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The hospitality industry has recently witnessed explosive growth in robotization with the replacement of robots in many areas. Yet, a key consideration in this robotics wave is whether competition (i.e. robots take over all human tasks) or collaboration (i.e. humans collaborate closely with robots to perform work better) will define the future of the hospitality workspace. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on this controversial issue by taking a collaborative perspective to address the future human–robot relationship in hospitality workplace (i.e. cobotic team).

Drawing upon relevant theories and extant robotics literature, this paper will develop a critical reflection on the management of future cobotic team as a new phenomenon in hospitality industry.

The successful management of cobotics in hospitality lies in three interrelated key domains: feeling intelligence training for frontline employees, ethics governance for cobotics and trust building toward robot partners.

How to manage this cobotic team efficiently will be a focus for hospitality managers in the coming years. This paper offers several managerial insights for hospitality managers and practitioners regarding effectively managing the future collaboration between humans and robots within a dynamic work environment.

This study addresses cobotics as a critical yet unaddressed shift in the contemporary hospitality sector and proposes a framework highlighting three key domains for managing this cobotic team effectively. This framework also sets the direction to encourage more future empirical research exploring cobotic workforce in hospitality.

While robots have increasingly threatened frontline employees’ (FLEs) future employment by taking over more mechanical and analytical intelligence tasks, they are still unable to “experience” and “feel” to occupy empathetic intelligence tasks that can be handled better by FLEs. This study, therefore, aims to empirically develop and validate a scale measuring the new so-called empathetic creativity as being creative in practicing and performing empathetically intelligent skills during service encounters.

This study adopts a multistage design to develop the scale. Phase 1 combines a literature review with text mining from 3,737 service robots-related YouTube comments to generate 16 items capturing this new construct. Phase 2 assesses both face and content validity of those items, while Phase 3 recruits Prolific FLEs sample to evaluate construct validity. Phase 4 checks this construct’s nomological validity using PLS-SEM and Phase 5 experiments dedicated effort (vs natural talent) as an effective approach to foster FLEs’ perceived empathetic creativity.

The final scale is comprised of 13 refined items that capture three dimensions (social, interactive and emotional) of empathetic creativity. This research provides timely implications to help FLEs in high-contact services stay competitive.

This study introduces the new construct of empathetic creativity, which goes beyond the traditional definition of creativity in services and highlights the importance of empathetic intelligence for FLEs in future employment. This study also develops a multi-item scale to measure this construct, which can be applied to future service management research.

The user churn (UC) of rural public digital cultural services (RPDCS) indicates that rural users no longer use RPDCS or have switched to other services. The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors influencing RPDCS's UC and to contribute toward bridging the rural digital divide.

Based on the stimulus-organism-response theory, this study proposes a theoretical framework to investigate the factors influencing RPDCS's user churn. A total of 120 RPDCS users were initially recruited and 90 representative participants were chosen. Data were collected from the 90 respondents and 20 follow-up interviews. To examine the proposed framework and validate the correlations between these factors and UC, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multiple regression analysis were used. In addition, recommendations are made to avoid the UC of RPDCS to bridge the rural digital divide.

The results indicate that the UC of RPDCS was stimulated by both physical and ability divides and RPDCS ineffectiveness, resulting in increased churn rates and an exacerbated digital divide. Thus, avoiding the UC of RPDCS is an important way to bridge the rural digital divide, which includes both the physical and ability divides.

This study adds new knowledge about RPDCS and distinguishes it from previous research on public digital cultural services. In addition, the authors discuss how to avoid the UC of RPDCS, to bridge the rural digital divide.

This study aims to explore the relationship between elderly users' trust in public digital cultural services (PDCS) and their intention to use PDCS, and reveal the factors affecting their intentions from the perspective of trust to make recommendations that will increase their intention to use PDCS.

Combined with the trust building model and social exchange theory, this study constructed a conceptual model of elderly users' intention to use PDCS. Data collected from Chinese elderly users who have reached the age of 60 through questionnaire surveys were tested using the structural equation model with partial least squares. Finally, the authors proposed a model of elderly users' intention to use PDCS.

This study finds that elderly users' trust positively affects their intention to use PDCS from two aspects: service features and user features of PDCS. Concerning the service features, system quality directly affects elderly users' trust in PDCS most significantly, followed by information quality and service reputation. Concerning the user features, perceived value has a higher impact on elderly users' trust than that of service features, and information literacy and information quality directly affect perceived value.

This study adds new knowledge to the users' behavior of PDCS and enriches the prior description of PDCS. The recommendations made in this study provide a series of strategies for practitioners and researchers to improve the elderly users' intention to use PDCS and bridge the silver digital divide, which offers new ideas for improving the efficiency of PDCS.

This study aims to investigate how the public formed their need for information in the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. Exploring the formation of information needs can reveal why the public's information needs differ and provide insights on targeted information service during health crises at an essential level.

The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 46 participants and analyzed using the grounded theory approach. Concepts, sub-categories and categories were developed, and a model was built to examine how the public formed the need for information about the pandemic.

The authors found that participants were stimulated by information asymmetry, severity of the pandemic and regulations to control the pandemic, which triggered their perceptions of information credibility, threat and social approval. After the participants perceived that there was a threat, it activated their basic needs and they actively formed the need for information based on cognitive activities. Moreover, information delivered by different senders resulted in a passive need for information. Participants' individual traits also influenced their perceptions after being stimulated.

Long-term follow-up research is needed to help researchers identify more detailed perspectives and do comparative studies. Besides, this study conducted interviews through WeChat voice calls and telephone calls, and might be limited compared with face-to-face interviews.

The findings of this study provide theoretical contributions to the information needs research and practical implications for information services and public health management.

There is little systematic research on how the public formed information needs in the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak.