Social media is fundamentally changing the way people communicate, consume and collaborate. It provides companies a new platform to interact with their customers. In academia, there is a surge in research efforts on understanding its effects. This paper aims to provide a review of current status of social media research. We discuss the specific domains in which the impacts of social media have been examined. A brief review of applicable research methodologies and approaches is also provided.

Building upon the concept of D _α operator introduced by Atanassov (1989), this article proposes an improved objective approach and a hybrid approach to operationalize D _α so that the hesitation in an intuitionistic fuzzy number (IFN) can be further refined and characterized. Numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the features and novelty of the proposed approach compared to existing methods in the literature. The aim is to furnish an effective way to refine hesitations in intuitionistic fuzzy assessments for more reliable and confident decision aids.

Retail price and promotional effort are two important parameters on which demand of a commodity largely depends. This paper develops and analyzes a two-echelon supply chain where market demand depends on both retail price and sales effort. The centralized model is studied as the benchmark case, and the wholesale price-only contract is studied as the base case in which each entity tries to maximize its individual profit. Different contract mechanisms are implemented to outperform the base case in terms of both total chain’s as well as individual profits. Comparisons among the coordinating contracts are provided so that any entity may choose the better one from available contracts after the contract parameters are negotiated. The model is extensively examined through a numerical example.

Recent developments in computational sciences and computer modeling have allowed emergency preparedness exercises to include simulation models as supporting tools. These simulation models are generally built for predicting temporal and geographic patterns of disease spread. However sole use of simulation models in exercise design falls short in terms of incorporating policy decision makers’ preferences into decision-making processes. In this paper, a general framework for exercising public health preparedness plans with a decision support system is presented to integrate estimation of key epidemiological parameters with a system dynamics model of an outbreak. A multi-criteria decision making framework, an Analytical Hierarchy Process model, is then developed and integrated with the simulation model to help public health policy makers prioritize their response goals and evaluate mitigation strategies in a table-top exercise environment.

This paper analyzes the queuing problem that was experienced during the Shanghai World Expo of 2010. The queuing problem will be discussed at three levels. The three levels include the physical, psychological, and social aspects of the queuing problem. The collective behavior of visitors is studied through analyzing the information from the different sources, such as, the network of electronic eyes, the evaluation platform based on mobile phone system and the Internet. A hybrid information network technology is implemented. Based on the Wuli-Shili-Renli (WSR) system methodology, a new theoretical analysis framework for the queuing problem is proposed.

While last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of digital economy, there is limited understanding in literature on whether the conventional wisdom on pricing strategy still holds for information goods. On one hand, information goods, similar to durable goods, are subject to value depreciation; on the other, they differ from traditional goods in negligible marginal cost and the sensitivity to social influences. This paper develops a two-period, game-theoretic model to investigate optimal pricing strategy of information goods. On one dimension, two different depreciation mechanisms (self- and time-depreciation) are considered; on the other, two prevalent pricing schemes (perpetual licensing and subscription-fee models) are studied. We obtain closed-form solutions in all scenarios. Our findings suggest that vendors of time-depreciation information goods should adopt subscription-fee model to attract early adopters and exploit social influences, while the vendors of self-depreciation information goods should strategically balance between depreciation and social influences. Interestingly, as social influences become strong enough, the difference between pricing schemes diminishes and the tradeoff between candidate strategies vanishes. We also extend the model to static pricing in which the vendor commits to future price. We discover that the superiority of subscription-fee model might be overturned under static pricing. Our results above also imply that building consumer feedback and interaction systems could be helpful for minimizing the potential loss of a suboptimal pricing scheme.