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This thesis helps to address the gap in literature relating to the study of the provision of information to consumers, consumer information search behaviour and consumer information processing and choice behaviour relating to information-intensive products. Throughout the thesis, wine is taken as an example of an information-intensive product. Through a series of four published papers in peer reviewed journals, the thesis examines how firms can control and manipulate the provision of information to consumers and that by restricting the availability of information, the firm can make its target consumers want the product even more. Although secrecy has existed for centuries, as a marketing tool it is relatively new and little is understood about its power or purpose in marketing strategy. The thesis also analyses how consumers process information relating to information-intensive products using mental shortcuts, or heuristics, to substitute price for product quality at increasing rates of product consumption. Finally, the thesis provides a new way in which to segment the luxury wine market based on consumer knowledge together with the timing of consumption. The thesis provides a number of interesting advancements in marketing and consumer behaviour research. The first advancement examines whether secret wine societies are actually that secret at all and finds that they are not; however this finding does not absolve the need for marketers to use secrecy as a marketing tool. The second advancement provides insight into advertising, blogs and consumer innovativeness and finds a positive relationship between attitude toward advertising and consumer innovativeness. The third advancement finds evidence that consumers’ process information by using the price-quality heuristic, for both sighted and blind tasting experiments. Furthermore, the study finds that blind tasting (deliberate thinking) reinforces sighted tasting (automatic thinking) which contributes to judgement errors about product quality. The fourth advancement is to provide a new way to segment the luxury wine market based on consumer objective knowledge, frequency of consumption and timing of consumption. / <p>QC 20160518</p>

<p>Political consumers, by using their consumerism to make political statements, constitute a potential force in changing global consumption patterns towards more sustainable ones. Thus new insights concerning this specific group and its ways of searching for information prior to a purchase decision might help understand the mechanisms behind sustainable consumption choices. This study is based on a series of twelve personal qualitative interviews conducted with Swedish consumers of sustainable goods. These interviews confirmed certain characteristics known to political consumers, such as a high level of commitment, high standards regarding information and the frequent use of labelling schemes. Furthermore this study has shown the complexity experienced by this group of consumers regarding sustainability claims and the role of a chosen “sustainability champion” in helping make sense of this complex information. Finally this study reminds of the significance of respecting the consumer and his trust for a message as well as the need for simple and clear information tools to distinguish proper sustainable goods from others.</p>

<p>The project examines the information seeking behaviour of a small group of so-called Generation Y students at the Stellenbosch University as they undertake an academic&nbsp / assignment. There is consensus across the world that universities need to adapt to the needs of Generation Y students, brought up with high-level information technology, the internet and social networking. However, research shows that this does not mean that they are information literate. They have high-tech skills but often do not know how to analyse an information need or discriminate between information sources. Information scientist Carol Kuhlthau develop the ISP model upon which the study was based. Her model sees information seeking as a complex cognitive and affective process. Successful seekers have learned how to manage the process. University libraries need to adapt their information retrieval systems and services to meet the needs of their new kinds of students. The study, a small-scale intensive qualitative case study, hopes to provide insight into how they might do this. The researcher collected data while the participants were writing the assignment. Data gathering methods included interviews, journal writings and questionnaires.</p>

The information overload problem becomes imperative with the explosion of information, and people need some agents to facilitate them to filter the information to meet their personal need. In this work, we conduct a research for the article classification in the tourism domain so as to identify articles that meet users¡¦ information need. We propose an information need orientation model in tourism, which consists of four goals: Initiation, Attraction, Accommodation, and Route planning. These goals can be characterized by 13 features. Some of the identified features can be enhanced by WordNet and Named Entity Recognition techniques as supplement techniques. To test the effectiveness of using the 13 features for classification and the relevant methods, we collected 15,797 articles from TripAdvisor.com, the world's largest travel site, and randomly selected 600 articles as training data labeled by two labelers. The experimental results show that our approach generally has comparable or better performance than that of using purely lexical features, namely TF-IDF, for classification, with fewer features.

With the repaid growth of Internet users, the economy of the virtual cybermarket becomes worthless. Among all kinds of business activities on the web, on-line shopping is the most directly contact between buyer and seller. Competition no longer takes place in the physical marketplace but in the marketspace (Rayport and Sviokla,1994). This implication indicates the breaking of traditional restrictions of the time and place. Businesses can contact a large number of consumers in a faster and cheaper (low entrance obstacle) way. For the marketers, the key point to succeed in the cybermarket is to understand and analsize the consumer behavior. Internet marketers should revisit traditional models of consumer behavior, examine their underlying assumptions, and explore their validity in the new Internet context.¡]Butler and Peppard, 1998¡^ Therefore, this study seeks to further our understanding of consumer buying decision process on the web according to the EKB model which includes five stages: need identification, information search, evaluation and choice, purchase decision, and post-purchase behaviors.¡]Engel, Blackwell, and Kollat, 1984¡^ This research is concentrated on the first three stages. A web survey was conducted on one entrance web site (Openfind), three purchasing web sites (Cybercity, Aago, and Citymart) and two virtual community web sites (CityFamily and OHOT) from March 6 2000 to March 20 2000. The total valid sample is 3986 consisting of 1364 (34.2%) web patrons and 2622 (65.8%) web non-patrons. And the main findings of this research are as following¡G 1. The characteristics of the majority respondents are male, high educated and students or employees from information industries. 2. The main purpose of web use is sending or receiving e-mail (according to 47% of the respondents¡¦ answers). 3. The top three products in the web transaction are book and magazine (27.9%), computer hardware (12.4%) and communication products (11.7%). 4. For the web patrons, five factors were extracted from the questions on behavior in the information search stage. They are named "related information obtained from the media", "troubles in web transaction and information", "confidence in web transaction and information", "information from the comparison of visiting numerous web sites" and "word-of-mouth reference". And six factors were extracted from the questions on the behavior in the evaluation and choice stage. They are named "requirement of post-purchase warranty", "perceived risk of the product", "influence of direct sales experience and other media", "confidence in web transaction", "confidence in his/her buying decision", and "influence of the reference group". As for the web non-patrons, four factors were extracted from the questions on behavior in the information search stage. They are named " related information obtained from the media", "taking on-line shopping as a waste of time and money", "troubles in web information", "confidence in web information". And three factors were extracted from the questions on the behavior in the evaluation and choice stage. They are named "warranty given by seller", "perceived risk of the product", "confidence in web transaction". 5. The web patrons¡¦ behaviors of "word-of-mouth reference" in the information search stage and "confidence in web transaction and information" in the evaluation and choice stage are influenced by their different gender, age, occupation, and education. The web non-patrons¡¦ behaviors of " related information obtained from the media" and "confidence in web information" in the information search stage and "confidence in web transaction" in the evaluation and choice stage are influenced by their different gender, age, occupation, education, and income. 6. Three clusters are formed according to the above eleven factor scores. Cluster 1 persons are named as "highly confident persons". Cluster 2 persons are named as "risk-avoidance persons". Cluster 3 persons are named as "self-confident persons". 7. The first three stages of consumer buying decision processes on the web are proved to be¡Gneed identification, information search and evaluation and choice. The relationships between these three stages are need identification will positively affect information search and information search will negatively affect evaluation and choice.

Abstract The purposes of the study were to improve the understanding of the Internet shoppers¡¦ motives and their influences on other stages at the EKB Model. According to an on-lined survey at 2001 with 6069 valid samples, 5 factors of motives were extracted. They were the needs of ¡§achievement, approval and happiness¡¨, ¡§self-recognition and show off¡¨, ¡§economical benefits¡¨, ¡§convenience¡¨, and ¡§ no disturbance¡¨. The factors in the information search stage were ¡§references to outside information¡¨, ¡§basis of own experiences¡¨, ¡§searching sequence with web information¡¨, ¡§promotion messages on web media¡¨ and ¡§information quality on current web shopping¡¨. The factors in the evaluation and choice stage were ¡§opinions from reference groups¡¨, ¡§contents in the web site¡¨, ¡§subsidiary service with the product¡¨, ¡§previous experiences of direct sales¡¨ and ¡§personal economical needs¡¨. Three clusters were formed according to the 28 motive variables. All respondents attached importance to the needs of ¡§no disturbance¡¨ and ¡§convenience¡¨. These needs were the main reasons why they shop on line. They differed from the needs of ¡§achievement, approval and happiness¡¨ and ¡§self-recognition and show off¡¨. Therefore we named the 3 clusters as ¡§ high-achievement motivated persons¡¨, ¡§mid-achievement motivated persons¡¨, and ¡§low-achievement motivated persons¡¨. The 3 clusters had different buying behaviors on information search, evaluation and choice, purchase and post-purchase. They also differed from the web usages and shopping patterns. Additionally, the results showed that women and young generation might play as crucial roles on Internet shopping in the future.

As Taiwanese consumers¡¦ economic ability grew up and pursuing for housing quality expanded in the recent years, their high-quality furniture purchasing behavior has increased gradually .The current research mainly studied the relation between the stage of purchase process and the need for various product information as consumers purchase the high-quality furniture. The examples for the research were 60 students from the National Sun Yat-sen University. The current research applied a 3¡Ñ2 factorial experiment design. Where the purchasing three decision stages were: problem recognition, alternative evaluation and purchase decision, and the furniture category option were sofa of living room and bedding set of bedroom, general data regarding consumer¡¦s information search behavior on furniture purchase were collected in the process of the experiment. Important findings of the current are summarize as follows: (1) Among different purchasing stages, there was significant difference in information needs in terms of category and particular item. But no significant difference in preference for information sources between various furniture items neither among decision stages. (2) Furniture category was found to be a nonsignificant variable to information need and information source. (3) The interaction effect on information needs was found for the variable of decision stage and furniture category.

The purpose of this study is to examine if digital public libraries are serendipitous environments. Serendipity in this instance is defined as finding something unexpected and valuable, while searching for something else. A survey was conducted at two Swedish digital public libraries, where the patrons were asked to fill in a questionnaire online. The questions were based on the work on serendipitous digital environments by Lori McCay-Peet, as well as considerations of human factors that could possibly influence serendipity. The result indicate that a majority of patrons experience serendipity at the digital library, although it’s still more common to do so at the physical library or on other web sites. The result also confirms the importance of taking human factors into account when studying serendipity. The patrons who said they didn’t experience serendipity at the physical library or on other web sites, didn’t experience it at the digital library either – or at least only partially. However, the patrons who didn’t experience serendipity at the digital library still did so in other environments. A digital library is an environment with many possibilities for serendipitous encounters and discoveries, but what is missing is a better understanding of how serendipity can actually help in finding information. By teaching patrons to actively seek out serendipity, and by offering a serendipitous digital environment in which to do so, the library can further information literacy in our society.