While most people claim to be very concerned about their privacy, they do not consistently take actions to protect it. Web retailers detail their information practices in their privacy policies, but most of the time this information remains invisible to consumers. This paper reports on research undertaken to determine whether a more prominent display of privacy information will cause consumers to incorporate privacy considerations into their online purchasing decisions. We designed an experiment in which a shopping search engine interface, Privacy Finder, clearly displays privacy policy information provided by retailers in a machinereadable format. Privacy Finder annotates search results with a “privacy icon” and a “privacy report.” The privacy icon provides a privacy rating for the retailer on a five-point scale. The privacy report summarizes information contained in traditional privacy policies in a short, concise format. Our research shows that providing accessible privacy information reduces the information asymmetry gap between merchants and consumers. This reduction tends to lead consumers to purchase from online retailers who better protect their privacy. Additionally, our study indicates that once privacy information is made more salient, some consumers are willing to pay a premium to purchase from more privacy protective websites.

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The strength of a memory trace is modulated by a variety of factors such as arousal, attention, context, type of processing during encoding, salience and novelty of the experience. Some of these factors can be modeled as a variable plasticity level in the memory system, controlled by arousal or relevance-estimating systems. We demonstrate that a Bayesian con dence propagation neural network with learning time constant modulated in this way exhibits enhanced recall of an item tagged as salient, proactive and retroactive inhibition of other items is also demonstrated as well as an inverted U-curve response curve to overall plasticity.

Decision making in process-aware information systems involves build-time and run-time decisions. At build-time, idealized process models are designed based on the organization’s objectives, infrastructure, context, constraints, etc. At run-time, this idealized view is often broken. In particular, process models generally assume that planned activities happen within a certain period. When such assumptions are not fulfilled, users must make decisions regarding alternative arrangements to achieve the goal of completing the process within its expected timeframe or to minimize tardiness. We refer to the required decisions as escalations. This paper proposes a framework for escalations that draws on established principles from the workflow management field. The paper identifies and classifies a number of escalation mechanisms such as: changing the routing of work, changing the work distribution, or changing the requirements with respect to available data. A case study and a simulation experiment are used to illustrate and evaluate these mechanisms.

The ways of modelling some of the most profound effects of emotion and arousal on cognition are discussed. Entropy reduction is used to measure quantitatively the learning speed in a cognitive model under different parameters ’ conditions. It is noticed that some settings facilitate the learning in particular stages of problem solving more than others. The entropy feedback is used to control these parameters and strategy, which in turn improves greatly the learning in the model as well as the model match with the data. This result may explain the reasons behind some of the neurobiological changes, associated with emotion and its control of the decision making strategy and behaviour. 1

The work presented in this thesis deals with neural network models of human memory based on the Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Network (BCPNN). The focus is to explore how a model derived from a statistical framework can link more abstract top-down cognitive models with biologically plausible cortex models. Of special interest is whether it there exists necessary architectural differences between different memory systems or whether they can all be achieved within the same neural architecture for different parameter values.

A failure to adapt to novel or changing environmental demands is a core feature of a wide variety of neuropsychiatric disorders as well as the normal states of stress and fatigue. We review the neurochemistry of cognitive control, which has been associated primarily with the prefrontal cortex. Many drugs affect the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, but the direction and extent of drug effects vary across individuals and tasks. Apparently paradoxical effects are often observed, where the same medication causes both cognitive enhancement as well as cognitive side effects. We review neurobiological research that is beginning to elucidate the nature of these contrasting effects and the factors underlying the large variability across individuals and behaviours. The work has considerable implications for the understanding of and treatment development for abnormalities such as Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and drug addiction.

The growth of e-commerceand its attendantnew technologyfeatureshas increasedinteractivity in consumerinformationprocessinganddecision-makingprocesses.The pulland push of information can be both more personalizedand more commonly used. The ease of pushing information may lead to interruptions in consumer information processing that are more pronounced than those experienced in non-Internetenvironments.Our study investigated the impact of interruption frequency, timing, and content and the moderating effects of consumer knowledge, control,and goal type on time spent on the decisiontask as well as satisfactionwith the decision processand the choice.Our resultsshow that the rightconfigurationof interruptionsmay lead to increased online viewing time, whereas ill-designed interruptions may be detrimental. The Internet provides an interactive information search and decision environment for consumers. Interactive features such as banner ads, pop-up windows, and intelligent agents that make purchase recommendations to consumers (e.g., collaborative filtering) are becoming more popular and are frequently used by marketers to attract attention and to promote

Information and information processing are one of the most important aspects of dynamic systems. The term 'information', that is used in various contexts, might better be replaced with one that incorporates novelty, activity and learning. Many important communications of learning systems are non-ergodic. The ergodicity assumption in Shannon's communication theory restricts his and all related concepts to systems that can not learn. For learning systems that interact with their environments, the more primitive concept of 'variety' will have to be used, instead of probability. Humans have a fundamental need for variety: He can't permanently perceive the same context, he can't do always the same things! Following an action theoretical approach we have to conclude a fundamental need for variety. This need for variety leads to a different interpretation of human behavior that is often classified as "errors". Variety is the basis to measure complexity of an activity. Complexity in the relati...