Mobile device technology with the influence of the Internet is creating a lot of Webbased services so that people can have easy and 24-hour access to the services. Recently, the Google’s Android has revolutionized applications development for the mobile platform. As there is an increasing number of companies exposing their services as Web services, enabling flexible mobile access to distributed Web resources is a relevant challenge. However, the current Web is a collection of human readable pages that are unintelligible to computer programs. Semantic Web and Web services have the potential of overcoming this limitation. For this, a standard ontology called Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL-S) is employed. The vision is to automatically discover services like Sensor Web services from mobile. In this thesis, a mobile framework is developed for the automatic discovery of services. The application is implemented for the Coastal Sensor Web and the Semantic Web service.

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In this thesis, we present a hybrid semantic web service discovery framework that exploits both the signatures and specifications of a web service, whilst adopting logical and non-logical service matching methods. For signature level service matching, we have developed two techniques: (i) logical similarity measures applied to the services’ input/output concepts; and (b) non-logical matching based on a Structure Preserving Semantic Matching algorithm. For specification level service matching, we have applied a unique short sentence matching approach on the textual-description of a web service. We evaluated the performance of our S5 Web Service Matchmaker using the OWLS-TC dataset, and furthermore compared its performance with the OWLS-MX discovery model. Our results indicate that S5 Web Service Matchmaker offers an improved web service matching performance with a significant increase in recall and subtle improvements in precision. / Web services are independent software systems designed to offer machine-to-machine interactions over the WWW to achieve well-described operations. The description of a web service entails (a) a syntactic component detailing the service’s operations and data structures in terms of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and (b) a semantic component that offers a semantic description, in terms of an ontology, of the services’ data and operations. Typically, service providers expose their services to the public by providing brief descriptions of the service’s operations; the challenge is to discover the right service based on rather sparse service descriptions in response to a specific service request. In this thesis, we present a hybrid semantic web service discovery framework that offer semantic web service discovery at both the signature and specification levels of a web service, whilst exploiting logical and non-logical service matching methods. For signature level service matching, we have developed two techniques: (i) logical similarity measures applied to the services’ input/output concepts; and (b) non-logical matching based on a Structure Preserving Semantic Matching algorithm. For specification level service matching, we have applied a unique short sentence matching approach on the textual-description of a web service. The cumulative similarly measures determine the overall similarity of a services’ description with the service request. We evaluated the performance of our S5 Web Service Matchmaker using the OWLS-TC dataset, and furthermore compared its performance with the OWLS-MX discovery model. Our results indicate that S5 Web Service Matchmaker offers an improved web service matching performance with a significant increase in recall and subtle improvements in precision.

過去十年，適婚年齡市場中的單身男女比率大幅成長，從1997年到2007年人口數共成長了10%，許多適婚未婚男女在茫茫人海中，希望運用不同的相親管道來找尋未來的伴侶。在所有選擇當中，婚友社是所有管道中最有效率的，透過婚友社媒合的平台，能快速拓展網絡效益，比較起網路交友、親朋好友介紹、其他不同型式的聯誼活動等等，如以找尋未來結婚伴侶為前提，婚友社是最好的選擇。 但是，最好的選擇並不等於最優先的選擇，許多人對於婚友社的印象，是比較負面的，認為它無法提供有品質的服務，能確實介紹適合自己的異性做為認識，甚至擔心付費後會員權益沒有保障，對婚友社運作流程沒有信心。市面上各式各樣規模的婚友社不少，但似乎還沒有一間夠穩定、可靠且擁有龐大的經濟規模，為整個產業的領導者，此篇研究，就是要建立起婚友社最重要的核心價值之一 - 標準化的配對機制，滿足顧客最根本的需求，創造差異化及提升競爭優勢，達到良好的口碑效益。 在研究中，與個案公司-中華民國佳緣婚友推廣協會配合，由資深紅娘蔡郁莉小姐做為公司代表，進行多次訪談，來了解公司整體運作狀況後，再深入探討既有配對流程和步驟。同時與佳緣會員及相關業者也安排了一對一訪談，了解整體產業內外部環境、競爭狀態和會員為滿足的需求等等，再透過外部資料，如:文獻探討、期刊、相關書籍等做彙整後，找出解決方案，制定出標準化的配對機制。 透過資料的彙整，最終找出兩性在找尋未來的伴侶，可從十個不同層面做擇偶條件設定，依照會員背景和需求的不同，也會影響到擇偶條件的設定。將這些條件設定的規則視為配對機制的主要因素，經過相互配對和條件篩選，進一步發展為標準化配對機制三大流程，能從龐大的會員資料庫中，有效率幫會員找出最合適的對象，成為在產業中首先建立客製化的配對機制的公司，提升配對效率及成功率，成為核心競爭價值之一，增加會員信賴度，和需求滿足，更重要的是，能將紅娘對會員了解的內隱知識外顯化，讓資訊不斷層，能完整的保留且傳承下去，維持一致的服務品質，創造佳緣專業的形象，扭轉外界原先對婚友社負面刻版印象，最終成為適婚未婚男女在尋找伴侶上，優先考量的管道之一，能招募更多新的會員。 美中不足的是，這套機制還未能實際在佳緣內部操作，無法了解實務上運作的效益及需改進之處，且也無法確定是否能套用在其他婚友社裡。在未來，除了要建立高效率的配對機制以外，還需要進一步探討如何來深耕與會員間的關係，提供其他未滿足的服務需求。 / Over the past decade, the rate of single man and woman in marriageable age in the market rise dramatically, it increased a total of 10% from 1997 to 2007. The unmarried man and woman searching different ways to meet new friends, and wishing they could become their future partner. In those different ways of meeting a possible future husband or wife, I would like to conclude that through organized one by one matchmaker platform would be the most efficient way. In this platform, people can expand their friend network quickly, compared to make friends online, introduced by relatives or close friends, or other different types of matchmaker activities. But if you want to find a future husband or wife, the one by one matchmaker organization will be the first and the best choice. However, the best choice does not necessary mean the most preferred choice, many people’s impression towards matchmaker organizations, is relatively negative, they think it is unable to provide good quality of service, cannot really introduce the specific right person for you to know, or some of them even worry that after they became a member, they will start to get less attentions. They simply have no faith in those matchmaker companies.They are all kinds of matchmaker companies, but none of them are known as the leader brand in this entire industry yet. This study, is to help this case company to develop it’s own differentiated advantage by establishing the most important core values system - standardize pairing mechanism. The purpose is to meet customers fundamental demands, which is help to find Mr or Ms Right for them quickly. It will also be able to achieve a good reputation for its effectiveness. In this study, the case company-Chiayuan , with the senior matchmaker representative, Ms. Tsai Yu-Lio were involved , provided many useful and valuable information. With several times of interviews, I have come to an understanding of how the company operates, and further more, to know their present process of pairing procedures.At the same time, I was arranged to have one by one interviews with the members of Chiayuan and also the people used to work for other matchmaker companies. From those interviews I get a closer look into the whole industry both internal and external environment situations, competitive status and member’s vital unsatisfied needs. Through the external data, such as: a literature discussion, periodicals, published books, etc., after I consolidated the information, I was able to work out the proper solutions to develop a standardized pairing mechanism.Through the data being deliberated, eventually I could find out the tracks on how the two sexes find their future partner. We can look at it from ten different required items, in accordance with the member’s different backgrounds and needs, can also affects how they set their requirements base on the those ten items and using those as the basic factors when processing the pairing mechanism. Through the filtering, we can develop three major steps for this pairing mechanism. The mechanism can help the matchmakers to identify the most appropriate member to match. There are no other companies has developed this kind of mechanism yet. This mechanism could enhance the matching process efficiency and improve the success rates, to become one of the core competitive value.It can increase the the dependability from members. More importantly, this mechanism can make the implicit knowledge into storable information, and stays in the company, maintaining consistent service quality, emphasize a professional brand image for Chiayuan. But this mechanism has not actually been used in Chiayuan as part of their internal procedure, therefore cannot be sure the practical benefits and necessary improvements. Addition to establishing the efficient pairing mechanism, we also need to explore further to know how to commit with the members, and provide them other unmet demand of services.

Thesis advisor: Hideo Konishi / My doctoral dissertation contains three essays on menu auction and its related applications. The first chapter is a theoretical generalization of classical menu auction model, and the second and the third chapters are applications to a resource allocation problem and an industrial organization problem. Menu auction (Bernheim and Whinston, 1986) is a first-price package auction with complete information. They show that every Nash equilibrium under some refinements always leads to an efficient outcome. Therefore, this becomes a natural efficiency benchmark for package auction designs (e.g., Ausubel and Milgrom 2002). Menu auction can also be viewed as a model of economic influence where the auctioneer is going to choose an action which affects bidders' payoff so that each bidder tries to influence the outcome by monetary transfer to the auctioneer. This framework is widely adopted in political lobbying models where the special interest groups lobbying the government over trade policies (e.g., Grossman and Helpman 1994). However, the applicability is limited by quasi-linear preferences and the absence of budget constraints. In my first chapter, ``Menu Auctions with Non-Transferable Utilities and Budget Constraints'', I extends Bernheim and Whinston's (1986) menu auction model under transferable utilities to a framework with non-transferable utilities and budget constraints. Under appropriate definitions of equilibria consistent with subgame perfection, it is shown that every truthful Nash equilibrium (TNE) is a coalition-proof Nash equilibrium (CPNE) and that the set of TNE payoffs and the set of CPNE payoffs are equivalent, as in a transferable utility framework. The existence of a CPNE is assured in contrast with the possible non-existence of Nash equilibrium under the definition by Dixit, Grossman, and Helpman (1997). Moreover, the set of CPNE payoffs is equivalent to the bidder-optimal weak core. The second chapter relates menu auction to a resource allocation problem. Kelso and Crawford (1982) propose a wage-adjustment mechanism resulting in a stable matching between heterogeneous firms and workers. Instead of a benevolent social planner, in ``Profit-Maximizing Matchmaker'' (w. Hideo Konishi), we consider a profit-maximizing auctioneer to solve this many-to-one assignment problem. If firms can only use individualized price, then the auctioneer can only earn zero profit in every Nash equilibrium and the sets of stable assignments and strong Nash equilibria are equivalent. Otherwise, the auctioneer might earn positive profit even in a coalition-proof Nash equilibrium. This reinforces Milgrom's (2010) argument on the benefit of using simplified message spaces that it not only reduces information requirement but also improves resource allocation. The third chapter applies menu auction in an industrial organization problem. In ``Choosing a Licensee from Heterogeneous Rivals'' (w. Hideo Konishi and Anthony Creane), we consider a firm licensing its production technology to rivals when firms with heterogeneous in production costs competing in a Cournot market. While Katz and Shapiro (1986) show that a complete transfer in duopoly can be joint-profit reducing, we show that it is always joint-profit improving provided that at least three firms remain in the industry after transfer. While transfers between similarly efficient firms may reduce welfare, the social welfare must increase if the licensor is the most efficient in the industry, contrast with Katz and Shapiro (1985) in the duopoly environment. This has an important implication in competition regulation. Then we investigate relative efficiency of the licensee under different licensing auction mechanisms. With natural refinement of equilibria, we show that a menu auction licensee, a standard first-price auction licensee, and a joint-profit maximizing licensee are in (weakly) descending order of efficiency. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

In this thesis, I investigate economic and policy implications of individual choice decisions, including consumers’ choices among differentiated products and households’ decisions on intra-household resource allocations. In the first chapter, I develop a consumer demand model for US retail banking services in which consumers have preference over the geographical convenience of their banks’ networks. The purpose of the study is to identify consumers’ taste for branch network convenience in the US banking industry and to assess the effect of this demand motive on bank revenues, consumer surplus, and market structure. I show that consumers value the geographical convenience of their bank branch network to a large extent. Specifically, a branch that is one mile closer is equivalent to a branch with a 0.4 percent higher annual interest rate. Furthermore, consumers value proximity of the branch network to both their residence and workplace. The counterfactual experiment shows that banks with a larger number of branches enjoy greater network benefits in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, consumers benefit from the reduction in their expected travel distance by choosing depository institutions with large-scale networks. The second chapter examines how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling expenditures in rural China. The model is tested using data from a unique household interview survey carried out in Hebei Province. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more in observable marital and post-marital transfers as partial compensation. This marginal compensation estimate is quantitatively larger than any comparable estimate using North American data, suggesting that the unitary model is a useful model of resource allocation for sons in traditional agricultural families. As a supplement to Chapter 2, Chapter 3 investigates matchmakers’ negotiation role in rural Chinese marriages and its impact on marital transfer from the parents to the children at the time of marriage. Using a unique household-level dataset collected in Hebei province, I find that a negotiator’s involvement can raise the total marital transfer by 20 percent, which supports my public goods story.

In this thesis, I investigate economic and policy implications of individual choice decisions, including consumers’ choices among differentiated products and households’ decisions on intra-household resource allocations. In the first chapter, I develop a consumer demand model for US retail banking services in which consumers have preference over the geographical convenience of their banks’ networks. The purpose of the study is to identify consumers’ taste for branch network convenience in the US banking industry and to assess the effect of this demand motive on bank revenues, consumer surplus, and market structure. I show that consumers value the geographical convenience of their bank branch network to a large extent. Specifically, a branch that is one mile closer is equivalent to a branch with a 0.4 percent higher annual interest rate. Furthermore, consumers value proximity of the branch network to both their residence and workplace. The counterfactual experiment shows that banks with a larger number of branches enjoy greater network benefits in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, consumers benefit from the reduction in their expected travel distance by choosing depository institutions with large-scale networks. The second chapter examines how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling expenditures in rural China. The model is tested using data from a unique household interview survey carried out in Hebei Province. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more in observable marital and post-marital transfers as partial compensation. This marginal compensation estimate is quantitatively larger than any comparable estimate using North American data, suggesting that the unitary model is a useful model of resource allocation for sons in traditional agricultural families. As a supplement to Chapter 2, Chapter 3 investigates matchmakers’ negotiation role in rural Chinese marriages and its impact on marital transfer from the parents to the children at the time of marriage. Using a unique household-level dataset collected in Hebei province, I find that a negotiator’s involvement can raise the total marital transfer by 20 percent, which supports my public goods story.

隨著文化創意產業的興起，傳統的宗教信仰如何結合數位互動科技，以輔助參與者加深對宗教信仰文化的理解與體驗，是數位內容產業值得研究的議題。月下老人是華人傳統信仰中的姻緣之神。本研究因此將針對月老文化內容，設計一多人互動體驗情境，以探究月老文化內容以傳統和數位化的形式呈現，對參與者體驗感受的影響程度。 在設計研究方法上，包括創作概念發想以及互動裝置雛型實作兩部分。首先透過文獻探討，歸納出互動體驗設計原則，接著針對月老文化進行數位化設計與互動體驗流程設計，並以Unity 3D遊戲引擎結合Kinect體感科技與Android系統平台，實作一數位化月老文化互動體驗情境，以兩大體驗主題：數位化月老之參拜體驗與體感互動之繡球牽線等情境，以呈現月老文化創意設計概念。 針對參與者對月老文化內容的理解程度與體驗感受，進行問卷與訪談分析後發現，本研究設計之互動體驗情境能有效提昇參與者對文化內容起源與意義的理解。再以Schmitt 提出之策略體驗模組（Strategic Experiential Modules, SEMs）進行分析，發現此體驗情境皆有助於提昇參與者於感官、情感、思考、行動、關聯體驗的感受程度與認同感，進而創造深刻的互動體驗感受。最後，期望此互動體驗情境的設計過程與雛形的實作經驗，能轉移到同性質的文化體驗情境設計的應用上，並提供建議給後續研究做參考。 / With the advent of the cultural and creative industry, it is worth to investigate the integration of traditional religious culture with the interactive technology to improve the participants' understanding of culture. The Matchmaker, the old man of the moonlight, is the god of marriage and love in Chinese traditional religious culture. In the thesis, the design of a multiplayer interactive experiential environment for the integration of the Matchmaker culture with the interactive technology is investigated and developed to improve the participants’ experience. For the design methodology, the creative concept design is performed and the interactive device prototyping is implemented. We draw out the related interaction design principles and used Unity 3D game engine along with the Kinect somatosensory Technology and Android platform to implement the Matchmaker interactive environment. Two themes of the developed environment are the digital prayer experience of the Matchmaker and the interactive embroidered ball throwing. To evaluation the user experience of the developed environment, the questionnaire analysis and interviews are performed based on the Schmitt’s strategic experiential modules. The result showed that the developed environment can enhance the participants' understanding of the culture of the Matchmaker and improve participants’ perception and recognition towards the experience of sensing, feeling, thinking, acting and relating.