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E-commerce companies often manipulate customer decisions through dark patterns to meet their interests. Therefore, this study aims to identify, model and rank the enablers behind dark patterns usage in e-commerce companies.

Dark pattern enablers were identified from existing literature and validated by industry experts. Total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) was used to model the enablers. In addition, “matriced impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classement” (MICMAC) analysis categorized and ranked the enablers into four groups.

Partial human command over cognitive biases, fighting market competition and partial human command over emotional triggers were ranked as the most influential enablers of dark patterns in e-commerce companies. At the same time, meeting long-term economic goals was identified as the most challenging enabler of dark patterns, which has the lowest dependency and impact over the other enablers.

TISM results are reliant on the opinion of industry experts. Therefore, alternative statistical approaches could be used for validation.

The insights of this study could be used by business managers to eliminate dark patterns from their platforms and meet the motivations of the enablers of dark patterns with alternate strategies. Furthermore, this research would aid legal agencies and online communities in developing methods to combat dark patterns.

Although a few studies have developed taxonomies and classified dark patterns, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has identified the enablers behind the use of dark patterns by e-commerce organizations. The study further models the enablers and explains the mutual relationships.

This research aims to examine the influence of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) dark triad traits, follower COVID-19 anxiety and self-leadership on follower evaluations of the effectiveness of organizations’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

In this paper data were collected over two time periods. At time 1, mid-October 2021, 650 participants responded to questions on their CEO’s leadership traits and self-leadership. At time 2, (3-week lag) 275 matched individual responses provided followers’ evaluations of the effectiveness of the organization’s COVID-19 response and follower self-leadership.

CEO dark triad traits had direct and indirect negative effects on followers’ evaluations of the organization’s COVID-19 response (through COVID-19 anxiety). Follower self-leadership mitigated the negative effects.

By examining the moderating role of self-leadership, we can offer organizations evidence-based strategies to mitigate some harmful effects of leaders exhibiting dark triad traits.

Given that organizations are still dealing with the ongoing ramifications of COVID-19 and planning for future crises, our findings emphasize the negative effects of dark traits on COVID-19 anxiety, and in turn, on follower’s evaluation of effective organization response to a crisis, highlighting the importance of top-level leader selection.

Our results bolster Manz’s (1986) argument that self-leadership might be key to achieving peak performance in organizations and important for follower well-being.

This study of dark traits is especially important in a crisis context to understand how leaders affect followers’ perceptions about organizational outcomes and factors that might mediate or moderate the negative impact. Despite interest in understanding leadership during a crisis, the majority of research is focused on positive traits of leaders (Palmer et al., 2020).

E-commerce companies use different types of dark patterns to manipulate choices and earn higher revenues. This study aims to evaluate and prioritize dark patterns used by e-commerce companies to determine which dark patterns are the most profitable and risky.

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) prioritizes the observed categories of dark patterns based on the literature. Several corporate and academic specialists were consulted to create a comparison matrix to assess the elements of the detected dark pattern types.

Economic indicators are the most significant aspect of every business. Consequently, many companies use manipulative methods such as dark patterns to boost their revenue. The study revealed that the revenue generated by the types of dark patterns varies greatly. It was found that exigency, social proof, forced action and sneaking generate the highest revenues, whereas obstruction and misdirection create only marginal revenues for an e-commerce company.

The limitation of the AHP study is that the rating scale used in the analysis is conceptual. Consequentially, pairwise comparisons may induce bias in the results.

This paper suggests methodical and operational techniques to choose the priority of dark patterns to drive profits with minimum tradeoffs. The dark pattern ranking technique might be carried out by companies once a year to understand the implications of any new dark patterns used.

The advantages of understanding the trade-offs of implementing dark patterns are massive. E-commerce companies can optimize their spent time and resources by implementing the most beneficial dark patterns and avoiding the ones that drive marginal profits and annoy consumers.

Dark Souls heralded a shift from the dichotomy of survival horror, and instead, thrust the player into a world where narrative was everywhere (if only you dared to look). This chapter explores the reimagination of Gothic narrative and narrative engagement in the cryptic and fragmented nested narratives of the iconic FromSoftware, Inc. series. In doing so, this chapter highlights the emergence of a hybrid ludo-narrative form within the Gothic genre, and examines the ways in which the series presents said narratives to the player as it shifts the onus of narrative engagement from the storyteller to the one now living the experience. The chapter explores video-ludic interpretations of death, play, and experientiality through the lens of video game studies, and posits the value of the series as a defining moment in the Japanese action role-playing game genre.

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of online policing has questionable impacts in Australian prosecutions involving drugs obtained and distributed through dark web cryptomarkets. The authors describe several Australian prosecutions of mid- and low-level dealers who have accessed drugs through the dark web and contrast these with the United States (US) case against the cryptomarket, AlphaBay. The discussion in this study emphasises how Australian police and courts view the relative weight of dark web activity associated with the domestic and transnational supply of illicit drugs that result in formal prosecutions. The authors suggest that large-scale forms of online and dark web police surveillance undertaken by US enforcement agencies reflect Ethan Nadelmann’s (Cops across borders: the internationalization of US criminal law enforcement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) thesis on the Americanisation of global policing through transnational communications networks. The authors then explain how key elements of transnational dark web drug supply appear to have a marginal bearing on criminal investigations into low- and mid-level traffickers in Australia, which rely on conventional surveillance tactics to identify clandestine mail pickups, physical distribution methods, and irregular money trails. However, the authors then illustrate how the Americanisation of online policing that targets high-level entrepreneurs and seeks to dismantle or eliminate dark web cryptomarkets has important implications on Australian reforms aimed at enhancing online surveillance powers to target a range of crimes that are often wrongly associated with illicit drug cryptomarkets. The authors conclude by demonstrating how intensive dark web surveillance has limited direct impact on routine drug policing in Australia, with dark web communications simply another medium for facilitating the physical detection of illicit transnational drug transactions.

The present book chapter deals with the problem of dark tourism as well as the resilience forms of consumption in post-disaster context.

The turn of the century characterised a radical change in the forms of tourism consumption. New forms of tourism as dark or thana tourism have captivated the attention of scholars and journalists. This book chapter centres efforts in dillucidating what are the key factors that determine the formation of a dark site. The text is inspired in my own ethnographies in Cromañon, Argentina and the Ground Zero, US.

As Phillip Stone puts it, not all dark shrines or sites welcome tourists. While some sites are reluctant to mass tourism, others are mainly organised around the figure of the tourist. La Republica de Cromañón is a night club where in a fire died 194 young. The site is today refurbished as a sanctuary to remind the victims. At a closer look, there is a tension between stakeholders at the time of promoting dark tourism in Cromañón. In the opposite the ground zero is fully designed to be visited by thousands tourists.

The originality of this research consists in the contraposition of two study cases which answer the question to what extent dark tourism is desired by locals. The findings lay the foundations towards the specialised literature in dark tourism studies. We discuss critically the nature of thanatopsis.

Over the years, dark tourism as a theory has become very heterogenous. It has come to mean a lot of different things, according to the vantage points chosen for analysis. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the research that has been conducted on the topic of dark tourism including what the accepted definitions are, where it originated from, subcategories of the topic, and tourist motivations for visiting such sites. A discussion regarding the role of cultural differences in perceiving the phenomenon of dark tourism is also included. Dark tourist experience is qualitatively different from that of the leisure tourists, and the theories and frameworks available in the extant tourism literature to understand leisure tourism are insufficient to capture its essence. This means, more foundational conceptualisations and radical theory building are called for – rather than incrementally tweaking the existing ones.

The present chapter reviews part of the literature that focuses on dark tourism and dark consumption. The main theories were placed under the critical lens of scrutiny. With strongholds and weaknesses, dark tourism seems to be enframed in an ‘economic-based paradigm’, which prioritises the managerial perspective over other methods. Like Dark Tourist, the Netflix documentary assessed in this chapter, this academic perspective accepts that the tourist's experience is the only valid source of information to understand the phenomenon. Rather, we hold the thesis that far from being a local trend, dark tourism evinces a morbid drive which not only emerges recently but involves other facets and spheres of society. We coin the term Thana-capitalism to denote a passage from risk society to a new stage, where the Other's death is situated as the main commodity to exchange. The risk society as it was imagined by Beck, set finally the pace to thana-capitalism. Dark Tourist proffers an interesting platform to gain further understanding of this slippery matter. In sharp contrast to Seaton, Sharpley or Stone, we argue that dark tourists are unable to create empathy with the victims. Instead, they visit these types of marginal destinations in order to re-elaborate a political attachment with their institutions. They consume the Other's pain not only to feel unique and special (a word that sounds all the time in the documentary) but also to affirm their privileged role as part of the selected peoples.

The study uses a postcolonial lens to examine the historical interest of Western tourists towards dark tourism in the east, critically assess the current status of dark tourism in India, and recommend sustainable strategies that must be considered for promoting a dark tourism market in the future. The observations and recommendations for the study are based on primary fieldwork experience at different dark tourism sites in India besides an analysis of secondary data. A critical analysis in the context of dark tourism in India demonstrates several complex issues in terms of the existence and applicability of Euro-centric frameworks and concepts. Firstly, it is revealed that the Western fascination with death-related rituals in the east is rooted in notions of colonial discourse, authenticity and counter-culture movements. Secondly, although dark tourism has not been formally acknowledged or promoted in India, it already exists in the form of fragmented and informal markets across the country. Thirdly, the application of dark tourism frameworks and concepts in India requires careful consideration of contextuality and non-Western interpretations of death, disaster, heritage and processes of memorialisation to ensure that the marketing rhetoric does not reinforce colonial or neocolonial structures of power. Lastly, promoting responsible dark tourism in India entails minimising dissonance and decolonising the dark tourism narrative considering the larger goals of social sustainability and ethics.

Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic traits are often viewed as negative or undesirable personality traits. However, recent research demonstrates that individuals with these traits possess qualities that may be personally beneficial within the business contexts. In this chapter, we conceptualize a balanced perspective of these traits throughout the entrepreneurial process (opportunity recognition, opportunity evaluation, and opportunity exploitation) and discuss human resources management strategies that can be employed to enhance the benefits, or minimize the challenges, associated with Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic traits. Specifically, we propose that Machiavellian qualities are most beneficial in the evaluation stage of entrepreneurship, and Machiavellian, narcissistic, and psychopathic qualities are beneficial in the exploitation stage of entrepreneurship.