Search results

The spread of the Internet has transformed the dating landscape. Given the increasing popularity of online dating and rising immigration to Canada, this study takes an intersectional lens to examine nativity and gender differentials in heterosexual online dating.

In 2018, a random-digit-dial telephone survey was conducted in Canada. Logistic regression models were used to analyze original data from this survey (N = 1,373).

Results show that immigrants are more likely than native-born people to have used online dating in Canada, possibly because international relocation makes it more difficult for immigrants to meet romantic partners in other ways. In online-to-offline transitions, both native-born and immigrant online daters follow gendered scripts where men ask women out for a first date. Finally, immigrant men, who likely have disadvantaged positions in offline dating markets, also experience the least success in finding a long-term partner online.

Extending search theory of relationship formation to online dating, this study advances the understanding of change and continuity in gendered rituals and mate-selection processes in the digital and globalization era. Integrating search theory and intersectionality theory, this study highlights the efficiency of using the Internet to search for romantic partners and the socially constructed hierarchy of desirability as interrelated mechanisms that produce divergent online dating outcomes across social groups. Internet dating, instead of acting as an agent of social change, may reproduce normative dating practices and existing hierarchies of desirability.

The purpose of this study is to explore and identify the privacy concerns of smartphone app users pertinent to app usage.

Adopting a qualitative phenomenological approach, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with app users to explore the app users' privacy concerns.

Credibility concerns, unauthorised secondary use and vulnerability concerns are the three major privacy concerns of app users, under which these concerns have sub-concerns, i.e. popularity, privacy policy, stalking, data sharing, hacking and personal harm.

The findings are useful to app marketers, app developers and app stores. App marketers, app developers and app stores can use the findings to understand and properly address app users' privacy concerns, thereby increasing the apps usage.

By exploring the privacy concerns of app users, the authors' study extends the literature and provides a theoretical development of individuals' privacy concerns in the context of a widely used technology, i.e. smartphone applications. Accordingly, this study contributes to the consumer privacy literature.

Mobile apps usually have a short lifespan, and this prevents the majority from surviving long enough to generate revenue for their developers. To address this issue, this study aims to recognize the role of engagement and immersion and develops a cognitive-affective theoretical framework to associate these factors with the lifespan of an app. Moreover, the authors focus on gaming apps because of their dominance on mobile platforms, and because a few of them become lucrative while the majority perish within a few weeks.

This study uses a longitudinal survey-based approach to collect data on one of the popular gaming apps (Pokémon Go), which received international attention. The design focuses on identifying factors that extend the lifespan of the app and affects users’ decision to continue or stop using the app over time. The authors use the survival analysis and structural equation modeling to analyze the theoretical framework.

The authors find the centrality of the users’ experience of immersion to extend the mobile app lifespan. Engagement influences immersion and immersion predicts users’ decision to continue or stop using the app. Users’ experience of immersion increases the probability of the apps’ survival by 12%.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the only study that proposes a theoretical framework, meticulously investigates the factors that can lead to survival of a mobile app and uses longitudinal data for the empirical analysis.

This study aims to argue that user’s continued use behavior is contingent upon two perceptions (i.e. the app and the provider). This study examines the moderating effects of user’s perceptions of apps and providers on the effects of security and privacy concerns and investigate whether assurance mechanisms decrease such concerns.

This study conducts a scenario-based survey with 694 mobile cloud computing (MCC) app users to understand their perceptions and behaviors.

This study finds that while perceived value of data transfer to the cloud moderates the effects of security and privacy concerns on continued use behavior, trust only moderates the effect of privacy concerns. This study also finds that perceived effectiveness of security and privacy intervention impacts privacy concerns but does not decrease security concerns.

Prior mobile app studies mainly focused on mobile apps and did not investigate the perceptions of app providers along with app features in the same study. Furthermore, International Organization for Standardization 27018 certification and privacy policy notification are the interventions that exhibit data assurance mechanisms. However, it is unknown whether these interventions are able to decrease users’ security and privacy concerns after using MCC apps.

In this research, the authors focus on mobile cloud computing (MCC) collaboration apps that are multiplatform and send the users’ data to the cloud. Despite their benefits, MCC collaboration apps raise privacy concerns, as the users’ information is sent to the cloud where users lack direct control. This study aims to investigate why users disclose information to MCC apps despite privacy concerns and examine the effect of security and assurance mechanisms (i.e. privacy policies and ISO/IEC 27018 certification) on users’ perceptions and information disclosure. Based on three surveys conducted in 2016 (n = 515), 2017 (n = 505) and 2018 (n = 543), this study finds mixed results regarding the relationships among security, assurance mechanisms, utilitarian benefits and information disclosure.

This study conducted three scenario-based surveys in the USA in 2016 (n = 515), 2017 (n = 505) and 2018 (n = 543).

This study finds mixed results of relationships among security, assurance mechanisms, utilitarian benefit and information disclosure.

With proliferation of MCC apps, the investigation of how users make privacy decision to disclose personal information to these apps is sparse. This study, for the first time, investigates whether the signals of assurance mechanism decrease users’ privacy concerns. This study also examines the interplay between security and privacy within information disclosure behavior. Finally, this study was conducted in 3 years to enhance the generalizability and robustness of findings.

The empirical study draws on a crowdsourced database of 221 innovations associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aside from the health and humanitarian crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an acute economic downturn in most sectors, forcing public and private organizations to rethink and reconfigure service provision. The paper introduces the concept of imposed service innovation as a new strategic lens to augment the extant view of service innovation as a primarily discretionary activity.

The identified imposed service innovations were assigned to 11 categories and examined in terms of their strategic horizon and strategic stretch. The innovations are characterized by spatial flexibility, social and health outreach and exploitation of technology.

As a new area of service innovation research, imposed service innovations highlight strategic issues that include the primacy of customers and the fragility of institutions.

Situations involving imposed service innovation represent opportunities for rapid business development when recognized as such. A severe disruption such as a pandemic can catalyze managerial rethinking as organizations are forced to look beyond their existing business strategies.

As a strategic response to severe disruption of institutions, markets and service offerings, imposed service innovations afford opportunities to implement transformation and enhance well-being. This novel strategic lens foregrounds a societal account of service innovation, emphasizing societal relevance and context beyond the challenges of business viability alone.

While extant service innovation research has commonly focused on discretionary activities that enable differentiation and growth, imposed service innovations represent actions for resilience and renewal.

The purpose of this paper is to report novel information about the use of gay apps by the patrons of an exclusively gay resort in Queensland, Australia. This novel research environment facilitates an understanding of the embeddedness of gay dating apps within contemporary gay culture and community and the spatial reorientation that comes alongside the juxtaposition of physical and digital geographies.

An ethnographic study was conducted at the resort, and qualitative data presented here are drawn from semi-structured interviews with 27 gay-identifying male patrons of the resort. Critical ethnography provided beneficial access to situated perspectives and realities.

These data indicate that gay apps remain a pervasive way of making connections, even in an environment where common homosexuality is a reasonable expectation and where open self-expression is permitted and even encouraged. This complicates assumptions that gay apps’ emergence was in response to a need for privacy or anonymity for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in wider, straight society.

This paper reports the results of an ethnographic survey conducted in a highly novel research environment and particularly seeks to address divergent experiences of social and cultural change by LGBT people, including generational divides. It has value in demonstrating clear differences, ambiguities and mixed implications of gay apps and their relationship with changing LGBT spaces.

This study aims to understand if an online dating app is considered an acceptable channel to conduct advertising activities and understand the differences between Generations X, Y and Z for such acceptance.

A total of 411 Tinder users’ reactions were obtained and analyzed using text mining to compute the sentiment score of each response, and a Kruskal–Wallis H test to verify if there are statistical differences between each generation.

The results showed positive acceptability toward the marketing campaign on Tinder, especially Z Generation. Nevertheless, the statistical analysis revealed that the differences between each generation are not statistically significant.

The main limitation relates to the fact that the participants, during the data collection, revealed their identification, perhaps leading to acquiescence bias. In addition, the study mainly covered the male population. A balanced sample would be positive to examine any possible differences between gender.

Results provide an essential indication for companies regarding their marketing activities conducted on Tinder to fully exploit the possibility of using Tinder as an alternative and valuable channel to conduct marketing activities.

Up until now, no studies tried to understand the effect of a marketing activity online on an online dating app.

The purpose of this study is to understand how young consumers engage in the multi-category context. To that end, engagement on the focal product (dating platforms) and the other product (matrimony platforms) were studied. The objective is to find an answer to the following research question: Why do consumers tend to engage more with the focal product, yet are likely to purchase its complement or substitute?

Semi-structured depth interviews and Straussian grounded theory method were used to collect, analyze and interpret the data.

Self-determination theory provides an answer to the research question. This study suggests: young consumers experience different levels of need fulfilment when they evaluate the focal product in the single-category and in the multi-category contexts; young consumers’ motivational orientation (controlled motivation, autonomous motivation and intrinsic motivation) results into high-level behavior and engagement (pleasure-seeking, platform abandonment, goal-oriented pleasure-seeking, goal-oriented problem-solving, anxious and outsourcing) with the focal product and the other product.

Value of the paper lies in developing a grounded theory framework for engagement in the multi-category context. This study can help practitioners in making important business decisions, especially in the dating and matrimony e-business categories.

Online dating services have been growing rapidly in recent years. However, adopting these services may involve high risk and trust issues among potential users toward both online dating services and the daters they introduce to users. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceived benefits vs risks, and trust vs distrust affect user adoption vs non-adoption intentions toward using this rather controversial information and communications technology in the context of online dating.

Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate the research model using data from a survey of 451 single individuals.

The results indicated that perceived benefits play more essential roles in adoption, while perceived risks affect non-adoption more. Individuals' trust in online dating service predicts a major portion of the variation in user benefit perceptions, while distrust in online dating service and in daters that users might select significantly influence perceived risks. Moreover, benefit and risk perceptions can mediate the impacts of trust and distrust on both adoption and non-adoption decisions.

This study extends theories of decision-making in the use of controversial information technologies such as in the case of online dating. It investigates the coexistence of various trust and distrust beliefs as well as benefit and risk perceptions, and their different impacts on adoption and non-adoption in online dating services.