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Because online shopping is risky, there is a strong need to develop better presentation of online reviews, which may reduce the perceived risk and create more pleasurable shopping experiences. To test the impact of online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation, the purpose of this paper is to adopt a scenario experiment to study consumers’ decision-making process under the two scenarios of mixed presentation and classified presentation of online reviews collected from Jingdong.com in China: focusing on the comparative analysis on the differences of the consumers’ perceived risk, purchase intention and purchase delay, and further studying the interaction effect of involvement and online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation.

This paper employed a 2×2 factorial experiment to test the hypothesis. The experimental design is divided into four groups: 2 (online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation: mixed presentation vs classified presentation) × 2 (involvement: low vs high), each of which contains 90 samples. Through the data analysis, the main effect, mediation effect and moderating effect were examined.

The results show that compared with mixed presentation, classified presentation can reduce purchase intention and increase purchase delay due to the existence of loss aversion and availability heuristic. Furthermore, the paper also confirms that there is a significant interaction effect between involvement and online reviews’ sentiment polarity presentation.

The existing research pays less attention to the impact of online reviews presentation on consumers’ decision making, especially the lack of discussion on the interaction effect between involvement and online reviews presentation. For this reason, this paper proposes a problem, which concerns whether mixed presentation and classified presentation of online reviews will affect consumers’ decision making differently.

In the competitive e-marketplace today, sellers are using an increasing number of signals to entice customers to make online purchases. However, how differential these signals are in terms of their capacity to improve sales performance has not yet been investigated. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Drawing on signaling theory and grounded in the context of China’s largest e-marketplace, Taobao, this study investigated the different effects of five commonly used signals on the sales performance of e-marketplace sellers.

The authors find that warranty has the highest effect on sales performance, followed by overall rating, mean detailed seller rating, percent of positives, and web site quality.

First, this study builds on signaling theory and contributes to the e-marketplace literature by providing new insights into how specific signals differentially affect sales performance in the e-marketplace (with evidence from a large-scale empirical analysis). Second, the study extends the applicability of signaling theory to the e-marketplace domain by incorporating distinctive features of the e-marketplace into the original signaling theory. Finally, the findings lend practical support to e-marketplace sellers’ investment decisions on signals and provide guidelines for deployment of such signals.

As the information society further develops, electronic services are created and physical distribution networks become sparse, it is important to analyse the determinants that inhibit or facilitate the ability to use these services. By focusing on the perceived behavioural control of computers, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how perceived physical restrictions, computer anxiety and ease of use influence the perceptions of control.

The authors examined older consumers (aged 60-79) in two cross-sectional studies conducted through mail surveys in 2004 and 2012. Randomized samples (n=1,000 in 2004 and n=3,000 in 2012) were drawn from the Finnish Population Register. The empirical research utilized structural equation modelling through multi-group analysis to explore the differences in the interrelationships between physical restrictions, computer anxiety, perceived ease of use and perceived behavioural control.

The results indicate that perceived behavioural control is directly influenced by ease of use and indirectly influenced by physical restrictions and computer anxiety. The eight-year time gap moderated only the relationship between physical restrictions and ease of use. Development seems to have been favourable, and device-related restrictions do not decrease ease of use as much as previously reported.

The present study starts a new discussion on how time moderates the relationship of technology perceptions in behavioural models that have been used to predict behavioural intent.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships among intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, flow, cognitive attitudes, perceived satisfaction, and purchase intention of consumers’ online shopping from a cognitive attitudes perspective. This study collected data from consumers having bought goods on the e-shopping platform.

This study adopted online questionnaire through my3q (www.my3q.com) for data collection. This research collected and analyzed 866 samples by using the structural equation modeling for validation of the proposed model.

The results indicated that hedonic value, utilitarian value, security, and privacy significantly affected cognitive attitudes (i.e. cognitive trust and perceived risk). Cognitive attitudes significantly affected perceived satisfaction and purchase intention, respectively. Flow significantly and positively influenced cognitive trust and purchase intentions, respectively. Cognitive trust is the mediators between motivations/flow and perceived satisfaction/purchase intention.

Both of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation can reflect the cognitive and conscious plan of an individual for a particular task. The cognitive trust and perceived risk are partial mediator and full mediator in the model, respectively. Hedonic value, utilitarian value, security, privacy, and flow all affect the individual’s perceived satisfaction and purchase intention through cognitive trust and perceived risk in the context of online shopping. Cognitive trust is a full mediator of the effects of privacy on purchase intention. It indicates that consumers must fully trust the website to ensure that the information provided by consumers in the transaction will not spread out for the protection of personal privacy.

This study aimed to assist the marketing personnel of the EC industry to examine the key influential factors of consumers’ purchase satisfactions and purchase intentions. The results of this study indicated that cognitive trust is the foundation for gaining and retaining customers. The classification of consumer motivations facilitates the understanding of consumers’ demands and accurate interpretation of consumers’ needs. The main influential factor of cognitive trust is utilitarian value. Therefore, this study states that the primary intrinsic motivation of online shopping for most consumers is utilitarian value (e.g. saving time, the cost of searching for the appropriate products, and increasing purchasing efficiency).

Websites should strengthen the quality and quantity of product information. In addition, websites should provide a dynamic presentation of the product by presenting in various forms (multimedia and text description) about product-related information in order to increase consumers’ hedonic value. For the aspects of security and privacy, websites should provide consumers with reliable safety features, such as secure socket layer or digital signature, smooth communication channel (specific phone services and e-mail address), and consumer’s privacy statements. Finally, web design should meet with the consumer experience model in order to make the website easy to use and order the purchase from the website directly. Websites should also increase the fluency and positive experience of consumers and improve the interaction of a website. Meanwhile, websites need to feedback the consumer problem instantly and provide customized information in order to increase the chance of interaction between the consumers and the website.

Relevant studies have explored online shopping from various perspectives, but few studies have examined consumers’ cognitive attitudes toward websites from the consumer motivation perspective. Thus, this study focussed on the influences of consumers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (e.g. hedonic value, utilitarian value, security, and privacy) on their cognitive attitudes toward websites. In addition, with the rapid development of the internet in recent years, internet users’ online flow experiences have gained increased attention. The creation of attractive consumption conditions is vital for website managers to provide consumers with flow experiences. Therefore, this study included consumers’ flow in the proposed model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that affect how people maintain their friendships by using information on Plurk.

This study extended the Theory of Planned Behavior model to include both interpersonal curiosity and reciprocity. Data were collected via an online survey with 220 valid samples. The respondents answered the survey questionnaire based on their past experiences using Plurk. The proposed research model was assessed using structural equation modeling as performed in the LISREL program.

The attitude toward using Plurk for maintaining friendships is the strongest predictor of intention to use, followed by perceived behavioral control. The findings indicate that reciprocity has the strongest effect on attitude toward using Plurk for maintaining friendship, followed by subjective norms and interpersonal curiosity. An analysis of the research explained 61 percent of the variance in attitude toward using Plurk for maintaining friendship, and 73 percent of the variance in intention to use Plurk for maintaining friendship.

This study only focussed on a limited number of factors, and as a result, the effects of some variables, such as personal characteristics, may have been overlooked. In the future, researchers can extend this model by incorporating more variables into the analysis of maintaining friendships via Plurk.

As microblogging firms compete for online customers, it would be useful to gain some understanding of the possible effects of reciprocity and interpersonal curiosity on users’ intention to use Plurk for maintaining friendships. As firms compete for internet marketing, managers should know the potential use of Plurk as an effective channel to promote their products and services to whoever needs them.

From the literature available in the public journal databases, no existing research model was found to explain the behavior of Plurk users on microblogs. The paper fulfills this objective.

Multimedia content that is accessible through mobile devices has a larger size than other types of content (e.g. text, images). This may lead to higher prices for accessing the content via mobile devices, as mobile operators are capping mobile data billing plans in an effort to increase their revenues and prevent congestion. This poses problems for the users that are not willing/do not afford to pay the required price but still want to use multimedia content through the mobile networks. A price reduction for the user, as well as minimising bandwidth consumption can be obtained as a trade-off in multimedia quality. However, as previous research shows, not all people are willing to trade-off quality for a lower price; therefore, there is no straightforward approach to this problem. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to present a model of user willingness to pay for multimedia content quality as a function of the user risk attitude with the aim to provide personalised content depending on the user willingness to trade-off price for multimedia content quality.

A user model was proposed based on a literature review and an existing data set. A stereotypical approach was used where users are divided in two groups: risk averse and risk seekers. An experimental study involving six scenarios was used to validate the findings.

The results of the evaluation show that for the proposed user risk model, risk seekers preferred to pay for multimedia quality, whereas risk adverse users preferred to switch to a lower multimedia quality when monetary cost is involved. However, when the mobile data billing plan had the bandwidth limited, rather than a higher price to be paid when the bundle quantity was exceeded, the risk averse people’s preference for a lower quality still holds, but it does not show that most of the risk seekers prefer to pay for the multimedia quality.

This paper adds to the state of the art by providing a novel way to model the user preferences for multimedia quality based on their attitude towards risk, age, and gender.

Mobile data users, content providers (application service providers, over-the-top providers), mobile network operators (MNOs) and internet service providers (ISPs) could benefit from the results of this research. For mobile data users, the outcome of this research could be beneficial, as they can obtain personalised content based on their needs. From the content providers’ point of view, providing personalised content can lead to more satisfied users. It could also reduce the bandwidth consumption and the traffic to the server and/or proxy. Reducing the bandwidth consumption could lead to the possibility to acquire more customers and hence increase the revenues.

This is among the first studies to assess how the user preference towards multimedia quality if affected by the user attitude towards risk.