Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the institutional environment influences auditor reporting.

This study employs China's anti-corruption campaign as an exogenous shock to its institutional environment and compares auditors' issuance of modified audit opinions (MAOs) to small-profit clients before and during the campaign.

This study documents that small-profit clients were more likely to receive MAOs during the anti-corruption campaign period than before, indicating that auditors issued more conservative audit opinions to small-profit clients because of the anti-corruption campaign. Additionally, this study finds that increased auditor conservatism was more pronounced for auditors of large clients.

This study suggests that a weak institutional environment adversely affects auditor conservatism. This offers valuable insights for governments and regulators to improve the audit environment and for audit firms to enhance auditors' integrity and independence.

This study contributes to the research on institutional environments and auditing by observing a unique exogenous event.

This paper aims to explore how sub-national or regional cultural differences influence backers’ willingness to crowdfund projects. The paper also explores how migrant transnationalism influences the impact of backer’s sub-national culture and crowdfunding relationships.

This paper is based on the experimental design technique using analysis of covariance methods. The authors tested the study hypotheses on a sample of 790 respondents.

The study results suggest that individuals differ in their intent to crowdfund product campaigns depending on value congruence between their cultural values derived from the region to which they belong and the nature of the product category, such as environmentally friendly or happiness-enhancing products.

This paper explores the role of regional cultural differences in determining the intention to crowdfund different campaigns based on the nature of the product. Value congruence, as driven by regional cultural differences with crowdfunding campaigns, has not been explored before.

Whenever social injustice tackled by social movements receives heightened media attention, charitable crowdfunding platforms offer an opportunity to proactively advocate for equality by donating money to affected people. This research examines how the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated social protest cycle after the death of George Floyd have influenced donation behavior for campaigns with a personal goal and those with a societal goal supporting the black community.

This paper follows a quantitative research approach by applying a quasi-experimental research design on a GoFundMe dataset. In total, 67,905 campaigns and 1,362,499 individual donations were analyzed.

We uncover a rise in donations for campaigns supporting the black community, which lasts substantially longer for campaigns with a societal than with a personal funding goal. Informed by construal level theory, we attribute this heterogeneity to changes in the level of abstractness of the problems that social movements aim to tackle.

This research advances the knowledge of individual donation behavior in charitable crowdfunding. Our results highlight the important role that charitable crowdfunding campaigns play in promoting social justice and anti-discrimination as part of social protest cycles.

This study aims to examine the perceptions of political figures and campaign strategists in Kuwait regarding the adoption of virtual political campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic. By using an enhanced version of the technology acceptance model (TAM), it seeks to understand and quantify their attitudes toward these digital campaign methods. This study can be considered as a bold contribution to the discussion on digital transformation of virtual channels for the promotion of bold innovation and social impact in Kuwait.

Data was gathered from 82 participants, comprising 47 politicians and 35 campaign managers in Kuwait. A comprehensive method involving both questionnaires and face-to-face interactions was implemented to ensure a thorough collection of relevant data, aiming to support the research’s objectives effectively.

The results underscore the significant influence of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and the newly integrated factor of perceived convenience on the attitudes toward virtual political campaigns. These factors collectively shape the willingness and approach of political entities in embracing digital campaigning avenues. The findings also indicate that digital transformation in the design and implementation of virtual campaigns can be grounded on positive attitudes and perceptions.

The research fills a critical gap in existing literature by examining large-scale attitudes toward virtual political campaigns in Kuwait’s unique context. It offers novel understandings of how political figures and campaign managers perceive and adapt to technological advancements in campaign strategies, mainly during unprecedented crisis times like the COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to academic discourse and has practical implications for the evolution of political campaigning strategies in a digital age. A direct implication of our study is also the need to promote further future research on the capacity of digitally transformed channels for political campaigns to be venues of bold innovation. It also highlights the need to provide citizens with training and awareness for this new era of prompt responses to their requirements toward sustainable development and innovation.

Fierce competition in the crowdfunding market has resulted in high failure rates. Owing to their dedication and efforts, many founders have relaunched failed campaigns as a second attempt. Despite the need for a better understanding, the success of campaign relaunches has not been well-researched. To fill this research gap, this study first theorizes how founders’ learning may enhance their competencies and influence investors’ attribution of entrepreneurial failure. The study then empirically documents the extent and conditions under which such learning efforts impact campaign relaunch performance.

This study examines 5,798 Kickstarter-relaunched campaigns. The founders’ learning efforts are empirically captured by key changes in campaign design that deviate from past business practices. Word movers’ distances and perceptual hashing algorithms (pHash) are used separately to measure differences in campaign textual descriptions and pictorial designs.

Differences in textual descriptions and pictorial designs during campaign failure–relaunch are positively associated with campaign relaunch success. The impacts are further amplified when the previous failures are more severe.

This study is one of the first to examine the success of a campaign relaunch after an initial failure. This study contributes to a better understanding of founders’ learning in crowdfunding contexts and provides insights into the strategies founders can adopt to reap performance benefits.

This study leverages an integrated framework that uses the theory of planned behavior (TPB), risk perception and sustainable behavior to investigate the COVID-19 risk perception of a potentially powerful consumer group – generation Z – on decisions to participate in the domestic tourism stimulus campaign and their willingness to practice socially responsible behaviors.

Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data. The study adopts partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to examine the data with the final sample of 422 generation Z in Thailand.

The COVID-19 perceived risk positively affects attitudes, perceived behavioral control and the intention to join domestic tourism campaign, affecting the desire to engage in sustainable behaviors when traveling. Attitude and perceived behavioral control mediated risk perception and the decision to join the campaign. Unlike other studies, generation Z is conscious of the situation but is not risk-averse to travel.

The study offers recommendations (and domestic tourism campaign's features) for government agencies and tourism partitioners, especially developing tourism destinations, to effectively launch domestic tourism campaigns to target generation Z during and after post-pandemic crises.

This study contributes to our limited understanding of generation Z's travel behaviors. It contributes to the extended use of TPB, risk perception and socially responsible conduct of such a specific generation. It is one of the first studies integrating the COVID-19 risk perception of generation Z and their intention to utilize the stimulus campaign.

This study aims to focus on how virtual campaigns are affecting voters in the elections of Kuwait, as well as whether such virtual campaigns will replace traditional campaigns in the post-COVID era.

This qualitative research adopts a purposeful sample when selecting participants from candidates and the managers of electoral campaigns in Kuwait. Fifteen participants were selected, which has been sufficient to achieve data saturation, and then, textual data were collected via semistructured interviews from 15 candidates and the managers of electoral campaigns in Kuwait during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings indicate that candidates preferred using virtual campaigns which enabled them to reach voters during the time of COVID-19’s lockdown. Majority of responses underlined that social media platforms do direct political messages to the voters. Hence, social media platforms should be perceived as preferred medium for communicating with supporters, especially in the post-COVID-19 era. However, some responses uphold the importance of keeping traditional political campaigns due to the peculiar nature of the Kuwaiti community where there is a need for socialization and meeting face-to-face with voters.

This research provides a new evaluation about the role of virtual political campaigns in Kuwait. It highlights the crucial and increasing role of virtual political campaigns in attracting voters; nevertheless, it found that virtual campaigns should be used as addendum to conventional political campaigns in the post-COVID-19 era in Kuwait.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how the innovation performance of start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that collect funds using equity crowdfunding (EC), i.e. creators (or proponents), and the EC performance are influenced by the social media networks (SMNs) in which EC platforms' managers and firms exchange their ideas with investors and customers.

The empirical analysis is conducted on a sample composed by all the creators that collected funds in EC platforms over the three-year period 2018–2020. For each creator, the innovation performance is computed as the percentage of sales from new or significantly improved product and services compared to total sales of firm. For each campaign, the EC performance is considered as the ratio between the total amount of funding raised at the end of the campaign and the target capital for the campaign. To investigate EC platform social media activity, LinkedIn profiles of EC platforms managers are analyzed using the social network analysis (SNA) methodology, which permits to observe the quantity and the quality of managers' interactions with other users. A regression analysis is thus performed to observe the relationship between managers' LinkedIn activities, EC performance and creators' innovation performance.

Data reveal that EC platforms managers display different activities in networking, with some individuals more active than others and more oriented to interact with business profiles rather than personal ones. The variables related to managers' LinkedIn activities are shown to impact both on the EC performance and on the ability of creators to innovate, suggesting the existence of a link between creators, EC platforms and the activity of the subject who manages it.

The present study is the first to examine the link between the ability of creators to innovate and SMNs, focusing on the social links of platforms managers and considering the LinkedIn social media; moreover, the analysis is conducted analyzing the quality of the interactions in addition to their number. The study is original also in that rather than focusing on specific EC platforms it considers all those purposefully authorized by the Italian financial market supervisory authority over a three-year time span. From a managerial point of view, the observation of the relevance of social networks by personnel with specific professional skills reveals it can be a successful driver for operators in the sector, not only to safeguard their reputation, but to stimulate the processes of co-creation of value that is essential in the crowdfunding market.

The present paper aims to explore if innovation strategies and crowdfunding campaigns can be cross-referred or even matched. These alternatives could increase the efficiency of crowdfunding processes since seeking new projects/business ideas to finance could be more targeted.

This paper is theoretical and explorative. Two dedicated literature reviews are carried out. The former is focused on innovation strategies and the latter is focused on crowdfunding campaigns. The offering of research propositions is the result of an inductive process.

Two main findings are achieved: first, a possible match between innovation strategies and crowdfunding campaigns (expressed by four research propositions); second, the confirmation of the role of innovation studies to corroborate the relevance of crowdfunding as an attractive field of research.

Previous contributions, expressly concerning the relationship between innovation strategies and crowdfunding campaigns, have mainly focused on the influence/support that crowdfunding campaigns offer to innovation strategies, by supporting or fostering them. Possible matches between innovation strategies and crowdfunding campaigns have rarely been investigated.

Framed by nostalgia marketing, this research draws upon lessons from ParticipACTION, a Canadian non-profit health promotion organization, to examine one of their most well-known campaigns, Body Break with ParticipACTION, in order to assess the potential role for nostalgia-based marketing campaigns in sport participation across generational cohorts.

Exploratory sequential mixed methods involving two studies were completed on behalf of ParticipACTION, with the authors developing the research instruments and the collection of the data undertaken by research agencies. Study 1 was the secondary analysis of qualitative data from five focus groups with different demographic compositions that followed a common question guide. Study 2 was a secondary data analysis of a pan-Canadian online survey with a sample (n = 1,475) representative of the overall adult population that assessed awareness of, and attitudes toward, ParticipACTION, Body Break, physical activity and sport participation. Path analysis tested a proposed model that was based on previous research on attitudes, brand and loyalty. Further, multi-group path analyses were conducted to compare younger generations with older ones.

The results provide direction and understanding of the importance of nostalgia in marketing sport participation programs across generational cohorts. For instance, in the four parent-adult focus groups, unaided references as well as frequent and detailed comments regarding Body Break were observed. Similarly, Millennials reported that Body Break was memorable, Canadian and nostalgic, with a mix of positive and negative comments. The importance of nostalgia was supported sequentially via results from the national survey. For example, while 54.1% of the 40–54 age-group associated ParticipACTION positively with Body Break, so did 49.8% of the 25–39-year age group, most of whom were not born when the promotion ran. Further, brand resonance was found to explain 4% more variance in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA), the proxy for sport participation, for younger people compared to older people.

Results provide direction to brands, properties and agencies around the use of nostalgia in sport marketing campaigns and sponsorship efforts. For brands seeking to sponsor sport properties to alter their image with potential consumers in a new market, associating with a sport property that many view as nostalgic could improve the impact of the campaign. On the sport property side, event managers and marketers should both identify existing assets that members or fans are nostalgic about, as well as consider building nostalgia into current and new properties they develop.

This research is valuable to the sport marketing and sponsorship literature through several contributions. First, the use of nostalgia marketing, and nostalgia in general, is novel in the sport marketing and sponsorship literature, with future research in nostalgia and sponsorship recommended. Second, the potential to adopt or adapt Body Break to other sport participation and physical activity properties is empirically supported. Finally, the finding that very effective promotions can have a long-lasting effect, both on those who experienced the campaigns as well as younger populations who only heard about it, is notable.