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The primary objective of this study is to explore the nuanced interplay of conspicuous consumption, ethical label purchasing and the ensuing dynamics of civic virtue and cynicism within the luxury foodservice context.

Grounded in a theoretical understanding of solidarity within the context of product consumption, this research employs a two-pronged approach involving secondary data analysis and scenario-based experimental studies. The initial phase involves analyzing firm-level data from the Euromonitor database in 2019 and 2021. The main study employs a between-subjects experimental design with a cohort of 316 participants sourced from an online panel.

The results reveal a consistent pattern in the consumption of luxury foodservice and underscore a distinct upward trajectory in consumer demand for ethically labeled food. Notably, these findings underscore the moderating role of ethical label purchasing in the relationship between conspicuous consumption and consumers civic virtue. Additionally, ethical label purchasing moderates the impact of conspicuous consumption on consumer cynicism, both directly and indirectly through emotional solidarity related to both communal and equitable principles.

This study holds significance for both luxury food service researchers and market design practitioners. It provides valuable insights into how ethical labeling interacts with consumers conspicuous consumption, all facilitated by emotional solidarity.

This paper aims to examine how consumers’ perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots influence individuals’ cognitive and emotional states and their subsequent behavioural intentions vis-à-vis online travel agencies (OTAs).

The survey sample comprised 566 customers who had experienced the use of travel AI chatbots in China using a combination of online and offline questionnaires. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to test the hypotheses.

The results revealed that interaction and information quality, as AI chatbot stimuli, significantly increase potential tourists’ trust and purchase intention. Perceived usefulness plays a mediating role in the relationship among interactivity, information quality, customer trust and purchase intention. Furthermore, the findings indicated that customers with high product familiarity exhibited greater trust in products demonstrating a high level of perceived usefulness.

By integrating cognitive consistency theory, this study theoretically validates the applicability of the stimulus–organism–response framework on AI chatbots and provides academics with useful insights regarding the influence mechanisms of human–computer interaction and information quality on customer response within OTA settings.

研究旨在检验消费者对人工智能聊天机器人的感知如何影响潜在旅游者个体的认知、情绪状态以及购买意愿。

研究结合线上、线上问卷调查方式共调研了566名体验过在线旅行社中聊天机器人的消费者, 进一步利用偏最小二乘结构方程模型对理论假设进行实证检验。

研究发现人机互动性和信息质量作为聊天机器人的外在刺激, 显著影响潜在游客的信任和购买意愿; 感知有用性在互动性、信息质量、顾客信任和购买意愿之间起中介作用。此外, 产品熟悉度高的顾客对具有高感知有用性的产品会产生更大的信任。

研究结合认知一致性理论, 从理论上拓展了SOR框架在旅游聊天机器人的适用性, 解释了消费者响应人机交互的内在机制。

The purpose of this study was to investigate restaurant employee behaviors and their likelihood of intervening when witnessing food safety threats.

A mixed method was used for this study with the focus group interview and survey questionnaire. A total of eight focus groups ranging in number of participants from to 6 to 12 were asked to respond to presented scenarios that depicted restaurant employees committing food safety risk behaviors and threats in the restaurant environment that would present food safety risks such as out-of-stock bathroom supplies, dirty tables in the restaurant dining area, employee personal hygiene issues and unclean production equipment. These participants were also asked to complete a draft of the survey that would later be edited and distributed to the sample population.

Results suggest that social norms and perceived severity of threats impact the likelihood that restaurant employees will intervene. Implications for academics and practitioners are discussed.

This study was special as it provides a synthetic viewpoint that considers how service organizations can work to do a better job of interviewing employees before starting their jobs about their beliefs and personal practices of food safety at home, their previous work in the restaurant industry and food safety culture that they may have worked in before, as well as increasing the communication in restaurants to build a food safety culture. These practices can help to lower risks to the public regarding food safety and can help to build relationship trust in the brands that we all love to indulge in when dining out.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what use has been made of civil recovery legislation in the first three years of its existence and to explain the legal issues which have been raised before the courts so far. It also examines the legislative and non‐legislative changes to the civil recovery scheme since it is commencement in 2003.

The paper uses examples from amongst those cases initiated by the Assets Recovery Agency and draws on both reported and unreported court rulings.

The civil recovery cases brought against property by the Assets Recovery Agency may be classified into six categories: where a potential criminal defendant has died and is therefore beyond prosecution; where a criminal defendant has been acquitted; where a criminal defendant was convicted but the confiscation hearing failed; where the respondent is not within the jurisdiction; where the owner of the property is uncertain; and where a respondent is unprosecutable due to insufficient evidence.

The paper provides a useful framework for law enforcement agencies which are considering what type of cases they may useful refer for possible civil proceedings by the Agency. The paper also sets out for practitioners a useful summary of the civil recovery jurisprudence which has so far developed.

This research aims to examine Chinese consumers’ wine consumption and purchasing behaviour.

The study, conducted during the Chinese New Year in early 2006, used in‐depth interviews with 15 consumers in Guangzhou, People's Republic of China.

The results suggest that Chinese consume Chinese spirits for all occasions, yet consume red wine only for special occasions such as Chinese new year and other holidays. A key point for selling red wine to the Chinese is its positive image; drinking red wine is considered trendy and shows good taste. Another key point is consumer perceptions of red wine as healthier than Chinese spirits because wine contains less alcohol. Two other findings are that most Chinese consumers assume all wine is red wine and have little wine knowledge. Most respondents did not know of white wine or that Australia produces wine. Finally, China's culture of face value, mianzi, plays a key role in purchasing and consuming wine. Chinese tend to purchase inexpensive wine for private consumption and public occasions, yielding more mianzi in front of others. In some important occasions, consumers will purchase a foreign (French) red wine to impress their guests and obtain even more mianzi. In most situations, Chinese purchase and consume wine for perceived health and symbolic – lucky or good face – values.

The small sample size is a limitation. Another limitation is that all the respondents lived in the urban area of Guangzhou, one of China's most developed cities. The findings do not generalize to China.

The findings suggest that wine is a symbolic product rather than a necessity product in China; therefore, image is an important attribute for selling wine in China. Furthermore, limited wine knowledge tends to make Chinese consumers rely heavily on price for their wine purchasing decisions, as price relates to mainzi. Chinese consumers’ high awareness of France as a wine making country and their deep‐rooted positive beliefs about French wines pose difficulties for marketing other foreign wines, such as Australian wines, in China.

This is perhaps the first academic study in English of Chinese wine consumption and wine purchasing. It offers important insights on the characteristics of wine consumption and purchasing in China.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze critically the evolution of educational reform in Thailand. Three major phases are identified. The special focus of the paper is an assessment of the third reform which began with the passage of the Office of the National Education Commission (ONEC) (2002).

The methodology for the study is mixed methods including document analysis, direct participant observation, and compilation of major statistical performance indicators from diverse sources.

The success of the most recent reform has been clearly mixed. Major structural and legal changes have occurred but overall system performance remains disappointingly low, despite large Thai educational expenditures as a percent of national budget and the presence of much impressive educational leadership talent. The paper identifies what is called the “Thai educational paradox”. The essence of the paradox is Thailand’s failure to achieve its educational potential. The paper identifies key factors explaining the paradox.

The paper has significant theoretical, policy, and practical implications. From a theoretical perspective, the study confirms the persistence of strong regional disparities and a lack of fiscal neutrality associated with a neoliberal model of capitalistic development. From a practical policy perspective, it is imperative for Thailand to improve the overall quality of its educational system and to reduce regional disparities. There have been numerous studies of each of Thailand’s three phases of reform, but this paper’s original contribution is its presentation of a historical, interdisciplinary, and integrated perspective on the evolution of educational reform and the many obstacles associated with its implementation.

Due to the lack of industrywide data, now there is only perceptual knowledge, through survey data, that construction firms may face great challenges in geographical diversification. The article aims to provide an objective description on the state of interregional market entry practices in the Chinese construction industry. How these practices are influenced by related set of regional and industry-related factors is further studied.

Description analysis of the practices is first performed based on a first-hand industrial data set including 1,020 projects and 404 construction firms. Combining provincial panel data in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, related regional and industry-related factors on these practices are further analyzed through hierarchical regression models.

(1) Interregional market entry practices are not quite prevalent during the past two decades, only involving 271 projects and 111 firms which accounts for 26.57% and 27.47% of the analyzed subjects respectively; (2) Large, state-owned and experienced firms are more frequently involved in the practices; (3) A number of regional factors such as local market protection and industry scale also significantly impact the practices.

The empirical analysis of this study was conducted using the specific dataset from the National Quality Award Projects where firms tend to be national, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to the whole industry contexts.

While most of the research on market entry practices in the project-based construction industry is undertaken at project or firm level based on survey data, this research represents an exploratory effort of using objective data to provide a macro overview of the practices at the industry level. The findings could contribute to a deepened understanding of how these practices are impacted by related regional- and industry-level factors.

This paper aims to investigate the thermal oxidation behavior of trimethylolpropane trioleate (TMPTO) base oil when exposed to Fe surfaces.

Samples of TMPTO bulk oil were placed in Fe vessels and heated in an oven to accelerate the oxidation at different time intervals, while others were placed in glass vessels and used as experimental controls. Subsequently, the physicochemical properties of the oxidized TMPTOs, including the kinematic viscosity and acid value, were measured and a structural analysis was conducted using the Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) techniques.

The results demonstrate that the TMPTO bulk oil exhibited an exponential increase in the kinematic viscosity along with the increasing acid value over the oxidation time. The Fe surface significantly increased the kinematic viscosity of TMPTO, while only mildly impacting its acid value compared with the experimental controls. The structural analysis results of the TMPTO suggest that the C = C and = C-H bonds were the vulnerable sites. Furthermore, the results suggest that the Fe surface evidently accelerates the chemical reactions of the C = C and the = C-H bonds, and less alcohols and more carbonyl products were identified in the oil samples that were heated in the Fe vessels.

The results demonstrate that the Fe surfaces affected the oxidation behavior of the TMPTO base oil, and an interaction mechanism between the Fe and the TMPTO is developed.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the religiosity of the chief executive officer (CEO) on Indonesian banks’ performance.

The research method used was a review of the annual reports of banking companies in Indonesia from 2015 to 2019 and a web-based search to determine the religiosity of the CEOs. This study comprised 88 banking companies in Indonesia that come under the supervision of the Financial Services Authority.

The results of this study show that banks led by religious CEOs had better financial performance, as measured by their ROA and ROE, than those led by not very spiritual CEOs. These results indicate the importance of religiosity in organizations, especially at the top management level, for achieving better bank performance.

This research results show that religiosity plays an essential role in the banking business sector. This research adds to the literature on CEOs’ characteristics based on their religiosity and the concomitant effect on banking performance.

This study shows how individual religious beliefs influence the corporate behavior of top management, particularly the CEOs, and why this is crucial for organizational decision-making. This study measures an individual's religiosity (i.e. a CEO) based on that individual's actions in their workplace environment.

This paper aims to investigate the thermal oxidation characteristics of the unsaturated bonds (C=C) of trimethylolpropane trioleate (TMPTO) and to reveal the high temperature oxidation decay mechanism of unsaturated esters and the nature of the anti-oxidation properties of the additives.

Using a DXR laser microscopic Raman spectrometer and Linkam FTIR600 temperature control platform, the isothermal oxidation experiments of TMPTO with or without 1.0 wt. % of different antioxidants were performed.

The results indicated that the Raman peaks of =C-H, C=C and -CH₂- weaken gradually with prolonged oxidation time, and the corresponding Raman intensities drop rapidly at higher temperatures. The aromatic amine antioxidant can decrease the attenuation of peak intensity, as it significantly reduces the rate constant of C=C thermal oxidation. The hindered phenolic antioxidant has a protective effect during the early stages of oxidation (induction period), but it may accelerate the oxidation of C=C afterwards.

Research on the structure changes of synthetic esters during oxidation by Raman spectroscopy will be of great importance in promoting the use of Raman spectroscopy to analyze the oxidation of lubricants.