasing the framing effect is limited. Based on past literatures, this study proposed a comprehensive framework to suggest and investigate the effect of debiasing strategies, which were developed in terms of sources of bias including individual difference, imcomplete external information and insufficient cognitive effort of decision makers. Four experitmts were conducted in this study. First, the subjective knowledge, objective knowledge and need for cognition are considered as the possible moderator of attribute framing effect. The second experiment aimed to understand that whether the completeness of decision problem and amounts of attributes affect the phemenon of attribute framing effect. The debiasing effect of warning and elaboration were examind in the third and fourth experiments respectively. The results suggested that both subjective and objective knowledge as well as participants¡¦ need for cognition did not moderate the attribute framing effect. Specifically, the attribute framing effect is observed in all groups regardless of the individual differences. Second, the attribute framing effect disappeared when subjects were provided with positive and negative messages simultaneously. Third, attribute framing effect occurred for subjects in one attribute, three and five attribute conditions. That is, one attribute is sufficient for the framing effect to be observed. Moreover, there is an inverted U relationship between subjects¡¦ attitude and the amount of negative attributes. The framing effect was weakened but is not eliminated when the participants were provided with warnings. In addition, weak warning can prevent subjects of high level need for cognition from framing effect, whereas strong warning can eliminate subjects¡¦ framing effect successfully for group of low level need for cognition. Finally, elaboration is the most effective debiasing strategy in this study to eliminate the framing effect.

The H.264/AVC video coding standard aims to enable significantly improved compression performance compared to all existing video coding standards. For achieve this purpose, a robust rate-distortion optimization (RDO) [4] technique is employed to select the best coding mode and reference frame for each macro-block. As a result, the complexity and computation load increase drastically. This paper presents a fast mode decision algorithm for H.264/AVC inter-prediction based on frame difference. There used signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 4*4 block information based on adjustable threshold to judge the mode type. Experimental results show that the fast inter-prediction mode decision scheme increases the speed of motion estimation significantly with negligible loss of peak signal-to-noise ratio.

Taiwan stock market exists a special feature that over 80% of participants are natural persons while only 20% are legal persons. Compared to the latter, natural persons own less expertise in stock trading. Thus the effectiveness of the local stock market is an interesting subject for research. In this paper, we will try to find out an answer through the using of technical analysis on the past two years trading data to see if it can gain benefit in investment.Most of the similar research in past exist some problems, which either use only single or a pair of technical indices for prediction, predict only a specific stock, or filter out unwanted training and testing data in preprocessing, etc. Thus their results may not really reflect the effectiveness of the market. In this paper, we will adopt a different way of experiment design to conduct the test.Past research has shown that a fuzzy decision tree outperforms a normal crisp decision tree in data classification when there are numerical attributes in the target domain to be classified (Y.M. Jeng, 1993). Since most of the technical indices are expressed in terms of numerical values, we therefore choose it as the tool to generate rules from the eight largest stocks out of the local stock market that have the largest capitals and highest turnover rate. The trees are evaluated with more objective criteria and used to predict the up or down of the stock prices in the next day. The experimental results show that the created fuzzy trees have a better predictive accuracy than a random walk, and the investment rewards based on the trees are much better than the buy-and- hold policy.

Real estate development involves many complex, dynamic, and uncertain elements. In the pre-development stage, greater uncertainties result from the fact that the space being considered has not yet been created. Considering both the inherent characteristics of the real estate and the inefficiency of the market it operates in, any aid in the investment decision process is believed to add to the quality of the end product. This being the case, most, if not all, of the development companies make office development decisions using some kind of a procedure in the pre-development stage. However low occupancy rates and long payback periods that are being faced, even by the most recently completed Class A office projects in Turkey, show that there are serious deficiencies in these applied procedures and that they lack the necessary and important components of project feasibility analysis, which are basically the market and financial feasibility analysis, that needs to be applied in the pre-development stage of the office development process. That is why this study’s purpose is to explore and identify the deficiencies of the decision-making models currently used by Turkish real estate development companies in the pre-development stage of office development projects and to recommend necessary additions and/or deletions for the enhancement of these company models. To do so, this research involved interviews of ten office developers to identify their go/no-go decision processes in evaluating office developments in Istanbul, Turkey. The study has found that developers tend to fall under three different groups, each following different models: Group I includes exclusively construction companies, Group II includes mixed companies and Group III includes exclusively real estate investment companies. Furthermore, the research has found that similarities and differences among these three groups involve the following: While investment companies seek opportunities based on market research, decisions by construction companies are driven by the availability of land swaps. All three groups emphasize land availability and related title and land-use issues. Although unit-sale continues, there is a gradual shift to income property with the aid of improvement in the financial market, which is also reflected in the decision-making models being used.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the importance of postsecondary education in the future plans of 16-21 year old youth from the United States. A secondary purpose of the study was to determine if selected individuals in their lives influence the post-secondary education decisions made by 16-21 year old youth in the United States. In addition, selected outcome options were analyzed to determine the effect these options have on post-secondary education decisions made by 16-21 year old youth from the United States. The sample for the study consisted of 3,017 males and females between the ages of 16-21, collected by means of a telephone survey. The dependent variable for this study was the higher education plans of 16-21 year old youth; and the independent variables were age, gender, ethnicity, usual grades made in high school, strength of influence of selected outcome options, and influencers of the decisions made by the respondents. The study found that 16-21 year old youth in the United States have a strong desire to attend post-secondary education full-time rather than part-time. A majority of the respondents indicated that they prefer attending a 4-year college or university with the second choice being a 2-year junior or community college. The respondents indicated that they are influenced strongly by their parents, siblings, and close friends to make decisions; but there does not appear to be a strong influence by this group on the respondents to make decisions about post-secondary education. The outcome options that appear to have the most influence on this age group are: having a job that makes you happy, having a good paying job, earning money for college, having an attractive lifestyle, preparing for a career, having job security, making a positive difference in the community and learning a valuable trade or skill. These factors, however, don’t appear to have a strong influence on this group when making a decision to attend post-secondary education.

Commercial off-the-shelf systems (COTS) such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are becoming mature technologies to support inter- and intra-company business processes even in intermediate and small organizations. However, such systems are complex and expensive. The decision to install a COTS necessitates a choice of mechanisms to determine whether it fits firm¡¦s requirements. This paper presents a misfit diagnosis decision principle grounded on the COTS misfit analysis methodology proposed by Wu, et al., 2008. We propose a systematic diagnosis decision principle to add on to the misfit analysis methodology by providing support to decision-making in customization or Business Process Engineering (BPR). Our research contributes to the misfit analysis methodology by proposing a systematic diagnosis decision principle that will help both software vendors and organizations when the misfits between firm requirements and COTS functionality are encountered. The results indicate that with this approach, organizations can more easily and systematically determine whether the misfits should be customized or conducted BPR. They also help to evaluate the efforts needed for COTS customization and business process reengineering for each misfit and thereby help to support decision making in customization or BPR, thereby reducing the risk in implementing COTS.