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  • Investor sentiment and emotions have a strong impact on financial markets. In recent years there has been increasing interest in analyzing the sentiment of investors for stock price prediction using machine learning. Existing prediction models mostly depend on the analysis of trading data and company profit. few prediction theories have been built based on individual investors' sentiments. The fundamental reason is the difficulty to measure individual investors' sentiment.

  • Citizens' trust in eGovernment is crucial for the successful implementation of new electronic services. This relationship in the Greater Bay Area (GBA) plays an essential role since the Government services rely on mobile mini-programs This study investigates the trust towards government service mini-programs in WeChat and Alipay. A user feedback questionnaire was designed, and a total of 609 valid samples were collected from Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau. The findings imply that competence, integrity, and benevolence are the key components of trust in e-government (TIEG). TIEG positively influences perceived value (PV), which positively affects citizens' Intention to adopt service mini-programs. PV significantly mediates the relationship between TIEG and Intention. Although TIEG does not effectively reduce perceived risk (PR), risk issues cannot be ignored in the adoption process. Finally, this article proposes relevant implications and suggestions for the GBA government agents and policy makers.

  • Technology research offers several theories and models to explain how individuals accept and use technology innovations. While these often focus on the technical aspects of the innovation, they tend to downplay the affective component of technology. Recognizing that the adoption of technology is also determined by what it means and represents to the users, this paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by studying the effects of social influence and image on the behavioral intention to adopt a technology. We used structural equation modeling (SmartPLS) to analyze data collected from 238 self-administrated surveys regarding the behavioral intention of Macau residents to use battery electric vehicles. The result showed significant relationships among the variables in the model and depicted the construct of image as a strong factor in the adoption decision. Our findings suggest that social influence may not exhibit substantial impact in the case of innovations in their initial phase and, more importantly, the construct of image could be included as a key predictor of behavioral intention in technology acceptance models, particularly in contexts where the choices that consumers make are public, and therefore subject to judgments from the members of the community.

  • The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) was first conceptualized in 2016, which aimed to facilitate trade and finance liberalization among the three regions. The trade and financial environment of the GBA is unique. Due to the “one country, two systems” principle, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau are considered to be trading partners bounded by WTO rule, but bilateral free trade agreements have been signed between Mainland China and Hong Kong, and between Mainland China and Macau, but not between Hong Kong and Macau. Furthermore, each of the three regions circulates a local currency subject to its own exchange rate policy, with Hong Kong Dollar and Macau Pataca currently pegged to the US Dollar. These affect the mobility of trade and capital flows in the area. Hence, this paper applies the widely-used price-based approach due to Cheung et al. [5] to analyze the degrees of real and financial integration in the GBA based on interest rates, exchange rates, and price indexes data from January, 2016 to November, 2021. The real interest differential (RID), uncovered interest differential (UID) and the deviation from purchasing power parity (PPD) between each regional pair have means that are statistically and economically close to zero, implying high real and financial integration in the GBA. The unit root tests for stationarity also confirm that the time series are mean-reverting, so the economic integration in the GBA in the long run is foreseeable.

  • Neuromarketing lies at the intersection of three main disciplines: psychology, neuroscience, and marketing, and it has been a successful neuroscientific approach for the study of real-life choices such as consumer behavior [1]. A current gap in the cosmetics field is the lack of published research studies, considering the marketing investment done yearly in this category. With the rapid economic expansion and the rise of social media in China, consumers' interest in beauty is growing. Even though the Chinese cosmetics sector is rapidly expanding, no studies have been done with Chinese consumers. This study aims to employ the same approach as previously done in consumer neuroscience studies to evaluate cosmetic brands' marketing strategy to understand better if immediate emotional responses can be measured using Electrodermal Activity (EDA). Here, we focus on cosmetics products advertisement as a model to understand consumer preference formation and choice. Eighteen Chinese female consumers were recruited between 19 and 37 years old. From the results obtained, it was understood that none of the participants have voted for the product advertisement for which they showed higher emotional arousal. However, it appears that the participants' preference is for the products for which the brand awareness is stronger since the product advertisements with more votes are the ones for the Korean brand used. The product advertisements with Asian faces were the ones with more votes, suggesting that Asian faces have engaged consumer preference. However, the product advertisements for the Brazilian brands, unknown to the Chinese public, were the ones with fewer votes, although, those product advertisements were the ones with more emotional arousal per minute. Those advertisements were also those with non-Asian faces, suggesting that this feature influenced voting decisions. From this study, it has been observed that Electrodermal Activity is a measure of emotional arousal that by itself cannot be translated into consumer engagement. Therefore, it is also proposed to evaluate brand awareness in future studies related to product advertisements. The physical features of the people included in the advertisements is also suggested to be further evaluated in future studies since a different cultural background seems to influence the consumers' engagement. Furthermore, using EDA to complement other neurophysiological tools like facial expression analysis is also suggested for future studies to have evidence about the nature of the emotions raised.

  • In recent years, entrepreneurship and innovation have been highly propagandised for Macau's economic development, diversification, and the Greater Bay Area (GBA). Since 2013, efforts have been exerted by the Macau government to encourage and support entrepreneurship, from the launching of the Young Entrepreneurs' Aid Scheme in 2013 and the Macau Young Entrepreneur Incubation Centre in 2015. While the failure rate of startups has been considered high in most parts of the world, the rate was only as low as 14% in Macau, with many businesses created every year. This research aims to study the unique entrepreneurial environment for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) starting up in Macau from the experience of local entrepreneurs who are benefactors of government support. In-depth interviews were conducted to understand the experience and perceptions of these entrepreneurs as they go through each stage of the entrepreneurial process. Existing research on entrepreneurial processes varies from the two-stage process, which focuses on the beginning of an enterprise, to the different models of various stages from ideas generation to exit or long-term development. From the consolidation of the literature on the entrepreneurial process, five key stages were taken to guide this qualitative research. Findings suggested that idea validation at the start of the entrepreneurial process is almost non-existent amongst our research subjects. Yet it does not affect the implementation and growth of these SMEs. The growth strategies tend to be steady and for the long term, with most SMEs having no consideration of an exit plan.

  • As the rate of change increases exponentially, organizations must adapt quickly to the business landscape's volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). As a result, organizations must implement agile strategies and practices to ensure their responsiveness and readiness to any changes brought about by internal or external factors. With a greater number of changes, change agents are tasked with implementing various change management methodologies to ensure that change recipients accept change initiatives. This research will look at one of the methodologies used by change agents, the use of nudges from Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge Theory, which is a subtle intervention to influence an individual's decision-making with the goal of steering them towards a specific desired outcome; and analyze their effectiveness towards the change recipients when implemented. Change agents were interviewed on the application of Nudge Theory to change recipients when managing to change initiatives within their respective organizations. The results indicate that the use of nudges created by the change agents can significantly impact the level of resistance from the change recipients. If used correctly, the Nudge Theory can mitigate change resistance, and the success of a change initiative is higher. But, if change recipients are forced to comply, their resistance will be greater, affecting the organization overall.

  • Countless historical sites worldwide have become unrecognisable based on their historical context. Many are cultural heritage structures with significant historical and aesthetic importance. The majority have not been well preserved; worse, some were demolished (Stenning, 2015). Furthermore, structures are part of a dynamic and changing environment, and their location within the original landscape is not always clear. People have gradually forgotten cultural traditions as environments where historical stories took place, and the look and feel have been corrupted. Immersive Virtual Reality (V.R.) allows us to relive and explore the past. However, in the Pearl River Delta Region, specifically Macau S.A.R., V.R. is still in its infancy and is not frequently used for reproducing historical sceneries. Our research focuses on reproducing heritage structures and scenery based on scarce historical information. It shows how to incorporate facts and memories into the design and create engaging, immersive experiences in V.R. scenery that takes place, both inside and outside of a cultural heritage site that has lost its original appearance. Following this, a prototype was created with specific parameters relating to past and present sceneries. We partially reproduced an existing building complex currently being used for creative and commercial purposes, but it was a shelter for the poor and a house for old ladies to live in. There were not enough facts or images linked to the inner space in the past. Inadequate information allows audiovisual scene creators to be more imaginative. The prototype focuses on a functional design that integrates cultural traits tied to local industries. The researcher used image processing software, and web 3D tools (A-Frame 1.1.0). Users can navigate by virtually “walking” and starting the visual tour; simultaneously, the story unfolds as the timeline progresses. After entering, the users jump from the present to a specific era in the past. With audio guidance, users enter the private space, shared areas, working space, etc. Users can interact with objects from the virtual scenes while the interface displays relevant audiovisual introductions. Users could utilise the virtual system to learn how the old ladies led their daily lives in the Pearl River Delta Region and grasp the local single ladies’ group lifestyle at a specific time in the past (Kwong, 2020). The interactive experience enhances the users’ interest; additionally, the users become more familiar with the region’s traditional customs. With this approach, we can create old stories using modern technology. A-Frame provides users with great convenience and can be used by any Internet browser without relying on professional V.R. devices. The content from this usage provides a greater understanding of our heritage buildings and their historical context to the wider community. This could be used in other heritage sites worldwide to reproduce and maintain structural qualities over time. This immersive experience could be a means to navigate the past while in the present. This application could benefit exhibition developers, and visitors, notably in exhibition guided tours, virtual tours inside museums, or educational assisted historical storytelling.

  • Macao SAR, China is one of the more densely-populated territories in the world, and as such necessarily struggles with Soundscape quality. Nonetheless, the territory has already been identified as a unique location for to function as a Soundscape living lab (Cordeiro et al., 2014), since it has a very small manageable area that includes many types of geographical varieties, from extremely high density urban areas to natural environments with dense vegetation highland or varied water front typologies. In addition, Macao has extremely wide multicultural population with a broad range of subjects that have diverse cultural perceptions and thresholds in regards to sonic cognition. The potential impact of this diversity has already been noticed in both tourism (To & Chung, 2019) and research (Chung et al., 2016). The concept of Soundscape itself is garnering increased awareness as a viable alternative to assess the quality of the sonic environment, of use to policy management and legislation, shown not only by the increasing numbers of scientific articles on the subject (Moscoso et al., 2018), but also by recent international standardisation efforts in measuring it (ISO,2018). In this talk we shall give a preliminary description and illustration of the Soundscape in a territory that is rich in diversity and has huge potential for citizen participation. This includes approaches like noise mapping, sound mapping, Soundwalks, grounded theory efforts for detailed descriptions of the environment and use of alternative objective metrics. We will describe how to use the richness of this gathered data in developing artificial-intelligence algorithms to autonomously assess and predict the evaluation of a given Soundscape based on recordings alone. This goal will alleviate the intense human effort in subjective assessment, and may prove to be an effective and substantial diagnostics tool in planning the soundscape for prospective built environments, functioning not only as an analysis and diagnostics tool, but as a design strategy for a sustainable sonic future.

  • This study is an attempt to understand and describe the compositional principles of Chaoshan traditional houses (CTH) through a computational space syntax. In this approach, the space syntax is used to describe and verify the compositional rules of Chaoshan houses. Chaoshan rural residence is a classical Lingnan style building in Chaoshan area of eastern Guangdong province, associated with Teo-Swa people, a Han Chinese minority. This study takes the example the prototypes existing in the village of Zhupu, Haojiang District, Shantou city as a case study, to analyse the spatial form of the residences. The Zhupu village houses date from the Qing Dynasty - Qianlong period, around 1700 AD. The hypothesis of this study is that CTH buildings are a result of a space compositional rule system that can be described and replicated through a computational design methodology. This study will establish a computational architectural syntax, and is the first stage of an extended research work on the evolution of Chaoshan residential types. The understanding of this evolution may help, as future work, to develop urban strategies for adaptation of the CTH heritage buildings to the contemporary living conditions. As the result of this study is a computational 3D graphics modelling algorithm, the ability of the system to generate the house layouts is not limited to the reconstruction of existing typologies of CTH and its variations. The same algorithm will allow the generation of new housing schemes, with adaptation to design variables extracted from a particular site and region.

  • People with intellectual disabilities need vocational training and support in order to be able to get into the work market and maintain their workplace. In Macau SAR, China, the vocational training ecosystem still operates in fully classic, in-person, fashion, which means it is susceptible to pandemic situations such as COVID-19. This causes a big disruption to the training when isolation measures are in place. Our goal is to study the introduction of serious games for vocational training of people with disabilities in Macau. This work presents a study to assess the training benefits of serious games and usability factors, understand the acceptability and adoption factors/benefits of serious games for vocational training for people with intellectual disabilities and associated stakeholders in Macau.

  • It has been proven in numerous research that mindfulness can be helpful to reduce stress and chronic pain (Hall, 2014; Lindström, n.d.; Tong et al., 2015). While interactive mindfulness has been one of the focuses in the recent mobile applications market, usually tackling three essential human senses: audio, visual, and touch, each mobile application has quite some different approaches in terms of interactivity. Some focus on the touch and visual, and some on audio (environmental sounds or instructing meditation). Immersing oneself in virtual reality (VR) creates a constant stream of interactivity. Nonetheless, what are the conditions for an (in)tangible virtual reality to be more effective? Under the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown since the end of 2019, Macao has been facing a social concern that we cannot travel easily to visit our decedents’ graves abroad, let alone the existing concerns of expensive burial services, lack of space, and alternative burial options. Also, taking into consideration that standard funeral service in Macao is often too brief, and getting briefer, thus lacking the opportunity to properly farewell the decedent, this research is proposing a virtual reality 3D model construction of the Chapel of St. Michael, located in St. Michael the Archangel Cemetery in Macao, to be streamed on a 360 virtual tour platform, Kuula. co. By immersing in this virtual reality, the participant is to have a single user experience for mindfulness with the decedent. To ensure valid and reliable results that address the research aims and objectives, a single-user experiment is going to be set up with multiple electronic devices, namely, the smartphone iPhone X with cardboard VR, the tablet iPad Pro, and the Oculus Quest 2. The methodology to collect the data will be using observation and simulation. The experiment will be started with an introduction to the project and conducted with no instruction, allowing users to explore and examine all features in this immersive experience. Along with a post-experience survey (interview + questionnaire), we seek its conditions and impacts on Macao residents in terms of interactive mindfulness and participants’ expectation of testing, for the first time in Macao, a virtual reality grave mourning experience.

  • (Un)Directed Reading is an interactive installation (Edmonds, 2010) initially derived from the “Directed Reading” course, which all undergraduate students at the University must take during their final year. In this course, students are assigned different writing exercises and research assignments to open their creative and constructive minds in writing (EdwardsGroves, 2012; McVey, 2008). Every year, at the end of the course and after a selection process, a collection of stories is uploaded to a database of original stories. We then developed an open-source application to print a receipt ticket from a thermal printer with a randomly picked story every time a user pushes a button. An arcade game-style button is installed on a kiosk designed in collaboration with students and set on the university's campus (left photo). The printed receipt presents a short extract of one of the stories and a QR code that links to the full story decorated with illustrations. In a modern society where most of our interactions are audiovisual-based, young generations are less and less encouraged to read and even less to write. By offering a simple kiosk installation with short stories and graphical illustrations, we propose a new interactive interface that can easily engage passers-by to eventually stimulate their reading and creativity. By reading these stories, students, professors, staff, and visitors can be surprised by the talent of our students, as it stimulates students to write new pieces to be selected. The interactive kiosk was accessible to all for a period of 3 months with 23 stories during which we automatically collected some data to use in quantitative analysis. In this first run, we focused on data from the user's interactions such as story printed, story read, date and time. It allowed us to see the ratio between the printed receipt and the actual online reading of a story and more.

  • This paper aimed to build up the theorical and conceptual understanding of future forecasting study of Macau’s GDP and Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) by co-movement of economic indicators. Macau GDP and GGR showed co-movements with a number of time series economic indicators, including China’s exports and imports, China’s manufacturing PMI, non-manufacturing PMI, China's electricity production growth, share price of some Macau’s gaming operators, etc. These time series data can be found in statistics departments of China, Macau and Hong Kong, stock exchanges, and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Burns and Mitchell’s study in 1946 identified co-movements between economic indicators and being further carried out and developed leading, coincident and lagging indicators, which is essential for future econometric models and nowcasting techniques developments to study these co-movements. In particular, with the proper application of nowcasting techniques, future studies can exploit the data of leading and coincident economic indicators to forecast Macau’s GDP and GGR within an acceptable level of error. Since Macau is a “monotown,” where the gaming revenue makes a significant contribution to the economy. The forecasting of gaming revenue is crucial as it aids the gambling and tourism industries in preparing supply and provides information to policymakers to plan for the near future. This research also contributes to understand Macau’s economy by investigating its internal and external economic variables.

Last update from database: 3/29/24, 6:58 AM (UTC)