The process of consumer’s purchasing decision is overly complicated. We applied a multi-agent model to simulate consumer behavior, which has been more complicated because the available information has increased through wide use of the Internet. We constructed a consumer goods market model, which there are several competing products and several consumers with different personality. The model estimates the amount of sales of several competing products. Each product comes to the market at a specific date, and the sales price changes with time, and the utilities that each consumer obtains by purchasing each product are different because of the relations between the individuality of each product and each consumer’s worth. As the information about the product, “word-of-mouth (WOM)” and “Internet WOM” are included in the model as communication channels. And in addition, consumers can see information about sales in the overall market. In this study, we applied the model to the Digital Music Player industry and examine the effectiveness of the analysis of the reaction of the entire market.

After 2000, the growth of information services industry market has a tendency to stagnate in Japan. In addition, the price of information services for enterprise is still falling. What is a reason for these phenomena? We recognize that the environment surrounding information service industry is changing, and that the strategy corresponding to the changes of the environment is needed for information services enterprises.

In this paper, we paid attention to business model, human resources which have rich talents and technology, and outsourcing, as management resources which control the performance of the enterprise under the situation of information services industry described previously. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the source of competitive edge of information services enterprise by empirical analyses of that those management resources effect on value added from the viewpoint of scale economy.

By these analyses, we could conclude that business model, human resources which have rich talents and technology, and outsourcing are closely related to scale economies, and the most important management resource is human resource. For information services industry, this means that it is necessary for further growth to convert from labor-intensive industry to knowledge-intensive industry.

In this paper, we propose a method of problem specifications, which are structured descriptions of problems, in XML form based on the Generic Entity-Relationship Model (GERM). The GERM is an expansion of the Entity-Relationship Model. This proposal form consists of two layers which are called ‘class level (XGERM)’ and ‘instance level (XGERM instance)’. This approach depends neither on the problem domains nor on the target mathematical models. Both of layers can be represented in XML and the formal validity of the document can be checked by XML Schema. XGERM has predefined 31 tags and the unique XML Schema for XGERM can be specified. On the other hand, the tags of XGREM instance vary according to XGERM documents. Thus XML Schema for XGERM instance cannot be predefined, but it can be generated automatically from the target XGERM document. By using XML Schema, we can use existing XML parser to check the formal validity, and we need not develop the original XML parser. The validity checked XGERM instance can be transformed into input data to invoke the target solver.

In many organizations, various communication media, such as face-to-face meeting, written document, telephone, facsimile, mobile phone and e-mail, are used. And some of organizations have considered adopting new CMC (computer mediated communication) technologies including Weblog and SNS (Social Networking Service) in recent years. However, diversification of media can cause several problems. This article discusses “media saturation” which means the situation that the variety of media used by their members cannot increase any more, and examines the impacts of diversification of media on communication inefficiency. The results of quantitative research have shown that media diversification makes communication more inefficient and depresses effectiveness of communication environment. And organizational rule of media use and individual situational media use improve such communication inefficiency, but the rule decreases the effectiveness of communication environment. Additionally, we can recognize that the level of media saturation differs according to tasks.

This study aimed to reveal impacts of individual factors, participant factors, institutional factors on individuals’ information sharing and diffusion behavior through trust for participants in BBS. Using questionnaires, data was gathered from 900 respondents who had used internet and participated in a BBS, and was analyzed using path analysis. The result showed that, in a BBS, 1) institutional factors and individual factors such as general trust, information provision motivation and relationship motivation enhanced trust, which stimulated information sharing within the BBS while hindering their participation in other BBSs and face-toface communication, 2) general trust and information gain motivation stimulated their participation in other BBSs and face-to-face communication, 3) information provision motivation stimulated information sharing in the BBS and the participation in other BBSs, 4) relationship motivation stimulated all of information sharing and diffusion both inside and outside of the BBS.