Search results

Over the past two decades, online booking has become a predominant distribution channel of tourism products. As online sales have become more important, understanding booking conversion behavior remains a critical topic in the tourism industry. The purpose of this study is to model airline search and booking activities of anonymous visitors.

This study proposes a stochastic approach to explicitly model dynamics of airline customers’ search, revisit and booking activities. A Markov chain model simultaneously captures transition probabilities and the timing of search, revisit and booking decisions. The suggested model is demonstrated on clickstream data from an airline booking website.

Empirical results show that low prices (captured as discount rates) lead to not only booking propensities but also overall stickiness to a website, increasing search and revisit probabilities. From the decision timing of search and revisit activities, the author observes customers’ learning effect on browsing time and heterogeneous intentions of website visits.

This study presents both theoretical and managerial implications of online search and booking behavior for airline and tourism marketing. The dynamic Markov chain model provides a systematic framework to predict online search, revisit and booking conversion and the time of the online activities.

This research explores the impacts of content-generating devices (mobile phones versus personal computers) and content features (social content and achievement content) on consumer engagement with marketer-generated content (MGC) on social media. It also examines these factors' interaction effects on consumer engagement.

The study analyzed MGC that 210 companies had posted to Sina Weibo over three years, testing the study’s proposed model with negative binomial regression analysis.

The study's results show that MGC generated via mobile phones attracts more consumer engagement than MGC generated via personal computers. MGC with more social features attracts more consumer engagement, whereas MGC with more achievement features reduces consumer engagement. The authors also found that MGC with more social features generated via mobile phones and MGC with more achievement features generated via personal computers lead to more consumer engagement due to the congruency of the construal level of psychological distance.

This research enriches the literature by exploring the effects of content-generating devices and content features on consumer engagement in the MGC context, which extends the research on consumer engagement with social media from the context of user-generated content to the MGC.

This exploratory study aims to help contribute to the understanding of online information search behaviour of PhD students from different humanities fields, with a focus on subject searching.

The methodology is based on a semi-structured interview within which the participants are asked to conduct both a controlled search task and a free search task. The sample comprises eight PhD students in several humanities disciplines at Linnaeus University, a medium-sized Swedish university from 2020.

Most humanities PhD students in the study have received training in information searching, but it has been too basic. Most rely on web search engines like Google and Google Scholar for publications' search, and university's discovery system for known-item searching. As these systems do not rely on controlled vocabularies, the participants often struggle with too many retrieved documents that are not relevant. Most only rarely or never use disciplinary bibliographic databases. The controlled search task has shown some benefits of using controlled vocabularies in the disciplinary databases, but incomplete synonym or concept coverage as well as user unfriendly search interface present hindrances.

The paper illuminates an often-forgotten but pervasive challenge of subject searching, especially for humanities researchers. It demonstrates difficulties and shows how most PhD students have missed finding an important resource in their research. It calls for the need to reconsider training in information searching and the need to make use of controlled vocabularies implemented in various search systems with usable search and browse user interfaces.

This study investigates perceptions of the use of online tracking, a passive data collection method relying on the automated recording of participant actions on desktop and mobile devices, for studying information behavior. It scrutinizes folk theories of tracking, the concerns tracking raises among the potential participants and design mechanisms that can be used to alleviate these concerns.

This study uses focus groups composed of university students (n = 13) to conduct an in-depth investigation of tracking perceptions in the context of information behavior research. Each focus group addresses three thematic blocks: (1) views on online tracking as a research technique, (2) concerns that influence participants' willingness to be tracked and (3) design mechanisms via which tracking-related concerns can be alleviated. To facilitate the discussion, each focus group combines open questions with card-sorting tasks. The results are analyzed using a combination of deductive content analysis and constant comparison analysis, with the main coding categories corresponding to the thematic blocks listed above.

The study finds that perceptions of tracking are influenced by recent data-related scandals (e.g. Cambridge Analytica), which have amplified negative attitudes toward tracking, which is viewed as a surveillance tool used by corporations and governments. This study also confirms the contextual nature of tracking-related concerns, which vary depending on the activities and content that are tracked. In terms of mechanisms used to address these concerns, this study highlights the importance of transparency-based mechanisms, particularly explanations dealing with the aims and methods of data collection, followed by privacy- and control-based mechanisms.

The study conducts a detailed examination of tracking perceptions and discusses how this research method can be used to increase engagement and empower participants involved in information behavior research.