Harnessing Business Insights from Unstructured Customer Data. Resulting from customers’ widespread uptake of online channels to buy and communicate has been a surge in online reviews and social media posts. This textual information offers a viable alternative to surveys that Australian businesses currently conduct to obtain customer insights. However, these reviews are unstructured and require substantial pre-processing to extract underlying customer perceptions. Therefore, this project aims to ....Harnessing Business Insights from Unstructured Customer Data. Resulting from customers’ widespread uptake of online channels to buy and communicate has been a surge in online reviews and social media posts. This textual information offers a viable alternative to surveys that Australian businesses currently conduct to obtain customer insights. However, these reviews are unstructured and require substantial pre-processing to extract underlying customer perceptions. Therefore, this project aims to develop a novel machine learning approach to quantify the business-relevant information contained in textual information shared by customers online. This alternative approach will provide significant cost-saving benefits for a range of Australian companies, such as retailers, hotels, airlines and restaurants.Read moreRead less
Improving external validity of stated choice experiments. This project aims to deliver more accurate estimates of choice behaviour by reducing biases due to choice task complexity in surveys as well as design artefacts. Extracting 'true' preferences is challenging, not only due to possible hypothetical bias, but also due to increasingly complex choice tasks and the existence of design artefacts. This project will investigate the latter two in the context of marketing, transport, health, and envi ....Improving external validity of stated choice experiments. This project aims to deliver more accurate estimates of choice behaviour by reducing biases due to choice task complexity in surveys as well as design artefacts. Extracting 'true' preferences is challenging, not only due to possible hypothetical bias, but also due to increasingly complex choice tasks and the existence of design artefacts. This project will investigate the latter two in the context of marketing, transport, health, and environmental economics, and proposes new methodologies to extract preferences that more closely reflect true behaviour in real markets.Read moreRead less
Engaging ethnic minority and majority blood donors in donor recruitment. Word-of-mouth is a potentially powerful way to recruit blood donors. Talking about donation increases awareness, trust, commitment and positive feelings about donating, particularly in ethnic minority groups. However, donors seldom tell others about donating. This project aims to determine how to motivate blood donors to recruit new donors using word-of-mouth, through research comprising co-design, surveys, and experiments. ....Engaging ethnic minority and majority blood donors in donor recruitment. Word-of-mouth is a potentially powerful way to recruit blood donors. Talking about donation increases awareness, trust, commitment and positive feelings about donating, particularly in ethnic minority groups. However, donors seldom tell others about donating. This project aims to determine how to motivate blood donors to recruit new donors using word-of-mouth, through research comprising co-design, surveys, and experiments. This project will generate new knowledge of how to encourage effective word-of-mouth for pro-social behaviours. Expected outcomes include producing culturally relevant, validated resources that will significantly benefit Australia by encouraging effective conversations to promote blood donation in all communities.Read moreRead less
Healthy eating campaigns: perceptions of the message and messenger. This project will be a means to evaluate the likely effectiveness of some of the resolutions of the NSW Childhood Obesity Summit aimed at the commercial food industry and the media. The project will provide information for the food industry on consumers' perceptions of their credibility as a source of information about healthy eating. This will inform the development of communication campaigns, as well as provide guidance on de ....Healthy eating campaigns: perceptions of the message and messenger. This project will be a means to evaluate the likely effectiveness of some of the resolutions of the NSW Childhood Obesity Summit aimed at the commercial food industry and the media. The project will provide information for the food industry on consumers' perceptions of their credibility as a source of information about healthy eating. This will inform the development of communication campaigns, as well as provide guidance on development and marketing of 'healthier' brand extensions. The project will also have considerable benefit for public health. The findings will be relevant to government and non-government health promotion organisations considering the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns in association with food companies.Read moreRead less
Intelligent CRM through Conjoint Data Mining of Heterogeneous Sources. This project aims to investigate and develop techniques to improve customer relationship management (CRM) for public and private organisations. It aims to develop an intelligent framework to assist in adaptive marketing and management of customers. The framework is designed to manage multiple information resources for information sharing, and to synthesise knowledge through visualisation. Intended outcomes are standardised XM ....Intelligent CRM through Conjoint Data Mining of Heterogeneous Sources. This project aims to investigate and develop techniques to improve customer relationship management (CRM) for public and private organisations. It aims to develop an intelligent framework to assist in adaptive marketing and management of customers. The framework is designed to manage multiple information resources for information sharing, and to synthesise knowledge through visualisation. Intended outcomes are standardised XML profiles for the different data sets and business processes, novel techniques for conjoint mining of structured and semi-structured data, and adaptive business intelligence techniques. The results will be validated using large real-world data sets provided by the partner organisation.Read moreRead less
Increasing Visitor Frequency: approach to understanding and forecasting how cultural attraction visitors respond to various incentives to increase visitation rates. Museums have been steadily losing visitors over the past decade. While current research indicates that this may be attributed to greater leisure competition, little is understood about how people make choices to visit or not to visit cultural attractions. The aim of this project is to develop, demonstrate and test a Random Utility Th ....Increasing Visitor Frequency: approach to understanding and forecasting how cultural attraction visitors respond to various incentives to increase visitation rates. Museums have been steadily losing visitors over the past decade. While current research indicates that this may be attributed to greater leisure competition, little is understood about how people make choices to visit or not to visit cultural attractions. The aim of this project is to develop, demonstrate and test a Random Utility Theory (RUT)-based modelling approach allowing managers of cultural attractions to understand and predict the likely visitation consequences of potential initiatives. We wish to model visitor choices of museums versus other competing attractions to allow museums to identify specific strategic actions (or combinations) to achieve organisational goals.Read moreRead less
Understanding civil society activists. The growing role and importance of civil society groups demands an understanding of their philosophical and intellectual underpinnings and who the people are that support their agendas. This project provides a multifaceted picture of the supporters of three critical social causes: environmental sustainability, animal welfare and economic globalisation. Understanding who these people are and what motivates them will give us a better understanding of many o ....Understanding civil society activists. The growing role and importance of civil society groups demands an understanding of their philosophical and intellectual underpinnings and who the people are that support their agendas. This project provides a multifaceted picture of the supporters of three critical social causes: environmental sustainability, animal welfare and economic globalisation. Understanding who these people are and what motivates them will give us a better understanding of many of the drivers of our own economic and social future, thereby helping to strengthen Australia's social and economic fabric.Read moreRead less
Regimes of reading. The project analyses the ways in which reading and interpretation have been socially organised across a range of cultures, from ancient Rome to the contemporary world of virtual reality. It focuses in particular on conflict between different practices of reading in order to highlight the cultural assumptions underlying the uses of texts.
Banking System Competition and the Macro-economy. Australia has one of the most concentrated banking sectors in the world, generating concerns regarding its efficiency. This project aims to develop unified frameworks to understand and evaluate quantitatively how the structure of the banking industry affects the macro-economy and provide policy recommendations for establishing a healthy and efficient banking industry. This project expects to improve understanding of the welfare trade-off between ....Banking System Competition and the Macro-economy. Australia has one of the most concentrated banking sectors in the world, generating concerns regarding its efficiency. This project aims to develop unified frameworks to understand and evaluate quantitatively how the structure of the banking industry affects the macro-economy and provide policy recommendations for establishing a healthy and efficient banking industry. This project expects to improve understanding of the welfare trade-off between bank competition and economic well-being to enable policymakers to better determine the optimal concentration of banking sector in Australia. This will enhance the productivity and international competitiveness of Australia’s financial system and the broader economy.Read moreRead less
A Synthesis of Agency and Managerial Power Theories and Its Applications to Corporate Governance, Management Compensation, and Firm Performance. The existing models of corporate governance in economics and finance based on agency theory do not successfully portray all modern corporations. Thus the importance of a new and rigorous way to study corporate governance can be hardly exaggerated. This project will provide a synthesized theory of corporate governance and is expected to produce highest- ....A Synthesis of Agency and Managerial Power Theories and Its Applications to Corporate Governance, Management Compensation, and Firm Performance. The existing models of corporate governance in economics and finance based on agency theory do not successfully portray all modern corporations. Thus the importance of a new and rigorous way to study corporate governance can be hardly exaggerated. This project will provide a synthesized theory of corporate governance and is expected to produce highest-quality research publishable in top-tier journals. This will, among others, enhance Australia's standing as a knowledge nation. This project is also expected to contribute to the discussions on how to improve corporate governance and regulation of management compensation both in Australia and abroad. Read moreRead less