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This paper seeks to revisit the interrelationship among tourists’ perceived value of the destination, tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty in the heritage tourism site of Hoi An. In addition, the moderating role of tourists’ perceived crowding, which has become remarkably common at the site, in such a triangle relationship will also be explored. In other words, this study aims to validate an extended model of perceived value – tourist satisfaction – destination loyalty – perceived crowding.

The study collects data from 403 tourists who visited Hoi An during peak season through an online questionnaire. The data were later analysed using AMOS and Warp partial least squares.

The results validate the significant and positive correlation among perceived value, customer satisfaction and destination loyalty. Also, perceived crowding was confirmed to affect the relationship among these three variables negatively. In terms of academic contributions, this paper empirically proved that low levels of tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty among tourists who highly value their visiting experience at World Heritage Sites (WHS) can be caused by perceived crowding.

So far, current literature has investigated the direct (either positive or negative) relationship between perceived crowding and post-visit behaviours of tourists (Nie et al., 2022; Papadopoulou, Ribeiro, & Prayag, 2023; Stemmer, Gjerald, & Øgaard, 2022). Broadening this area of research, the authors of this paper used the social interference theory and the stimulus-overload theory to explain the low level of tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty among tourists who highly value their visiting experience at WHS.

Driven by artificial intelligence technology, chatbots have begun to play an important customer service role in the online retail environment. This study aims to explore how conversational styles improve the interaction experience between consumers and chatbots in different social crowding environments, and the moderating role of product categories is considered.

Three studies are conducted to understand the influences of conversational styles, social crowding and product categories on consumer acceptance, assessed using situational experiments and questions.

In a low social crowding environment, consumers prefer chatbots with a social-oriented (vs. task-oriented) conversational style, while in a high social crowding environment, consumers prefer a task-oriented (vs. social-oriented) conversational style, and warmth and competence mediate these effects. The moderating effect of product categories is supported.

This study expands the application of the stereotype content model to improve the interaction experience level between consumers and chatbots in online retail. The findings can provide managerial suggestions for retailers to select a chatbot's conversational style and promote a more continuous interaction between consumers and chatbots.

Based on the construal level theory, the purpose of this study is to prove the effect of interaction between construal level and visual crowding on consumers' buying intention. The study tries to explain the reasons behind the different buying intention toward visual crowding among consumers with different construal level.

This study was conducted through two situational simulation experiments. The main data analysis methods are ANOVA and bootstrap analysis.

(1) the matching of construal level and visual crowding has a significant effect on consumers’ buying intention. (2) Perceptual fluency mediates the interaction between the construal level and visual crowding on buying intention.

This study measures consumers' buying intention through situational experiments but does not measure consumers' buying behavior through real scenarios.

According to the study conclusions, consumers prefer visually crowded packaging that matches their construal level. Enterprises should consider the impact of the construal level on the effect of packaging stimulation.

This study enriches the theory related to construal level and highlights the mediating role of perceptual fluency. The addition of perceptual fluency explains the mechanism by which visual crowding affects consumers' buying intention. This extends the research on the antecedents and effects of perceptual fluency.

This study innovatively introduces visual crowding into packaging and matches visual crowding to construal level, explaining why different consumers buy different visually crowded packaging.

Based on the construal level theory, this research study examines the interactive effect between social crowding and corporate social responsibility (CSR) statement type on consumers' purchase intention.

The authors conducted two empirical experiments on a total of 508 subjects.

There is an interactive effect between social crowding and CSR statement type on consumers' purchase intention. Specifically, in high social crowding situations, concrete CSR statements lead to consumers' higher purchase intention, while in low social crowding situations, abstract CSR statements lead to consumers' higher purchase intention. Self-construal and processing fluency play a moderating and mediating role in the mechanism.

This research study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the interaction between social crowding and CSR statements, enriching the field of consumer behavior research on social crowding. Additionally, it offers practical insights for enterprises on how to present CSR information in crowded situations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how crowding without violating personal space influences consumers’ channel selection and the underlying mechanism of this process. Crowded environment is ubiquitous and affects consumers’ behaviors. However, less attention has been paid to whether and how crowding influences consumers’ preference for purchasing channels.

There were three studies to test the validity of the theorized model, including two laboratory experiments and a field study. The variance analyses and mediation analyses were used to give more insights into the analytical process.

This study proposes that crowding makes consumers lose their perceived control, leading them to form certain compensatory behavior through the conversion between online and offline purchasing channels – the type of goods moderates the process of compensatory behavior.

The results of this study are helpful for retailers to design effective strategies to allocate resources into online or offline channels and to choose the appropriate types of product to promote.

Environmental clues have been widely studied in previous marketing research. Crowding, as a common environmental clue, has only been noticed in recent years. This study examines the impact of crowding on consumers’ channel preference. The results of three studies have confirmed that consumers have higher preference for offline shopping when they are in a crowded environment and found the intrinsic mechanism and the marginal scenario of this process.

This study aims to explore the good crowding effect among Indian domestic travellers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the city destination. This study uses the framework of social motivation theory to achieve the objective.

This study adopted a qualitative research design by taking the case of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. Using purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 37 respondents, and themes were drawn manually.

The analysis found four themes that create a good crowding effect among domestic tourists, namely, convenience and price; familiarity and place attachment; social affiliation; and safety. The themes indicated that despite the pandemic, and constant occurrences of new variants, Indian domestic tourists’ on-site attitude towards crowding was favourable.

Firstly, the good crowding effect during the pandemic could have been better understood using empirical data. Secondly, the results cannot be generalized, specifically for developed economies.

This study offers practical implications to destination managers and local administrative bodies for whom achieving sustainability in urban tourism has always been concerning. These include developing infrastructural facilities, encouraging cultural activities in city centres and improving the perception of safety to sustain the good crowding effect.

The affective dimension involved in making a travelling decision played a significant role in the post-pandemic phase. While suppliers needed survival, tourists needed social affiliation and escape from the mandated home isolation due to multiple phases of COVID-19 lockdown in India. This study adds value to society by emphasising that the need for social affiliation among travellers remains intact, and the tourism industry should embrace this transformation.

While most of the pandemic-related studies criticised crowd and tourists’ crowd averting behaviour, this study reported that the good crowding effect could also be an outcome owing to different factors. Therefore, this study offers distinctive nuance of tourists’ behaviour in the post-COVID-19 phase, allowing destination managers and tourism stakeholders to re-think their strategies.

Much of the research on crowding in a service context has focused on customer reaction to crowding in a retail setting. This paper seeks to examine the effect of consumer goals on consumers' reactions to crowding for extended service encounters.

The authors used a 2 (Crowding: crowded or not crowded) × 2 (Goal: utilitarian or hedonic) × 2 (Service level: bad or good) factorial, between‐subjects design to test hypotheses. Service level and tolerance for crowding were entered as control variables. A service encounter in a casual restaurant was used as the service setting in the study. Subjects were randomly assigned to a written scenario describing an experience in a restaurant. They were then shown a photograph depicting the interior of the restaurant.

Consumption goal moderates the effect of perceived crowding on satisfaction. Significantly lower satisfaction ratings are associated with a crowded service environment when the primary consumption goal for the service experience is utilitarian, rather than hedonic, in nature. Furthermore, regardless of the consumption goal, crowding negatively impacts positive in‐store behaviors (i.e. desire to spend more money and time at the restaurant).

The study was limited to one extended service setting. Future research across other extended service settings is needed establish the generalizability of the findings.

The study has implications for the design of the service facility and the application of demand‐shifting revenue management strategies.

The paper extends the literature on shopping motivations to extended service settings by examining the effect of consumer goals on consumers' reactions to crowding, specifically consumer satisfaction with, and consumer behaviors within, the extended service encounter.

The purpose of this paper is to present findings from an experiment designed to test the impact of crowding perceptions (both human and spatial), emotions (positive and negative) and shopping values (utilitarian and hedonic) on shopper satisfaction. Culture is explored as a moderating variable with the expectation that it systematically affects perceptions and values, which, in turn, influence the shopper's experience with the store.

Data were collected via a 2×2×2 full factorial between subjects design with two variables, one manipulated and one measured. The two manipulated variables were spatial density (high versus low) and human density (high versus low). The measured variable was country of origin, where subjects were coded as either American or Australian.

Culture moderates the effects of perceived spatial crowding as well as both hedonic and utilitarian shopping values on shopper satisfaction. Specifically, the adverse effect of perceived spatial crowding on shopper satisfaction is less pronounced for Australians than is the case for Americans. With respect to both utilitarian and hedonic shopping values, the positive relationship between shopping values and shopper satisfaction is greater for Australians than for Americans.

Shopping has been generally described by Rintamaki et al. as “relativistic, because it involves preferences among objects, it varies among people, and it is specific to the context”. This paper demonstrates that culture clearly affects shopper's perceptions and shopping values, which in turn affect shopper satisfaction. It is reasonable to speculate that these effects would be even more pronounced had countries with greater cultural distance been examined.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and to test a model that illustrates the impact of technology anxiety on the intention to use a self-service technology (SST) in public. The study includes two context variables that are relevant in public settings: perceived crowding and perceived time pressure.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted to reflect individual perceptions and intentions when initially using a self-checkout. The proposed relationships and interaction effects were examined using structural equation modeling.

The analysis confirms the core relationships of the model (technology self-efficacy→technology anxiety→perceived ease of use→ intention to use) and yields three important results. First, technology anxiety has a direct negative effect on intention to use, which is greater than the indirect effect through the reduction of ease of use. Second, perceived crowding reinforces the negative effect of technology anxiety. Third, when perceived crowding coincides with perceived time pressure, technology anxiety almost completely inhibits the intention to use the SST in public.

Technology anxiety is examined as the only antecedent of perceived ease of use.

Initial encounters to public self-service technologies should be provided in servicescapes that avoid or at least reduce perceptions of crowding and time pressure.

The approach highlights the impact of technology anxiety on the acceptance of self-service technologies used in public by considering two context variables that are salient in public settings: perceived crowding and perceived time pressure.

Recognizing that crowding in a restaurant waiting area forms a first impression of service and sets service expectations, the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of crowding in the effective control of the waiting environment. The study seeks to examine the impact of crowding on customers' emotions and approach‐avoidance responses and to examine the mediating role of emotion and the moderating role of desired privacy in the relationship between crowding and approach‐avoidance responses.

Using real‐scale, interactive virtual reality (VR) technology that allows high‐fidelity representations of real environments, the authors created a navigable, photo‐realistic three‐dimensional model of a restaurant waiting area. Through an experimental study which manipulated crowding levels in the VR restaurant, they surveyed the subjects' responses toward crowding conditions.

The study found significant effects of crowding on emotions including arousal and dominance, but not pleasure, and on approach‐avoidance responses. The impact of crowding on approach‐avoidance responses was more direct than indirect, without having emotion as a mediator. It was also found that the desire for privacy as a psychological trait moderated the relationship between crowding and affiliation.

The findings of this study offer restaurant managers insights toward the effective management of the pre‐process service environment during the waiting state that minimizes the negative consequences of waiting/crowding. This study provides three courses of management actions that can make unavoidable crowding in the restaurant waiting situation more enjoyable and comfortable.

By using VR simulation, this study adds a new approach for crowding studies. Theoretically, this study broadened the scope of crowding studies by adding a potential mediating variable, emotions, and a moderating variable, desired privacy, in examining the relationship between crowding and approach‐avoidance responses. Also, by focusing on a restaurant waiting area, the authors were able to explore the pre‐process service expectations.