Competitive Web Research Articles

Rationale for the feasibility of developing a web application for aggregator of travel services

The article examines issues related to the feasibility of developing a web application that will combine tourism services and offer the user various services related to excursions. The introduction provides current statistical data on the development of the tourism industry based on research from the Higher School of Economics and the statistical bulletin of Rosstat. Arguments and reasoning in favor of the digital development of this area are presented. As part of the analysis of the feasibility of the development, the volume of the tourism services market in the Samara region was calculated. The volume of the tourism services market was calculated using 4 indicators: PAM, TAM, SAM, SOM (data for calculations was taken from official sources of Rosstat and the Ministry of Tourism). After analyzing the calculated indicators, a conclusion was made about the prospects of the tourism services market. A business model for the development of the application being developed based on lean canvas has been drawn up, and the rationale for the primary hypotheses is briefly described. Based on this table, a product development strategy is built. The criteria for analogues of the product being developed are described. An analysis of indirect and direct competitors, travel portals and applications was carried out. Direct competitors are products that provide services to the user in the field of excursions, attractions, etc. The positive and negative aspects of analogues are presented. An analysis of popular operating systems that are used by consumers was carried out. The difficulties of implementing a cross-platform application that runs on any personal device are described. Arguments are given in favor of developing a product based on a web platform. The results of the study allowed us to draw a conclusion about the situation in the tourism services market, the development of a competitive web application, and potential loyal customers. The possible practical benefits of market analysis and gradual product development are described.

Land and Living on Little in Kenya

In these three volumes, Ambreena Manji, Barbara Thomas, and Julie Zollman detail how poor people in Kenya navigate everyday struggles against restrictive social, economic, and political constraints to build livelihoods through their individual and collective efforts in order to access basic social services, land, markets, and employment, and to participate in the social, economic and political arenas. In the latest edition of her book, Politics, Participation and Poverty: Development Through Self-Help in Kenya, first published in 1985, Thomas chronicles innovative ways in which the rural poor in six locations in Eastern, Central, and Rift Valley Provinces have exploited the complex competitive web of Kenya’s electoral patron-client linkages at local and national levels to access scarce resources for community development projects. The trend of unequal development based on region, class, gender, and ethnicity that informed development through self-help in the 1970s and 80s persist to date, as elaborated in Zollman’s Living on Little: Navigating Financial Scarcity in Modern Kenya. While Manji, in The Struggle for Land & Justice in Kenya, focuses on struggles over land and justice from the colonial era to the present, Thomas and Zollman highlight continuing struggles by people living on little to access scarce essential services and land in their quest for personal and community development. While these titles fit into distinct disciplinary fields and use diverse methodological approaches, they meticulously weave profound narratives of the resilience of ordinary Kenyans building livelihoods, families, and communities with little resources.

Customer churn prediction for web browsers

In the competitive web browser market, identifying potential churners is critical to decreasing the loss of existing customers. Churn prediction based on customer behaviors plays a vital role in customer retention strategies. However, traditional churn prediction algorithms such as Tree-based models cannot exploit the temporal characteristics of browser customers behaviors, while sequence models cannot explicitly extract the information between multiple behaviors. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel model named Multivariate Behavior Sequence Transformer (MBST) with two complementary attention mechanisms to explore the temporal and behavioral information separately. Furthermore, a Tree-based classifier is attached for churn prediction instead of using the multilayer perceptron. Extensive experiments on a real-world Tencent QQ browser dataset with over 600,000 samples demonstrate that the proposed MBST achieves the F-score of 82.72% and the Area Under Curve (AUC) of 93.75%, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of churn prediction.

European Entrepreneurship Reinforcement Policies in Macro, Meso, and Micro Terms for the Post-COVID-19 Era

In today’s unprecedented transformation in the global socio-economic system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the escalating fourth industrial revolution, reinforcing innovative entrepreneurship appears a significant policy objective that can lead to overall socio-economic development. In this drastically changed context, entrepreneurship support policies seem that they need to be both conceptually and practically readjusted, simultaneously at the macro, meso, and micro levels. This paper investigates the case of public entrepreneurship policies in the European Union (EU), aiming to find specific patterns and suggest a new multilevel policy framework. Initially, the article offers a brief overview of the related trends created in the emerging post-COVID-19 era. Next, the “competitiveness web” perspective in terms of “macro-meso-micro” level synthesis is presented, considering that it can function as a theoretical framework for entrepreneurship reinforcement. Recent EU entrepreneurship support policy guidelines are then explored, emphasizing the latest trends and the development opportunities arising with the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility establishment to deal with the consequences of the current health and socio-economic crisis. Upon this basis, the paper concludes in a proposal for an integrated “macro-meso-micro” policy, placing at the epicenter the mechanism of the Institutes of Local Development and Innovation (ILDI). This policy aims to strengthen the spatially-located firms to reposition and readapt the “Stra.Tech.Man” potential they have and activate in their local business ecosystem (strategy-technology-management synthesis).

Comparison of Time Series Forecasting Based on Statistical ARIMA Model and LSTM with Attention Mechanism

Time series Forecasting (TSF) has been a research hotspot and widely applied in many areas such as financial, bioinformatics, social sciences and engineering. This article aimed at comparing the forecasting performances using the traditional Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model with the deep neural network model of Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) with attention mechanism which achieved great success in sequence modelling. We first briefly introduced the basics of ARIMA and LSTM with attention models, summarized the general steps of constructing the ARIMA model for the TSF task. We obtained the dataset from Kaggle competition web traffic and modelled them as TSF problem. Then the LSTM with attention mechanism model was proposed to the TSF. Finally forecasting performance comparisons were conducted using the same dataset under different evaluation metrics. Both models achieved comparable results with the up-to-date methods and LSTM slightly outperformed the classical counterpart in TSF task.

Thoughts on Competitiveness and Integrated Industrial Policy: A Field of Mutual Convergences

Competitiveness and industrial policy seem to play a critical role in the development and mutation of different spatialized socio-economic systems. This article aims to review the literature on these two concepts and suggest a novel theoretical framework. First, we identify that, in the relevant literature, industrial policy acquires progressively a repositioned content, described as a new, holistic, multidimensional, or integrated policy that can help create and sustain the competitiveness of the firms, industries, localities, nations, or other socio-economic agglomerations. In this context, we explore the form of an actual integrated industrial policy and propose the theoretical framework of the competitiveness web, in which the co-evolution of micro-meso-macro levels are explored, by placing the dynamics of business innovation at the dialectic center of the overall developmental process. This integrated industrial policy to strengthen competitiveness must also be able to promote innovation in the different local and regional ecosystems and, therefore, we conceive a policy mechanism in the form of the Institutes of Local Development and Innovation (ILDI). The primary purpose of these institutes is to diagnose and strengthen the Stra.Tech.Man physiology (strategy-technology-management synthesis) of the local socio-economic organizations. We believe that this new approach to the integrated industrial policy to strengthen the local competitiveness can contribute to facilitating the adaptation of the socio-economic systems, and especially the less dynamic and developed, to the new emerging challenges of the crisis and restructuring of globalization in the pandemic era.

Institutional Dynamics and Economic Development in Greece: An Acemoglian Approach

The evolution of institutions is a theoretical field of increasing interest today. Socio-economic development in the institutional approach results mainly from the historical unfolding and quality of institutions. This paper aims to highlight Daron Acemoglu’s institutional approach, which appears to be gaining prominence gradually, and propose a new theoretical perception of the developmental process of the Greek socio-economic system. It first analyses Acemoglu’s theoretical contribution, it then compares the ‘Acemoglian’ to other approaches and suggests that the analysis of inclusive and extractive institutions based on historically-significant virtuous and vicious circles has value for the Greek case. While several studies tend to focus on the macroeconomic and macro-financial symptoms of the Greek crisis, an evolutionary approach of the deeper institutional dynamics seems to offer a required reposition. We describe and recommend the development and underdevelopment process in terms of an ‘institutionally adaptive socio-economic system’ and ‘competitiveness web’. These findings indicate that development takes place over historically-significant periods, through complex processes of selection and diffusion of institutional restructurings, and that civil societies are responsible for the political forces who represent them, at least in democratic regimes. In the case of Greece, the proposal to utilise an approach of an ‘institutionally adaptive socio-economic system’ can give a repositioned theoretical perception, especially nowadays when the institutional and evolutionary socio-economic analytical classes seem to be gaining interest and prominence.

Growth Poles and Clusters: Are There Useful Analytical Complementarities?

This article aims to critically review the advancements in the study of contemporary dynamics of local development under the prism of the analytical perspectives of growth poles and clusters. We proceed to a literature review of clusters and growth poles and attempt an analytical synthesis. The analysis of growth poles appears to remain within the interpretive limits of traditional economic geography, focusing mainly on the dimension of regional agglomerations. At the same time, the broader literature on clusters deals more with interdisciplinary issues in their global perspective by starting increasingly its analysis from the micro-dynamics articulated at the firm level. This article proposes a conceptual extension to the analysis of the current dynamics of local development in the framework of the “competitiveness web” that takes into account all the interdependent levels of space and actors.

Trends on the conception of competitiveness and modern industrial policy: The emergent field of a new synthesis

The concept of competitiveness and the practice of industrial policy seem to acquire a repositioned meaning and new interest today. We explore how the concept of competitiveness is changing shape and scope and what is the focus of industrial policy both historically and recently in the effort of finding their theoretical convergences and divergences. The findings suggest a move towards an industrial policy that is systemic and integrated since it focuses on enhancing the multilevel competitiveness of the socio-economic system in a unified micro-meso-macro approach. A counter-proposed analysis of the “competitiveness web,” which perceives at the centre of the system the evolutionary micro-dynamics of the firm surrounded by co-evolving meso-dynamics and macro-economic and macro-social environments, enhances our understanding towards an “organic” industrial policy that focuses on strengthening the multi-level competitiveness.

Policies to Foster Entrepreneurship: Elements from the European Experience in the Integrated Micro-Meso-Macro Analytical Perspective

This article aims to present entrepreneurship policy practices from a micro, meso, and macro dimension to identify if there are signs of divergence or convergence in public intervention and policy of different European countries. To this end, it analyzes first the contemporary significance of entrepreneurship enhancement policies and, second, their relation to multilevel analysis. After proposing a repositioned and compound multilevel approach (micro-meso-macro) of the socio-economic system in terms of the “competitiveness web,” it uses as a case study different countries of the European South affected by the economic crisis and presents their political reforms over the last years. According to the findings of the research, it appears that development initiatives and regulations of these countries primarily focus on macro-economic and macro-social measures to enhance the potential of their business environment. On the contrary, an integrated policy in the context of the “competitiveness web” that takes into account all levels of space and different forms of developmental challenges by focusing primarily on the dynamics of innovative aptitude of the firms seems relatively underused until today. As a result, many firms and local business ecosystems maintain and reproduce their inability to grow and sustain their competitiveness in the current phase of restructuring of globalization, despite a wide variety of entrepreneurship enhancement policies.

Advancements on helix theory and the Stra.Tech.Man approach: towards a new synthesis

This article aims to investigate whether the helix theory and the Stra.Tech.Man approach (strategy-technology-management synthesis) have prospects of analytical cross-fertilisation. After presenting the evolution of helix theory of innovation in three different stages and identifying some of its essential points and received criticisms, it analyses the constituents and theoretical implications of the Stra.Tech.Man approach. It finds that some points of the Stra.Tech.Man analysis, such as the 'physiology' of the firm, the 'competitiveness web' approach that places the dynamics of business innovation centrally, and the proposal of a micro-meso level policy of 'local development and innovation institutions' that diagnoses Stra.Tech.Man physiology, constitute enrichment and cross-fertilisation elements of the two theories. Overall, both theories attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of integrated socio-economic development, and their synthesis seems to offer new theoretical implications.

Advancements on Helix Theory and the Stra.Tech.Man approach: Towards a new synthesis

This article aims to investigate whether the helix theory and the Stra.Tech.Man approach (strategy-technology-management synthesis) have prospects of analytical cross-fertilisation. After presenting the evolution of helix theory of innovation in three different stages and identifying some of its essential points and received criticisms, it analyses the constituents and theoretical implications of the Stra.Tech.Man approach. It finds that some points of the Stra.Tech.Man analysis, such as the 'physiology' of the firm, the 'competitiveness web' approach that places the dynamics of business innovation centrally, and the proposal of a micro-meso level policy of 'local development and innovation institutions' that diagnoses Stra.Tech.Man physiology, constitute enrichment and cross-fertilisation elements of the two theories. Overall, both theories attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of integrated socio-economic development, and their synthesis seems to offer new theoretical implications.

Advancements on Helix Theory and the Stra.Tech.Man Approach: Towards a New Synthesis

This article aims to investigate whether the helix theory and the Stra.Tech.Man approach (strategy-technology-management synthesis) have prospects of analytical cross-fertilisation. After presenting the evolution of helix theory of innovation in three different stages and identifying some of its essential points and received criticisms, it analyses the constituents and theoretical implications of the Stra.Tech.Man approach. It finds that some points of the Stra.Tech.Man analysis, such as the 'physiology' of the firm, the 'competitiveness web' approach that places the dynamics of business innovation centrally, and the proposal of a micro-meso level policy of 'local development and innovation institutions' that diagnoses Stra.Tech.Man physiology, constitute enrichment and cross-fertilisation elements of the two theories. Overall, both theories attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of integrated socio-economic development, and their synthesis seems to offer new theoretical implications.

Macro, Meso, and Micro Policies for Strengthening Entrepreneurship: Towards an Integrated Competitiveness Policy

This article aims to propose an integrated policy framework for competitiveness and entrepreneurship at a unified macro-meso-micro level. The article presents the evolution of the definition of competitiveness and competitiveness policy and focuses next on modern definitions of macro-policies, meso-policies, and micro-policies by presenting their conceptual synthesis based on the literature. Then, by building on the approach of “competitiveness web,” it presents the implications that such an overarching concept can have on the micro-meso-macro level of entrepreneurship strengthening policies. In this context, it leverages the “Stra.Tech.Man” approach to entrepreneurship dynamics, which implies that business innovation derives from the synthesis of the innate spheres of strategy, technology, and management. At the same time, it proposes the micro-meso-level policy of “Local Development and Innovation Institutes” in the overall context of the competitiveness web. The proposed “competitiveness web” policy framework can address the issue of fostering entrepreneurship in today’s environment of globalization because it takes into account all the building blocks of socio-economic systems by describing the general framework of the policies at the micro-meso-macro socioeconomic levels.

Porter’s Diamond Approaches and the Competitiveness Web

This study explores Porter’s diamond of national competitiveness, by critically examining both the analytical virtues, the extensions, and the criticisms it has received over time. The aim is to analyse the stage in which the study of the diamond is currently in, about twenty years after the introduction of M. Porter, suggesting that its analytical contribution focusing on the industrial dynamics (meso-competitiveness) is still relevant even though significant analytical repositioning and improvements are possible. This research attempts to integrate a set of evolutionary socioeconomic dimensions into the “diamond’s” analytical perspective, ending up with a proposed “competitiveness web” conceptual model.

Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior Information

We show that incorporating user behavior data can significantly improve ordering of top results in real web search setting. We examine alternatives for incorporating feedback into the ranking process and explore the contributions of user feedback compared to other common web search features. We report results of a large scale evaluation over 3,000 queries and 12 million user interactions with a popular web search engine. We show that incorporating implicit feedback can augment other features, improving the accuracy of a competitive web search ranking algorithms by as much as 31% relative to the original performance.

Bifurcation control for a fractional-order competition model of Internet with delays

In today’s society, the Internet has become an important tool of our life due to its potential applications in various areas such as economics, industry, agriculture, medical and health care, and information processing. To understand and grasp the law of the Internet, many competitive web site models of the Internet and some phenomena related to World Wide Web have been investigated systematically. However, many scholars only study the integer-order competitive web site models of the Internet. Up to now, there are few papers that focus on the dynamics of fractional-order competitive web site models of Internet, which possess memory property. In this paper, we are concerned with the stability and the existence of Hopf bifurcation of a fractional-order competitive web site model of Internet. By choosing the time delay as parameter and applying the Routh–Hurwitz criteria, we will establish a new sufficient condition guaranteeing the stability and the existence of Hopf bifurcation for fractional-order competitive web site model of Internet. The research reveals that fractional order and the delay play a key role in describing the stability and Hopf bifurcation of the considered system. Computer simulations are implemented to support the analytic results. Finally, a simple conclusion is presented. The theoretical findings of this article have a great significance in handling the competition dynamics among different web sites.

Multi-Dimensional QoS Prediction for Service Recommendations

Advances in mobile Internet technology have enabled the clients of Web services to be able to keep their service sessions alive while they are on the move. Since the services consumed by a mobile client may be different over time due to client location changes, a multi-dimensional spatiotemporal model is necessary for analyzing the service consumption relations. Moreover, competitive Web service recommenders for the mobile clients must be able to predict unknown quality-of-service (QoS) values well by taking into account the target client's service requesting time and location, e.g., performing the prediction via a set of multi-dimensional QoS measures. Most contemporary QoS prediction methods exploit the QoS characteristics for one specific dimension, e.g., time or location, and do not exploit the structural relationships among the multi-dimensional QoS data. This paper proposes an integrated QoS prediction approach which unifies the modeling of multi-dimensional QoS data via multi-linear-algebra based concepts of tensor and enables efficient Web service recommendation for mobile clients via tensor decomposition and reconstruction optimization algorithms. In light of the unavailability of measured multi-dimensional QoS datasets in the public domain, this paper also presents a transformational approach to creating a credible multi-dimensional QoS dataset from a measured taxi usage dataset which contains high dimensional time and space information. Comparative experimental evaluation results show that the proposed QoS prediction approach can result in much better accuracy in recommending Web services than several other representative ones.

Crafting a web-unique value proposition using the concept analysis technique

Online value proposition is an integral part of websites because it identifies the reason why customers will click on, return, register or buy from the website and feel motivated to share their experience. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for identifying competitive web value propositions for e-commerce website. This paper outlines a conceptual analysis of value proposition for e-commerce website combined with the value life cycle in a manner that offers managers a tool to create a web unique value proposition. The result of this paper is the four-cycle process which is an exercise an organisation can undertake in its own organisation's context. Such exercise would be a group activity enabling them to achieve a shared understanding while developing a clearer conceptualisation of the online value proposition concept.

The Impact of Rule Modifications on Elite Basketball Teams' Performance.

Rule modifications in basketball are used to develop the sport, and FIBA changes the basketball regulations periodically and constantly in search of a more attractive game. The objectives of this study were as follows: i) to characterise and identify the technical-tactical performance indicators which discriminated the game style according to the effect of rule modifications; and ii) to analyse the persistence of these indicators according to rule modifications over time. Analyses were made of all the editions of the current competition system of the Copa Del Rey in Spanish basketball. One hundred and forty matches were analysed, starting from the 1995-96 to the 2014-15 season. Data were gathered from the official competition web page (www.acb.com) The variables analysed included rule modifications, the number of ball possessions, points scored, one, two and 3-point field goals made and attempted, total rebounds, defensive and offensive rebounds, assists, steals, turnovers, blocked shots, dunks and committed and received personal fouls, score differences, as well as one, two and 3-point field-goal percentages. Several analyses were carried out: descriptive analysis to characterise the sample; ANOVA to identify differences between periods; discriminant analysis to determine technical-tactical performance indicators which best discriminated between each competition term and rule change period; and finally autocorrelation function and cross-correlation were used to estimate the persistency of performance indicators over time. Results show that rule changes affect the way basketball is played. Nevertheless, players and coaches are the ones who determine functional behavior in basketball.