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The purpose of this paper is to explore the social value of information in virtual investment communities and compare its effects with objective information value. A model including information quality, social comparison, and herding orientation, and their effects on decision usefulness and member satisfaction, is proposed and tested.

An online survey with a sample of 215 members of investment communities was conducted to test the proposed model.

The opinion comparison orientation of members and information credibility are positively related to their perceived decision usefulness and satisfaction. Consistency is positively related to decision usefulness, but not to member satisfaction. Members' herding tendency moderates the effect of opinion comparison orientation on decision usefulness and the effect of ability comparison orientation on satisfaction.

The sample is small and not random. The proportion of students in the sample seems to be higher than it should be among virtual investment community members.

Investors should be careful regarding the social influences of their communities; the effects may not always be good for investment decisions.

Virtual communities provide members with social comparison information, which may yield positive effects for members in inspiration, self‐improvement, and self‐enhancement.

The virtual community can be a forum where people gain information regarding others to satisfy their needs for social comparison. Virtual communities provide special social value for their members, even for those who do not interact with others by posting in the communities.

The purpose of the paper is to test and compare a framework of firms' business sustainability endeavours with internal and external stakeholders in an oriental business context and to verify the validity and reliability of a stakeholder framework through time and across oriental and occidental business contexts.

Quantitative approach based on a questionnaire survey in corporate Taiwan with a response rate of 68.5%. Multivariate analysis is undertaken to uncover the measurement properties of a stakeholder framework.

A framework of firms' business sustainability endeavours with internal and external stakeholders appears valid and reliable through time and across occidental and oriental business contexts.

This study verifies and fortifies a stakeholder framework through time and across business contexts consisting of five stakeholder groups: upstream, the focal firm, downstream, market and societal.

The framework of firms' business sustainability endeavours provides guidance to firms in their endeavours of business sustainability with internal and external stakeholders.

This study contributes to existing theory and previous studies by validating a stakeholder framework of business sustainability with internal and external stakeholders beyond occidental business context to be also valid and reliable in oriental ones.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

This study aims to draw attention to the familiarity effect among international multimarket contact (MMC) firms on coopetition in the global container shipping industry and to better understand the contingency model of structural holes and in-degree centrality on joint price elevation actions and subsequent performance.

Drawing on competitive dynamics and the literature on networks, a panel data model is developed from 6,489 competitive and 7,146 cooperative actions of the top 21 shipping firms in 18 global arenas with a structured content analysis method being applied.

Stronger MMC by firms requires increased levels of cooperative actions to elevate prices. This coopetition relationship is enhanced or weakened when the focal firm occupies a higher level of structural hole or position of competitive in-degree centrality.

Shipping liners seeking to cooperate with joint action in oligopolistic markets are offered guidelines and strategies to increase their performance through their actions.

This study contributes to the literature on coopetition networks by further analyzing interfirm relationships and interactions that enhance performance, while exploring network positioning strategies to mitigate risks.

This study of multinational companies in China focuses on the role culture plays in relationship cultivation. The author interviewed 40 participants from 36 multinational companies in China. The findings revealed that characteristics of Chinese culture, such as family orientation, guanxi, relational orientation (role formalisation, relational interdependence, face, favour, relational harmony, relational fatalism and relational determination) had an influence on multinational companies’ relationship cultivation strategies. Multinationals from Western countries were found, however, to be more persistent in maintaining their own cultural values in relationship building than multinational companies from Asian countries.

This study aims to ask two important research questions: “Do the investments of innovation capital and information technology (IT) capital have a non‐linear relationship with firm performance?” and “Does the interaction between innovation capital and IT capital have synergy effects on firm performance?”

The authors employ multiple regression models and add the squared terms of research and development (R&D) intensity and IT intensity to examine the non‐linear relationship between innovation capital, IT capital and performance. The research sample includes the top 1,000 companies in Taiwan.

The main findings of the study are that: innovation capital has a non‐linear relationship (inverted U‐shape) with firm performance; and IT capital has no significant impact on firm performance. However, after considering the interaction between innovation capital and IT capital, there is a positive effect on firms' performance.

This study can be extended in the following ways: researchers can adopt panel data and use more representative measures to examine the dynamic relationship between intellectual capital and performance; and future research should seek to examine the interaction effects of other perspectives of intellectual capital to understand further the comprehensive influence on performance.

The research results suggest that more investment in intellectual capital is not always better. Companies should coordinate different perspectives of intellectual capital to improve firm performance.

This paper extends prior research's viewpoint and suggests the non‐linear relationship between innovation capital and performance with empirical evidence. The results can provide the reference for further research about the relationship between intellectual capital and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework to link founding team and start‐up competitive advantage in the context of the Taiwanese technology‐based ventures.

The paper analyzes 211 start‐ups of the technology‐based sector and verifies the relationship between entrepreneur resources, trust, founding team partners' commitments, and start‐up competitive advantage.

In technology‐based start‐ups, the competitive advantage of a start‐up is determined by the founding team partners' commitments and the resources an entrepreneur has.

This study is retrospective which relies on technology‐based founding team members as the primary research subjects, some respondents may observe the performance of their start‐ups today and then make attributions about the past to explain that performance.

Utilizations of personal networks are important in the early stage of technology‐based start‐ups; through networking and using trust, an entrepreneur can gain the critical resources and competitive advantage required in the development of a business.

In technology‐based start‐ups, trust, not the resources an entrepreneur has, is an effective way by which entrepreneurs can win founding team partners' commitments.

Despite the increasing utilization of webpages for the purposes of information seeking, customers’ concerns have become a crucial impediment for online shopping. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of the effectiveness of web assurance seals services (WASS) and customers’ concerns on customer’s willingness to book hotels through perceived website trust and perceived value.

A questionnaire was administrated to measure the study variables. Using partial least squares–structural equation modeling approach to analyze the data collected from 860 users of online hotel websites.

The results indicate that WASS influence positively on perceived website trust and negatively on consumers’ concerns. As well as, perceived value and trust play a mediating role in the link between WASS and consumers’ concerns and their intentions. Finally, perceived website trust and perceived value have greater effect on intention to book hotel for low-habit consumers.

This study ignored the cross-culture issue as it concentrates on the customers from developing countries, so further research may need to compare between two or more than two samples from different societies that could give a significant insights. Second, this study stresses on the WASS to predict customers booking intentions that indicates significant results, so further research may need to examine the role of online reviews as a predictor of customers purchase decision as well.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first empirical research that investigates and examines the influence of the effectiveness of WASS and consumers’ concerns on consumers’ intentions through perceived value and trust. This research also investigates the moderating role of habit in the link between perceived website, perceived value and consumers’ intentions.