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This study aims to propose and evaluate a novel framework of strategic adaptability in dyadic negotiations. The authors define strategic adaptability as a reaction to a cue that leads to shifts between integrative and distributive strategies. Based on the literature on turning points, phase models and strategic negotiations, the authors developed an initial framework identifying five distinct strategic adaptations.

To verify the framework, the authors analyzed two negotiation simulations with a diverse set of negotiation students. Negotiations were content-coded, and adaptations were labeled.

The authors found a consistent pattern across two studies. Overall, 12% (study 1) and 18% (study 2) of all speaking turns were identified as strategic adaptations. The findings empirically confirmed four of their strategic adaptation types: adapt to deadlock, follow adaptation by opponent, adapt to priority of issue under discussion and adapt to new information on issue. Moreover, findings of this study revealed two new types of strategic adaptability: delayed adaptation to opponent and adapt to understand opponent. Study 2 additionally revealed that strategies vary with the negotiation phase, and negotiation outcome seems to benefit more from the constellation rather than the frequency of adaptations. Furthermore, lower-scoring negotiators tended to adapt to the opponent’s strategy instead of initiating a change in strategy.

The findings of this study provide preliminary insights into how strategic adaptations unfold. These findings present future research opportunities to further test the framework's robustness, increase the knowledge of individual and cultural factors, explore the relationship with negotiation outcomes and develop educational interventions to enhance strategic adaptability.

Chatbots are increasingly engaged in service marketing. Some academics and managers think using anthropomorphism chatbots will improve positive attitudes and behaviors in the customer journey, but at a high degree of anthropomorphism, consumers may experience negative emotions such as fear and disgust due to the feeling that the robots resemble humans too much, which is known as the uncanny valley effect. Therefore, the authors aim to explore whether chatbot anthropomorphism will promote or limit the development of the customer journey and explore the moderating factors and the antecedent factors affecting consumers' perceptions of chatbot anthropomorphism.

The authors collected 72,782 unique data points from 42 articles and 82 samples using a meta-analysis. Based on the stimuli-organism-response (SOR) model, the impact of anthropomorphic chatbots on the consumer journey was discussed.

The authors’ findings show that chatbot anthropomorphism positively impacts the customer journey but not their negative attitudes. Further moderator analysis reveals that the impact depends on service result, chatbot gender and sample source. The chatbot anthropomorphism is significantly influenced by social presence cues, emotional message cues and mixed cues.

This research contributes to the chatbot anthropomorphism literature and offers guidance for managers on whether and how to enhance chatbot anthropomorphism to facilitate the customer journey and improve service sustainability.

Contextual cues have become a hot research topic in the field of mobile consumer behavior, owing to the continuous rise of digital marketing. However, the complex online shopping scene makes it challenging to directly identify the association between the characteristics of contextual cues and consumer behavior. Presently, few studies have only systematically extracted and refined the types and characteristics of contextual cues. The purpose of this study is to explore the types and mechanisms of contextual cues in online shopping scenarios.

This study uses the word2vec algorithm, grounded theory and co-occurrence cluster method, along with online shopping word-of-mouth (WOM) text and consumer behavior theory, in order to explore different types of contextual cues and its efficiency from 5,619 comment corpus.

This study puts forward the following conclusions. (1) From the perspective of online shopping, contextual cues comprise aesthetic perception cues, value perception cues, trust-dependent cues, time perception cues, memory attention cues, spatial perception cues, attribute cues and relationship cues. (2) Based on the online shopping scenarios, contextual cues and their interaction effects exert an effect on consumer satisfaction, recommendation, purchase and return behavior.

The study conclusions are helpful to further reveal the deep association between contextual cues and consumer behavior in the process of online shopping, thus providing practical and theoretical enlightenment for enterprises to not only effectively reshape the scene but also promote the consumers' active purchase behavior.

This paper aims to study how price and sales level information influence consumer product perceptions and choices in online settings. It, in particular, tests whether displaying sales level information increases consumer price sensitivity, which is a potential strategic risk to retailers.

Study 1 uses eBay data to investigate whether the interaction effects between price and sales level can be observed in an existing market. Study 2 involves online experiments across three product categories. Participants choose from product pairs that are shown with either the same or different prices and with no, the same or different sales levels.

Study 1 shows strong effects of a product’s displayed sales and price level on its daily sales but finds no interaction effect. Study 2 shows strong effects of price and sales levels on product choice but similarly finds no evidence that sales level information influences consumer price sensitivity, although it reveals an effect on quality perceptions. The results show how perceptions of quality, sacrifice and popularity mediate the effects of price and sales level information on product choice.

Study 1 has limited control over prices and sales levels. Study 2 involves only hypothetical choices.

These findings indicate that businesses can use sales level information to manage consumer product quality perceptions and choices without having to be concerned that this will make consumers more price-sensitive.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate how sales level information affects consumer responses to price differences in online contexts.

Given inconsistent results in prior studies, this paper applies the dual process theory to investigate what social media messages yield audience engagement during a political event. It tests how affective cues (emotional valence, intensity and collective self-representation) and cognitive cues (insight, causation, certainty and discrepancy) contribute to public engagement.

The authors created a dataset of more than three million tweets during the 2020 United States (US) presidential elections. Affective and cognitive cues were assessed via sentiment analysis. The hypotheses were tested in negative binomial regressions. The authors also scrutinized a subsample of far-famed Twitter users. The final dataset, scraping code, preprocessing and analysis are available in an open repository.

The authors found the prominence of both affective and cognitive cues. For the overall sample, negativity bias was registered, and the tweet’s emotionality was negatively related to engagement. In contrast, in the sub-sample of tweets from famous users, emotionally charged content produced higher engagement. The role of sentiment decreases when the number of followers grows and ultimately becomes insignificant for Twitter participants with many followers. Collective self-representation (“we-talk”) is consistently associated with more likes, comments and retweets in the overall sample and subsamples.

The authors expand the dominating one-sided perspective to social media message processing focused on the peripheral route and hence affective cues. Leaning on the dual process theory, the authors shed light on the effectiveness of both affective (peripheral route) and cognitive (central route) cues on information appeal and dissemination on Twitter during a political event. The popularity of the tweet’s author moderates these relationships.

Understanding when an individual is being deceptive is an important part of police and criminal investigations. While investigators have developed multiple methods, the research literature has yet to fully explore some of the newer applied techniques. This study aims to investigate statement analysis, a recent approach in forensic linguistic analysis that has been applied to criminal investigations.

Real-world statements of individuals exposed as deceptive or truthful were used in the analyses. A behaviour sequence analysis approach is used to provide a timeline analysis of the individuals’ statements.

Results indicate that sequential patterns are different in deceptive statements compared to truthful statements. For example, deceptive statements were more likely to include vague words and temporal lacunas, to convince investigators into believing that the suspect was not present when the crime occurred. The sample in this research did not use one deceptive indicator, instead, electing to frequently change the order of deceptive indicators. Gaps in deception were also noted, and there was common repetition found in both the deceptive and truthful statements. While gaps are predicted to occur in truthful statements to reflect an absence of deception, gaps occurring in the deceptive statements are likely due to cognitive load.

The current research provides more support for using statement analysis in real-world criminal cases.

This study aims to draw on cue utilization and irradiation theories to: determine the extent to which country-of-origin image and its sub-dimensions exert an aggregate and relative influence on consumer brand evaluations; and identify the contextual and methodological factors that account for between-study variance in the focal relationship.

A random-effects model was used to examine 166 empirical articles encompassing 499,563 observations, and 282 effect sizes from 1984 to 2020 using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software.

Results show that country-of-origin image has a positive, moderate effect on consumer brand evaluations. Moreover, findings reveal that each dimension of country-of-origin image – general country image, general product country image, specific product country image and partitioned country image – significantly influences consumer brand evaluation, but the effect of general product country image is the largest. What’s more, the aggregate impacts of country-of-origin image on consumer brand evaluation – brand commitment, brand-specific associations and general brand impressions – show that the effect on brand commitment is the largest. Finally, findings show that contextual factors (brand source, product sector, culture [individualism vs collectivism], brand origin continents and respondents’ continent) and methodological factors (cues, sampling unit, publication year and sample size) significantly account for between-study variance.

This study provides the first meta-analytic review of the relationship between country-of-origin image and consumer brand evaluation to help clarify mixed findings and balance out the literature, which has only seen quantitative reviews on product evaluation and purchase decisions.

This paper aims to explore consumer perceptions of product design awards (PDAs) and their impact on consumer product evaluation and attitude formation about the award-winning product, the award-winning organization and the award-granting organization.

Based on the grounded theory approach, an exploratory qualitative study is conducted, using 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Turkish consumers through discussions on real-world examples.

Results show that consumers develop emotional responses to PDAs (e.g. interest, curiosity and confusion), hypothesize reasons for products receiving awards and cite rewards as confirmation of their existing judgments about products. PDAs are perceived as extrinsic cues signaling quality and price, and their impact is increased when consumers feel that the award is based on functional feature superiority. Consumer responses to PDAs are also influenced by the perceived expertise of the award-granting organization and beliefs about the award-granting process. Finally, PDAs can lead to positive brand-perception outcomes, influencing consumer perceptions of the product company as resourceful, competent and prominent.

This study shows that it is critical for companies to inform consumers about the specific features that resulted in a given product receiving a design award, as well as to provide information about the PDA itself.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to explore consumer perceptions of and reactions to PDAs, with significant implications for both the marketing managers of PDA-winning products and award-granting organizations.

Firms are increasingly required to make ethical choices when selecting suppliers for their supply chains, and the decisions often rest on individual purchasing managers within the firm. This study builds on the literature on ethical decision-making and the concept of decision frames to investigate the decision-making process of purchasing managers in financially distressed firms. Codes of Conduct (CoC) and how they are enforced (financial rewards and codified procedures for oversight) are studied in terms of their effectiveness in informing and guiding purchasing managers in their supplier selection decisions.

Four sequential experiments were conducted with a total of 648 purchasing managers from manufacturing firms.

The results indicate that purchasing managers in firms facing financial distress are more than four times more likely than purchasing managers in the control groups to select the less ethical supplier in favor of better operational performance. As a potential remedy, it is found that enforcing the firm's CoC help to counteract this tendency and increase ethical supplier selection decisions by 2.1- to 2.6-fold. However, CoC enforcement that invokes multiple conflicting decision frames simultaneously is more likely to impair than promote ethical supplier selection decisions, compared to situations where only one enforcement method is present.

These findings develop an improved understanding of purchasers' decision-making processes and shed light on how to effectively use CoCs to guide these decisions.