This study aims to clarify the structure of preference values of private women's universities in Japan. Three analytical flows were set up as methods: clustering women's universities, searching for major topics in current female students' electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) data using the topic model LDA, and observing the correlation between these topics and university ratings.

As a result, two factors, size and locality, were extracted, and a four-cluster model was created by plotting 60 women's universities in four quadrants of two dimensions. Then, 22 universities were selected to have the same level of text data, and eight topics were employed. Statistically significant correlations between the topics and university ratings were observed in each cluster. The larger universities with a high locality rate had high levels of “Topic 1: Learning through a wide range of specialties, courses, and seminars”. On the other hand, smaller universities with a high locality rate were found to have a high number of “Topic 3: Enjoyable learning from kind teachers”, while smaller universities with a low locality rate were found to have high numbers of “Topic 5: Foreign languages and international learning” and “Topic 4: Departments related to Psychology, Human Sciences, and Society”.

Based on the results and an analysis thereof, the following preference values are proposed: “vocational education that is overseen by female teachers”, “a role that responds to the conservative tendencies in female students' education”, “the establishment of academic fields that are useful for work and the cultivation of a sense of role within the workplace organization”, and “a gender-specific education system and educational ambience”. Furthermore, this study also makes recommendations for a combination of these proposals for preference values of each cluster.

In recent years, there have been systems in which E-commerce website management companies provide a sales platform for a particular product, and individual stores or companies “affiliate” with these companies. The individual stores and companies can then sell their products online through this platform. In systems that use such sales models, the departments that are responsible for placing orders and managing contracts with affiliated stores need to evaluate the importance of each affiliated store as a part of the operations of the E-commerce website. As it stands, affiliated store evaluations are often conducted based on qualitative and ambiguous criteria. If these evaluations are influenced by ambiguous impressions of the affiliated stores, or ambiguous evaluation criteria, then this may result in incorrect measures being taken. Therefore, this study employs a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model, referred to as a range adjusted measure (RAM) model, to evaluate the importance of each affiliated store, and conducted numerical experiments using actual data with this model. This model enables the provision of importance evaluation scores for each affiliated store. In addition, this model also enables the provision of specific numerical improvement targets for each evaluation criterion, and enables the provision of guidelines for which factors to improve to affiliated stores with low scores. Through this study, it was possible to quantitatively evaluate and analyze each affiliated store using the importance evaluation model.

In recent years, the importance of non-contact communication has increased in BtoB businesses, and efforts to increase sales efficiency have flourished. However, the increase in the number of departments involved in the purchasing process has created challenges in terms of inter-departmental collaboration and agreement on KPIs. This study proposes that visualization measures for customers together with a purchasing funnel that uses the service design method are useful in building consensus among departments and designing marketing measures for BtoB companies. This proposal was applied to several BtoB companies and its qualitative effects on marketing policy design and interdepartmental consensus-building was verified. The results show that reflecting recommendations that have been received when designing a website renewal had quantitative effects, such as an increase in access to target pages after renewal.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the sharing of emotional experiences influences the flexibility of organizations. Based on a literature review of previous studies related to flexibility of organizations and the psychological advantages of the social sharing of emotional experiences, a hypothesis on the relationship between them was derived. A questionnaire survey was conducted with employees in a variety of industries as participants. Participants' practices of social sharing of their emotional experiences, perceptions of the flexibility of their own institutes, perceptions of the organizational cultures of their own organizations, as well as demographic information relating to the participants were measured using these questionnaires. The results suggested that the sharing of emotional experiences has a significant correlation with flexibility of organizations. In particular, the intensity of shared emotional experiences had a stronger effect on dynamic capability than on organizational flexibility. In addition, different organizational cultures in the workplace were found to have different levels of influence on these factors. This study implies the importance of cultivating cultures of social interactions among employees, such as the social sharing of emotional experiences.