2025
Authors
Ferreira, D; Barbosa, B; Sousa, A;
Publication
EUROMED JOURNAL OF BUSINESS
Abstract
PurposeFresh food products remain one of the most challenging product categories for e-commerce managers. The literature emphasizes the importance of perceived freshness in explaining their purchase behavior. However, studies on online purchases of fresh food products are scarce, especially regarding repurchase intentions, and the role of perceived freshness in online settings has so far been disregarded. This research addresses this gap by examining the role of perceived freshness in the intention to repurchase fresh food products online.Design/methodology/approachGuided by the expectation confirmation theory (ECT) and the perceived risk theory, this study defined a set of hypotheses tested through structural equation modeling. Participants were consumers with previous experience in purchasing fresh food products online.FindingsThe findings indicate that the importance of sensory attributes negatively affected the perceived freshness of fresh food products purchased online, while the importance of non-sensory attributes had a non-significant impact. Expectations of freshness positively affected perceived freshness and confirmation of freshness, as suggested by ECT. The hypothesized positive effects of confirmation on satisfaction and of satisfaction on intention to repurchase fresh food products online were also supported. Finally, it was found that repurchase intention was negatively affected by perceived performance risk and financial risk.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the limited literature on online purchase of fresh food by focusing on perceived freshness as a determinant of repurchase intention.
2025
Authors
Barbosa, B; Amorim, AS;
Publication
INTERNATIONAL REVIEW ON PUBLIC AND NONPROFIT MARKETING
Abstract
This article aims to explore menopausal women's views on empowerment in menopause-related femvertising on social media and to examine its outcomes for both women and brands. It includes a qualitative study comprising in-depth interviews with menopausal women who were active social media users (n = 15). The data were subject to content analysis using NVIVO software. The results reveal that menopause empowerment strategies on social media are perceived by women as a source of knowledge, facilitating social support, focusing on self-worth enhancement, and deconstructing stereotypes and taboos. Despite positive impacts such as self-esteem and self-confidence, these messages can also induce discomfort and feelings of segregation. Although the study highlights potential benefits for brands, including improved image and engagement, it also identifies risks such as skepticism, distrust, and customer loss. This research contributes to the femvertising and branding literature by addressing the largely overlooked segment of menopausal women. It highlights knowledge dissemination as a critical and previously underexplored dimension of femvertising and demonstrates that menopause empowerment carries distinct dynamics and consequences for both women and advertising brands, shedding light on the complexity of femvertising strategies. The findings can assist brands and social organizations aiming to develop more effective strategies for engaging menopausal audiences.
2024
Authors
Mendes Neves, T; Seca, D; Sousa, R; Ribeiro, C; Mendes Moreira, J;
Publication
COMPUTATIONAL ECONOMICS
Abstract
As many automated algorithms find their way into the IT systems of the banking sector, having a way to validate and interpret the results from these algorithms can lead to a substantial reduction in the risks associated with automation. Usually, validating these pricing mechanisms requires human resources to manually analyze and validate large quantities of data. There is a lack of effective methods that analyze the time series and understand if what is currently happening is plausible based on previous data, without information about the variables used to calculate the price of the asset. This paper describes an implementation of a process that allows us to validate many data points automatically. We explore the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm to find coincident patterns in financial time series, allowing us to detect anomalies, outliers, and data points that do not follow normal behavior. This system allows quicker detection of defective calculations that would otherwise result in the incorrect pricing of financial assets. Furthermore, our method does not require knowledge about the variables used to calculate the time series being analyzed. Our proposal uses pattern matching and can validate more than 58% of instances, substantially improving human risk analysts' efficiency. The proposal is completely transparent, allowing analysts to understand how the algorithm made its decision, increasing the trustworthiness of the method.
2024
Authors
Pinto, J; Esteves, V; Tavares, S; Sousa, R;
Publication
PROGRESS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Abstract
The power transformer is one of the key components of any electrical grid, and, as such, modern day industrialization activities require constant usage of the asset. This increases the possibility of failures and can potentially diminish the lifespan of a power transformer. Dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is a technique developed to quantify the existence of hydrocarbon gases in the content of the power transformer oil, which in turn can indicate the presence of faults. Since this process requires different chemical analysis for each type of gas, the overall cost of the operation increases with number of gases. Thus said, a machine learning methodology was defined to meet two simultaneous objectives, identify gas subsets, and predict the remaining gases, thus restoring them. Two subsets of equal or smaller size to those used by traditional methods (Duval's triangle, Roger's ratio, IEC table) were identified, while showing potentially superior performance. The models restored the discarded gases, and the restored set was compared with the original set in a variety of validation tasks.
2024
Authors
Colonna, JG; Fares, AA; Duarte, M; Sousa, R;
Publication
INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS WITH APPLICATIONS
Abstract
Process Mining offers a powerful framework for uncovering, analyzing, and optimizing real-world business processes. Petri nets provide a versatile means of modeling process behavior. However, traditional methods often struggle to effectively compare complex Petri nets, hindering their potential for process enhancement. To address this challenge, we introduce PetriNet2Vec, an unsupervised methodology inspired by Doc2Vec. This approach converts Petri nets into embedding vectors, facilitating the comparison, clustering, and classification of process models. We validated our approach using the PDC Dataset, comprising 96 diverse Petri net models. The results demonstrate that PetriNet2Vec effectively captures the structural properties of process models, enabling accurate process classification and efficient process retrieval. Specifically, our findings highlight the utility of the learned embeddings in two key downstream tasks: process classification and process retrieval. In process classification, the embeddings allowed for accurate categorization of process models based on their structural properties. In process retrieval, the embeddings enabled efficient retrieval of similar process models using cosine distance. These results demonstrate the potential of PetriNet2Vec to significantly enhance process mining capabilities.
2024
Authors
Guimaraes, N; Campos, R; Jorge, A;
Publication
WILEY INTERDISCIPLINARY REVIEWS-DATA MINING AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have substantially pushed artificial intelligence (AI) research and applications in the last few years. They are currently able to achieve high effectiveness in different natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as machine translation, named entity recognition, text classification, question answering, or text summarization. Recently, significant attention has been drawn to OpenAI's GPT models' capabilities and extremely accessible interface. LLMs are nowadays routinely used and studied for downstream tasks and specific applications with great success, pushing forward the state of the art in almost all of them. However, they also exhibit impressive inference capabilities when used off the shelf without further training. In this paper, we aim to study the behavior of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in some inference tasks they were not initially trained for. Therefore, we focus our attention on very recent research works related to the inference capabilities of PLMs in some selected tasks such as factual probing and common-sense reasoning. We highlight relevant achievements made by these models, as well as some of their current limitations that open opportunities for further research.This article is categorized under:Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge > Key Design Issues in DataMiningTechnologies > Artificial Intelligence
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