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This paper aims to clarify the impact of information asymmetry on users' payment rates and examine the role of perceived uncertainty (PU) and acceptable price (AP) in the relationship between information asymmetry and users' payment rates.

To test the influences of information asymmetry on users' payment rates, this paper collects 18,489 transaction data from the Chinese knowledge payment platform Zhihu with a Python crawler. This paper constructs a mediation model to define the relationship between information asymmetry and users' payment rates by introducing PU and AP as the mediators.

Information asymmetry negatively affects users' payment rates. In addition, PU and AP mediate the information asymmetry in users' payment rates bond.

This study only explores the mediators of the information asymmetry users’ payment rates bond, ignoring the effect of potential moderators, which would be an important direction for future research.

The findings of this paper suggest that information communication is essential in knowledge market transactions. Knowledge providers, as well as knowledge platforms, should enhance information exchange with consumers in order to increase product sales.

This paper provides a new perspective for understanding how information asymmetry affects users' payment rates and helps to guide suppliers to improve product quality. The research framework of this paper is universal to a certain extent.

This paper is one of the first to propose using PU and AP to construct a mediation model to study the information asymmetry between users' payment rates relationship. It provides a new perspective for understanding the channel of information asymmetry in customer behavior.

This study aims to understand pathways to success for food video bloggers (food vloggers) by identifying the drivers of positive reception among audiences. It examines how entertainment, information and interaction values affect attitudes toward food videos and vloggers. Additionally, it investigates the potential for product placement by studying the effects of attitudes toward food videos and vloggers on consumers’ behavioral intention regarding purchasing featured food ingredients.

An integrated model informed by theories (uses and gratification and stimulus-organism-response) was developed. An online survey was administered to 339 Vietnamese social media users. The data were analyzed using partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results show that food videos’ entertainment and information value positively impact the attitude toward food videos. However, the interaction value does not have a significant impact. All three values (entertainment value, information value and interaction) impact the attitude toward food vloggers. Both attitudes significantly influence purchase intention, showing that there is a pathway to product placement. The frequency of social media use can moderate these relationships, with a negative effect on the attitude toward food videos and a positive effect on the attitude toward food vloggers.

These findings provide insights into vlogger success pathways, not only in terms of audience reception but also in terms of product placement. This study offers comprehensive suggestions on pathways for success that are interesting for vloggers, food business operators, restaurant managers and audiences on how to design effective food videos and potentially encourage consumer purchases. These pathways can also be valuable for other behaviors, such as food safety advice and food waste reduction.

Fake news stories have become a central element of crises that corporate public relations practitioners have confronted. Whether such stories are rumors, outright lies or deliberate attempts to discredit corporations, they have the same impact and require specific strategies for public relations practitioners to effectively respond. The purpose of this study is to uncover strategies to manage crises that arise from fake news and if and how these strategies differ for other corporate crises.

In this multi-method study of 21 in-depth interviews and a 8-person focus group with senior-level corporate public relations practitioners, authors explored decision-making strategies for responding to fake news crises. Transcripts of interviews and the focus group were thematically analyzed.

Results reveal insights regarding how public relations practitioners determine if and when to respond to fake news crises in corporations; what response strategies public relations practitioners have the autonomy to employ for fake news crises in corporations, and how public relations practitioners control media narratives during fake news crises in corporations.

The findings guide public relations practitioners to craft an autonomous decision-making process and effective online listening strategies—establishing a watchful waiting approach—and determine if the fake news issue is a passing moment or movement swirling into a crisis.

Few studies have examined the perspectives of crisis communication experts about minimizing and managing fake news crises. The study identifies opportunities for future research focused on crises originating from fake news and disinformation.

This scoping review aims to explore how “food media”, “food messages” and “food content” are referred to in scholarly writing to enhance a shared understanding and comparability.

Following the PRISMA, ScR-guidelines, four scientific databases were screened on published manuscripts in academic journals, books and doctoral theses mentioning food media, content and messages within the prevalent meaning as in human communication.

Of the 376 included manuscripts, only a small minority (n = 7) provided a conclusive definition of at least one of the three earlier-mentioned concepts; 40 others elucidated some aspects of food media, messages or content; however, they emphasized different and, sometimes even, contrasting aspects. In addition, the review explores in which disciplines the manuscripts mentioning food media, messages or content occur, which methodologies are used and what target groups and media are most common.

Based on this aggregated information, a definition of food media, messages and content is proposed, aiming to enhance the comparability of diverse academic sources. This contribution invites scholars to critically reflect on the included media and content types when comparing studies on food media, messages or content.

Based on the “S-O-R” and attachment theories, this paper constructs a research model of the platform attribute factors of sports short video live e-commerce on consumers' psychological conditions, and explores how platform attributes affect consumer behavior through consumer attachment.

The study carried out questionnaire survey through the “snowball” method, and a total of 422 valid questionnaires were collected. The paper uses SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 26.0 to adapt the data and model, and adopts the method of structural equation modeling for analysis.

The research results show that the interactivity, identity, personalization and entertainment of live sports e-commerce platforms can actively stimulate consumer attachment, and directly drive their consumption behavior through their attachment.

Examining the platform attributes and system functions of short video live broadcast e-commerce from the perspective of consumer attachment can help sports e-commerce understand consumers' needs and satisfaction with the functions provided by the platform. Through timely optimization and improvement of system functions, the platform will make the connection between consumers and e-commerce closer, thereby increasing consumer stickiness and promoting the vigorous development of sports e-commerce.

This study identified and defined the platform attributes contained in the sports live broadcast e-commerce platform, combined the S-O-R model with the attachment theory, expanded the analytical framework of the S-O-R theory and made contributions to the extension of the attachment theory.

The integration of social media and e-commerce has resulted in a rising phenomenon among individual content providers (ICPs), who used to offer free content, to provide consumers with paid content, such as online courses, Q&As or consultations. Despite the prevalence of ICPs’ content monetization, empirical research has rarely studied its underlying mechanism. This paper examines how the characteristics of free content contributed by ICPs on social media platforms influence their paid content sales, focusing on the perspective of human brand.

The empirical setting is an online knowledge exchange platform, where users are allowed to provide free content (e.g. answers) on the social media platform and launch paid content (e.g. lectures) on the e-commerce platform. A machine learning technique is employed to construct measures for the characteristics of free content, and fixed-effects estimation is presented to confirm which factors have a significant influence on the sales of paid content.

The empirical results show that the quality, diversity and expertness of free content have a significant positive impact on the sales of the ICP-paid content, with the brand popularity of ICP playing a mediating role.

This study is the first attempt to demystify the relationship between content contribution and ICPs’ content monetization from the perspective of human brand. The findings validate the effectiveness of the “Selling by Contribution” strategy and provide valuable insights for ICPs and social media platforms.

This study aims to investigate the use of social networking sites (SNS) by researchers and their behaviours when conducting research-related activities by applying the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) theory.

An online survey was distributed. This study’s design is derived from the UTAUT framework’s questionnaire items. The sample of this study comprised 216 respondents from 40 universities in the United Kingdom. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data.

Respondents revealed a positive relationship between the four constructs of the UTAUT framework (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating condition) associated with their intention to use SNS.

Most of the respondents were from the University of Strathclyde, so the authors cannot generalize the findings to other universities.

The findings will offer an extensive understanding of the value of SNSs, which will aid researchers to increase their visibility, and research activities online.

The results will provide an in-depth knowledge of the importance of SNSs, helping scholars to become more visible and engage in online research. A number of factors impacted how researchers behaved on SNSs and what they intended to use for research-related activity. School administrators, experts and other sponsors could take action to promote the use of SNSs in educational settings based on the findings. The study’s findings offer insightful knowledge to those who create SNS websites. By using this information, they will be able to improve these sites for research and study and gain a better understanding of the demands of SNS users.

Users' voluntary forwarding behavior opens a new avenue for companies to promote their brands and products on social networking sites (SNS). However, research on voluntary information disseminators is limited. This paper aims to bring an in-depth understanding of voluntary disseminators by answering the following questions: (1) What is the underlying mechanism by which some users are more enthusiastic to voluntarily forward content of interest? (2) How to identify them? We propose a theoretical model based on the Elaboration-Likelihood Model (ELM) and examine three types of factors that moderate the effect of preference matching on individual forwarding behavior, including personal characteristics, tweet characteristics and sender–receiver relationships.

Via Twitter API, we randomly crawled 1967 Twitter users' data to validate the conceptual framework. Each user’s original tweets and retweeted tweets, profile data such as the number of followers and followees and verification status were obtained. The final corpus contains 163,554 data points composed of 1,634 valid twitterers' retweeting behavior. Tweets produced by these core users' followees were also crawled. These data points constitute an unbalanced panel data and we employ different models — fixed-effects, random-effects and pooled logit models — to test the moderation effects. The robustness test shows consistency among these different models.

Preference matching significantly affects users' forwarding behavior, implying that SNS users are more likely to share contents that align with their preferences. In addition, we find that popular users with lots of followers, heavy SNS users who author tweets or forward other-sourced tweets more frequently and users who tend to produce longer original contents are more enthusiastic to disseminate contents of interest. Furthermore, interaction strength has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between preference matching and individuals' forwarding decisions, suggesting that users are more likely to disseminate content of interest when it comes from strong ties. However, the moderating effect of perceived affinity is significantly negative, indicating that an online community of individuals with many common friends is not an ideal place to engage individuals in sharing information.

This work brings about a deep understanding of users' voluntary forwarding behavior of content of interest. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first to examine (1) the underlying mechanism by which some users are more likely to voluntarily forward content of interest; and (2) how to identify these potential voluntary disseminators. By extending the ELM, we examine the moderating effect of tweet characteristics, sender–receiver relationships as well as personal characteristics. Our research findings provide practical guidelines for enterprises and government institutions to choose voluntary endorsers when trying to engage individuals in information dissemination on SNS.

Building on the relationship marketing and stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory, the purpose of this paper is to study the impact of the integrated store service quality (ISSQ) on the omnichannel customer lifetime value (CLV). The mediating role of customer commitment (affective, normative and continuance) and relationship program receptiveness with the moderating role of customer relationship proneness were relied upon to better understand the omnichannel customer profitability metric (CLV).

The study is descriptive and relies upon the cross-sectional data collected using the self-administered structured questionnaires from 785 omnichannel shoppers. A purposive sampling technique was performed in the study. Structural equation modeling was performed using the SMART-PLS 4.0 software to analyze the data.

The results indicate that omnichannel customer commitment (affective, normative and continuance) differentially mediates the relationship between ISSQ and relationship program receptiveness, subsequently impacting the omnichannel CLV. The customer relationship proneness significantly and positively moderated the relationships between different dimensions of customer commitment and relationship program receptiveness.

The study relied upon the cross-sectional data from the Indian population aged above 18 years for testing the proposed model. Further studies could test the model across different populations to generalize the study results.

This study addresses the need to investigate the omnichannel retail store customer profitability and their relationship performance with the store. By testing the customer relationship management model in the omnichannel retail store context, this study is the first to show that ISSQ will impact the customer profitability and relationship performance metric (CLV) through omnichannel customer commitment and relationship program receptiveness. The moderating effect of customer relationship proneness on a few proposed hypotheses was also tested to give managerial recommendations.

Exploring the determinants of a winery brand reputation (BR) and how those determinants interact is vital for the sustainable development of wineries as well as the growth of the wine industry as a whole. This study aims to test an integrated model to better understand the observed measurement constructs of winery brand reputation, including collective reputation (CR), wine label (WL), expert opinion (EO), social media advertising (SMA) and consumer wine knowledge (CWK).

In-depth interviews, an expert panel review and a pilot study were conducted to examine and improve the observed variables. A questionnaire survey was conducted as the main data source for the study. A total of 616 valid questionnaire responses were collected from 102 cities in mainland China and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from December 2021 to April 2022. Structural equation modeling was conducted for the data analysis.

This study supported 9 of the 18 proposed theoretical hypotheses. WL, EO and SMA had positive effects on BR. CWK was found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between expert opinions/social media advertising and brand reputation.

The results of this study can guide wine practitioners, researchers and administrators in brand development, label regulation and consumer education.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to examine the determinants of winery brand reputation among Chinese wine consumers. This study explains the mechanism of winery brand reputation, demonstrating the dynamics and effects of the observed measurement constructs on brand reputation.