This study aimed to reveal an impact of participants' ability and participants' personality on individuals' information-getting behavior and information-giving behavior through trust for participants in virtual environment (e.g. BBS or chat). Using questionnaires, data was gathered from 95 college students who had participated in BBS or chat and the data was analyzed by path analysis.

The result showed that 1) high perception of enough ability being shared among the participants has a strong positive impact on getting information directly, or indirectly through trust, and 2) not only the ability but also favorable personality and trust have positive impact on giving information. While certain number of competent participants foster information-getting behavior, favorable personality of participants and trust among themselves are as important as participants' ability in order to foster information-giving behavior.

This paper discusses that the influence of decision maker's affective state on risk preference under risky decision making. Prior research has recently appeared that the impact of affect on risk taking behavior induces different risk preference, as predicted by prospect theory. However, this propensity is not always confirmed among all research, and the reasons of this inconsistency have not appeared yet. This study hypothesizes that (1) the relativity between affect and decision making tasks, and (2) the way of comparison between the affective states, bring different preferences in prior studies. The results indicate that in comparison with task unrelated positive affect, task related positive affect changes the commonly found risk preference. The results also suggest that comparing positive and negative affective states has a stronger effect on risk preference than comparing affective and non affective states. These findings detect the important implication for future research that focuses on the role of affect on decision making in organizations.

The article discusses how primary information from individual employees can be gathered directly and processed by top management, giving practical examples. Top-management decisions in large companies are based on choices and information organized, summarized and processed by middle management, reflecting organizational realities. However, top management frequently has to resign over scandals of which it was uninformed. This suggests that information received via middle management is inadequate and that top management must be familiar with employee thinking. A practical and active means of access to such primary information is called for. To regularly obtain such unbiased information it must be gathered each and every day from all employees. The author discusses how, in the necessary devolution of screening to the lowest levels, system maintenance can be eased by linking it with incentives in a “fuzzy” operation.

This study focuses on the efficiency of the information hub at the crisis moment. St. Luke's International Hospital case, which had effectively responded to the chemical terrorism known as the Sarin gas attack on Tokyo subway system that was completely beyond the scope of the assumption at that time. The key problem solving drivers were the generation and effective functioning of the three information hubs that had provided status information and, at the same time, had indicated procedural information such as the practical countermeasures within the organization. Management in general should keep in their minds that any pertinent countermeasures should be built into such a structure to readily accommodate the generation of information hubs and utilize and benefit from their respective activities. The three elements necessary for the generation of hubs were: l) the creation of places where a good deal of information is channeled to and made available to crisis fighters. 2) the availability of people determined to transmit and disseminate information.3) the existence of organizations receptive and responsive to information transmitted.

We perform a new proposal in this paper about the "recommendation technique of goods" which a seller recommends next purchase goods appropriately for every specific customer. The new recommendation technique of goods was able to conquer the problem of the conventional collaborative filtering method based on data-mining, or the contents analyzing method by the past purchase track record data, and take in subjective evaluation of a seller's sales promotion person group (Hereafter, it is called the spot). Namely, it aims at the research on the new recommendation technique of goods and the construction of a practical model by fusion to IT (Information Technology)technique and humane sensitivity.

The collaborative filtering and the contents analyzing method have the problem that a lot of track record data is needed, and it cannot apply about recommendation of the new goods before sale in the planning stage since recommendation is performed based on the similarity of the purchase track record data for every customer. Moreover, big deviation with experience of the spot and the conference was seen, and the fusion of mathematical analysis and on-site feeling of the goods evaluation only depending on data analysis was often a subject.

The feature of the new technique to propose is to derive the "attribute relation matrix" which evaluates the strength of the relation of a "customer attribute" and a "goods attribute" by the mathematical programming model. According to this attribute relation matrix, the recommended candidate goods can be extracted for customers with a certain characteristic, and the recommended goods were narrowed down on the spot by making the recommended candidate goods of alternatives, and adding the subjective evaluation by AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). In the application experiment result in the real shop of the new recommendation technique, the recommended candidate goods was able to mention goods with unexpected nature or freshness while the goods of the high evaluation for the spot were contained

Cellular phone which spread widely as a communication tool has a great influence on people's efficient behavior, human relations and life style. The influences of the cellular phone are mostly researched in the field of sociology or social psychology. However, the studies targeting people who work in corporate organization are few. In this study, we grasp the change of people and organization by utilizing cellular phone from the viewpoints of "influence on people and organization of information technology in the corporation" and "influence by utilizing cellular phone". Therefore, we conduct questionnaire survey for people who work in the corporation, and analyze acquired data by using the multivariate analysis. As the results, we suggest that utilizing cellular phone influences various change of people who works in the corporation. Especially, we could confirm the change of work, information/knowledge sharing and the demerit which are not cleared up in the prior studies.