Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) is a private university located in&nbsp;Tamil Nadu, India. Founded in 1984, as Vellore Engineering College, the institution offers 20 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate, four integrated and four research programs. It has campuses in Vellore, Amravati, Bhopal and Chennai.

VIT is one of the top ranked private universities in India according to NIRF, THE and QS Rankings.&nbsp;Govt. of India has recognized&nbsp;VIT, Vellore as an&nbsp;Institution of Eminence. This has allowed VIT to take independent quality initiatives and move up in world ranking.

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VIT University

Department of Marketing

This study s purpose was to understand and test a modified model of service-provider selection-criteria in hospital service settings. Using a thorough literature review, the study developed an instrument using scaled items under eight identified hospital selection criteria. The study covered 55 hospitals in Indian cities. All of the eight hospital selection criteria studied positively influenced customer choice. The results validate the applicability and relevance of the standardised model in healthcare context. The moderation analysis highlights that patient s gender and age do not moderate the eight selection criteria for hospital choice. Hospital marketing, operations, administration, and planning can be better with understanding of factors that increase patient satisfaction. © 2021 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.. All rights reserved.

World University root node

VIT Business School

Vellore Campus

International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets

Hospital choice by Indian customers - empirical testing of a standardised model of service provider selection criteria

Given the negative utilitarianism and difficulty in maintaining long-term loyalty, hospitals resort to a variety of images that define and redefine their relationship strategies in order to stay patient-centric. As in any other sector, in healthcare, patients play an important role in service design and delivery. The basic services of medical appointment scheduling, online payment and health information search are recognized as one of the most important elements that increase patient footfall, service planning, patient satisfaction and their continued usage, in particular in developing economies such as India. This study seeks to understanding the basic e-Health services continuance usage intention among patients by integrating the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and extending them by including certain external variables. With a well-structured questionnaire, a survey of 453 respondents – out-patients and care-givers, who should have used e-Health services at least once, in particular, visited multispecialty hospitals, revealed that along with the ECM and TAM constructs such as satisfaction, confirmation, perceived ease-of-use, and perceived usefulness, the external variables such as trust, social influence, perceived service quality, and perceived privacy and security had a significant influence (p < 0.05) on e-Health services continuance usage. The main findings of the study contribute to developing and empirically testing a model that explains the basic process of motivating the e-Health service users for continuance usage intention. © K Anil Kumar, Subhashree Natarajan, 2020.

Innovative Marketing

An extension of the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM) to study continuance behavior in using e-Health services

Complex and noisy financial eco-system requires reliable models and proven techniques to predict the market movements and investor decisions. This study uses competent soft computing techniques: rough set theory (RST) and formal concept analysis (FCA) to study the investors' preferences, behavioural drivers and their actual behaviour in Gold-ETF (G-ETF) market. G-ETF, though a safe-haven and an alternate for reducing portfolio risks, inherits all complexities of financial markets. The employed RST helps in generating decision rules; and FCA to identify key factors affecting investment decision. This study is first of its kind, as integration of the foresaid techniques was not employed to study financial behaviour, earlier. The study has analysed 250 responses of G-ETF investors, in 12 listed G-ETFs, to conclude with a rich insight on the investment decisions discretised by different decision rules, strongly recommending the combined use of RST and FCA for data driven decisions. © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

International Journal of Applied Management Science

Application of soft computing techniques 'rough set theory and formal concept analysis' for analysing investment decisions in gold-ETF

Behavioural finance has gained research interest among researchers because of investor behavior and market anomalies. Investor behaviour varies with demographics and geographic characteristics. Further, investor behavior towards a gold exchange trade fund is gaining research interest due to various factors. Not much research has been carried out in this direction, with the exception of some comparisons. Therefore, the performance of a gold exchange traded fund needs to be assessed from the investor behavior perspective. Additionally, the investors behavior contains uncertainties. Thus, there is a need for intelligent techniques for identifying the investors behavior despite the presence of uncertain behavioral characteristics. Therefore, to study uncertain behavior characteristic in gold exchange traded fund, in this article the authors employ a fuzzy rough set. They employ fuzzy rough quick reduct algorithm to find the superfluous attributes. Further decision rules are generated to identify the chief feature of investors' behavior towards gold exchange traded fund.

VIT Unitversity

International Journal of Business Analytics

A Fuzzy Rough Feature Selection Framework for Investors Behavior Towards Gold Exchange-Traded Fund

Electronic health services is extensively employed to build an online platform for healthcare providers and patients. However, there are few studies that have investigated the intention behind why e-Health services are rejected by some of the end-users after their initial experience. There exists a considerable gap between the usage of e-Health services and our understanding of these technologies. Therefore, this study was carried out on the aim to better understand the factors leading hospital consumers’ continued usage of e-Health services based on expectation-confirmation model (ECM). To explore the process of continuance usage intention of e-Health services, the study has integrated ECM model with technology acceptance model and two post adoption expectation beliefs (i.e., perceived privacy and security, and perceived trust). With 253 e-Health services users’ responses, the proposed research model was empirically tested within the context of e-Health services by applying partial least squares (PLS) method. The main finding from the path analysis indicates that along with perceptual (confirmation, perceived ease-of-use, perceived usefulness), and emotional factor (satisfaction), post adoption expectation beliefs (perceived trust, perceived privacy and security) - also shown a significant association towards continuance intention of e-Health services. The study concludes by discussing theoretical and practical implications, limitations and future scope. © 2019, Indian Journal of Public Health Research and Development. All rights reserved.

Indian Journal of Public Health Research & Development

Role of Trust and Privacy Concerns towards Usage of E-Health Services—An Extension of Expectation-Confirmation Model

The need for Financial Inclusion is globally ascertained by the World Bank through its recent call for Universal Financial Access (UFA) by 2020. According to UFA goals, more than 55 countries have committed to provide access to transaction account through targeted interventions to the economically downtrodden civilians. The formal financial services such as credit services, payment services, business services, and digital services are far more efficient (with respect to wider range, transaction cost, and risk involved) than the informal financial services provided by the money lenders, credit unions, etc. However, several studies have indicated that the Low Income Households (LIH) prefer to use the informal financial services than the formal financial services despite being aware of its limitations. The reasons widely attributed for such behaviour are the objective factors such as income, literacy, accessibility, etc. which is based on the classical finance theories such as Life Cycle Hypothesis and Permanent Income Hypothesis. At the same time, the behavioural finance theories such as Behavioural Life Cycle Hypothesis (BLCH), Regret Theory, Prospect Theory, etc. state that the role of subjective factors (behavioural and psychological factors) also should be deliberated while explaining the financial behaviour pattern of the individual households. The researches in this spectrum are in the early stage of theory-building. Moreover, the majority of the existing research studies in this field are based on the Middle Income Households and Upper Income Households. So the dearth of researches on LIH and on the role of behavioural factors in the financial inclusion is the genesis for this research paper. The research objective of the study is to explore and identify the behavioural and psychological factors that influence the continued usage of the formal financial services among the LIH in India. Convenient sampling method is employed to collect the data from the target group. The statistical tools used in the study are the descriptive statistics and Factor Analysis. The suggested managerial implication of the study is to provide the insights for the policy makers to formulate appropriate financial inclusion strategies, and for the formal financial institutions to mould the behaviourally informed financial services. © IAEME Publication.

International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Technology

Behavioural factors that influence the continued usage of formal financial services among the low income households

Financial Inclusion is widely recognised today as an effective enabler for poverty alleviation, economic development and social welfare. Cost-effective, sustainable, innovative and technology-enabled channels like digital banking, mobile banking, etc play an undeniable role in scaling up the usage of formal financial services, especially in developing countries like India. In this research paper, the authors attempt to explicate to what extent the changes in 'Behavioural Intention' and 'Actual Usage' of mobile banking services can be explained by the combination of six exogenous variables. As an original contribution of this study, 'Familiarity' is proved to be a significant factor in the domain of mobile banking. The empirical data collected through 147 questionnaires are analysed using PLS-SEM analysis (Smart PLS 3.0), One Way between groups ANOVA, and Independent samples t-Test (SPSS 22.0). © Serials Publications Pvt. Ltd.

International Journal of Applied Business and Economic Research

Maximising the Usage of Mobile Banking: A New Channel for Financial Inclusion

Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) is not a sheer transfer of digital text or visually detailed images; it stretches beyond the machine screen to transform the social and cultural interactions by continuously defining and redefining digital communities' identities, relationships and their commonalities. It leads to many alterations in the method in which people communicate with each other, and it also persuades communication model and social networks. The study strives to understand and consolidate the research contribution, theories and models to benefit further research in implementing CMC for corporate marketing. It also defines some of the concerns elevated by electronic communication and provides a deeper understanding of computer mediated communication and insights on how technological alteration in society is more general. Also highlights advantages and disadvantages of CMC and the effect it has had on roles with social media. © Serials Publications.

Man in India

Computer mediated communication: A pathway to analyze social media communication trajectories

The paper attempts to understand the financial planning process, the attributes and its antecedence that define the financial behaviour of demographically different middle class families living as nuclear and joint families in the geographic limits of Odisha. This descriptive study is an applied financial behaviour research, that employs behavioural theory - The theory of planned behavior (TPB)- to elaborate motivation and behaviour towards financial planning, to achieve the financial goals set. Disguised Survey on 204 families, selected using convenient sampling from two strata - joint &amp; nuclear families-was conducted. Structured questionnaire was administered to collect data. The collected data was statistically analysed for its relations and variance on the attributes ranging from random casual awareness to high investment affinity. The paper discusses issues relevant to predicting positive financial behaviour. Comparison on the behaviour of retail investors belonging to two different family structures in expected to highlight the factors that affect financial decisions-beyond the demographics and socio-economic factors. © 2017 Serials Publications Pvt. Ltd.

Department of General Management

International Journal of Economic Research

Does family domicile changes financial planning decision? - A study on retail investor' behaviour using tpb

Mind Mapping researches carry a dual challenge of capturing; translating and communicating the most abstract ideas of consumers' requirements to the product or service development team, as a meaningful depiction, for designing and re-inventing a competitive consumer-inspired-solution. It is proved that people store their memories in pictures and abstract elements in their deeply embedded memory slots. ZMET and Laddering are two highly competent techniques employed to systematically digs deeper into consumers' mind and decode the metaphors. This paper intends to conceptually integrate these two techniques for analysing the consumers' decision process using their underlying models. This paper reviews a series of studies. It also elaborates on how both the methods compliment their advantages and off-sets the limitations. This paper acts as a guideline to apply 'mind mapping' techniques. IJER © Serials Publications.

Methodology to capture the content of customer thought: Review on application of Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) and Laddering methodology