Search results

This paper aims to find out the impact of business travelers’ behavioral belief on positive and negative e-comments, which consequently lead to intention to purchase a hotel room. To explore the relationships among attitude toward positive and negative e-comments with intention to purchase, the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) was used.

Business travelers in the USA who read e-comments and made a hotel choice based on those e-comments within the past six months were targeted for this study. The TRA, as well as a wide-ranging review of literature, were used to develop the survey instrument. The survey was distributed through Qualtrics, which is an online questionnaire service platform. To measure the business travelers’ behavioral beliefs toward e-comments, a number of measures were developed for this research. The theories of Fishbein and Ajzen were used to examine business travelers’ behavioral beliefs toward positive and negative e-comments. All of the questions on this survey about the intention to purchase were extracted from Liao et al. Other questions about attitude toward positive and negative comments were adopted from Chu and Choi, Sparks and Browning, Gundersen et al. and Lee and Sparks. The last section of the survey included questions about business travelers’ sociodemographic statistics, such as ethnicity, level of income, age, gender and education. The first question separated respondents to recognize those who made a reservation at a business hotel in the past six months after reading comments about the hotel. Those who responded positively were asked to participate in the study. Participants of this research presented their degree of agreement on each item by using a seven-point Likert scale, rating from (1) “Strongly disagree” to (7) “Strongly agree”. To verify the reliability of the questionnaire and to ensure it reflected the TRA, a pilot study was conducted with a small group of business travelers who had booked a hotel room in the past six months and finalized their purchases based on reading e-comments. No major changes were made to the survey as a result of the pilot study and all factors indicated an adequate level of internal consistency. The proposed model examined the effects of both positive and negative e-comments toward business travelers’ intention to purchase. This research aimed to determine the impact of behavioral belief on positive e-comments and negative e-comments, which consequently lead to intention to purchase.

The results of the proposed model revealed that behavioral belief positively affects both positive and negative e-comments. This means that business travelers want to be informed about both complaints and compliments in e-comments. However, this does not mean they intend to purchase a hotel room based on both opinions; rather business travelers would be inclined to purchase a hotel room based on positive e-comments. Using gender as a moderating effect indicated that females neither believe of the helpfulness of negative e-comments nor intend to purchase based on these e-comments. However, males tend to find both positive and negative e-comments helpful.

The findings of this research will help hoteliers, as well as online website review operators, to obtain a clearer understanding of guests’ or users’ needs and wants in order to offer a more desirable service. Since business travelers are considered an important target market in the hotel industry, hoteliers need to put more emphasize on these factors to attract more business travelers. By recognizing business travelers’ requirements and their expectations, hoteliers should prioritize their responsibilities for meeting these guests’ expectations; therefore, they can assign their resources accordingly. In other words, once a guest’s needs are understood clearly, hoteliers will be in safe position to provide the desired service.

Though prior research has addressed customer engagement (CE) with a focal object (e.g. a brand), the dynamics characterizing customers' engagement with different objects and the potential spillover from a customer's engagement with one object to that with another remains tenuous, exposing an important literature-based gap. The authors, therefore, develop a model proposing the existence of a spillover effect from customers' brand engagement to their engagement with brand-related content and suggest customers' personality trait of conscientiousness to moderate this effect.

An online survey-based experiment using 380 Danish Facebook users was conducted to test the model.

The results suggest customers' brand engagement as a significant predictor of their engagement with brand-related content, corroborating the proposed spillover effect. A weaker spillover effect is observed for highly (vs less) conscientious customers, substantiating the moderating role of customer conscientiousness. Moreover, customer conscientiousness is found to interact with brand content-related (i.e. commenting/content creation) task type and brand type (i.e. utilitarian/hedonic) (e.g. more conscientious customers are less likely to engage in brand-related content creation vs. commenting tasks), weakening the spillover effect.

This study extends prior research by quantitatively corroborating an intra-individual CE-based spillover effect from customers' brand engagement to their engagement with brand-related content. The authors also unearth a moderating role of customer conscientiousness, which interacts with brand- and brand content-related task type, on the spillover effect, informing the development of digital marketing strategies.

The spread of rumors on social media has caused increasing concerns about an under-informed or even misinformed public when it comes to scientific issues. However, researchers have rarely investigated their diffusion in non-western contexts. This study aims to systematically examine the content and network structure of rumor-related discussions around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on Chinese social media.

This study identified 21,837 rumor-related posts of GMOs on Weibo, one of China's most popular social media platforms. An approach combining social network analysis and content analysis was employed to classify user attitudes toward rumors, measure the level of homophily of their attitudes and examine the nature of their interactions.

Though a certain level of homophily existed in the interaction networks, referring to the observed echo chamber effect, Weibo also served as a public forum for GMO discussions in which cross-cutting ties between communities existed. A considerable amount of interactions emerged between the pro- and anti-GMO camps, and most of them involved providing or requesting information, which could mitigate the likelihood of opinion polarization. Moreover, this study revealed the declining role of traditional opinion leaders and pointed toward the need for alternative strategies for efficient fact-checking.

In general, the findings of this study suggested that microblogging platforms such as Weibo can function as public forums for discussing GMOs that expose users to ideologically cross-cutting viewpoints. This study stands to provide important insights into the viral processes of scientific rumors on social media.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to advance a set of recommendations concerned with enhancing residential strata title (ST) communities’ preparation for property management in a world of climate change (CC) and second, to examine the Australian ST community’s perceptions of the recommendations advanced.

The study comprised three empirical phases: three meetings with an 11 person industry reference group, conduct of 18 exploratory interviews and also an on-line questionnaire survey. The survey was designed to gauge the relative merit of sixteen recommendations developed during the study’s exploratory interview phase. The survey was completed by 450 individuals representing a broad cross-section of ST stakeholders.

The study’s findings are extensive. Amongst them it is notable that the survey respondents ranked procedures taken prior and during a ST building’s construction as more important CC management opportunities than steps and procedures implemented post-building construction.

While considerable care was taken to approach the analysis of interview data in an objective manner, it should be acknowledged that, like any research based on qualitative data, a researcher’s background is bound to introduce some biases in the way that themes in the collected data are determined and interpreted.

The range of practical implications arising from the study are very evident from the range of issues addressed in the 16 recommendations advanced by the study. These implications range widely from internal management suggestions such as identifying a CC champion in ST complexes, to insurance issues such as creating a low insurance or “uninsurable” ST building category.

The survey findings reveal the extent to which expressed opinions concerning how best to adapt ST buildings and communities for CC are affected by the stakeholder group that is expressing the opinion. This highlights the likelihood that any new ST policy making relating to CC is likely to become highly politicised due to conflicting lobbying interests represented by these distinct ST stakeholders.

The study is believed to embody an exceedingly high level of originality. It is the first to: provide an examination of the vulnerability of ST complexes to CC, and advance recommendations concerned with changes that should be made to the building and management of ST complexes in order to address the CC challenge.

Because we think of work and industry as a necessary evil we (the sentimental intellectuals) want to protect our children from it for as long as possible and we therefore formulate our educational ideals in terms of raising the school‐leaving age as high as possible. I think we should shift our emphasis.

any teaching method must be acceptable to the students, who should feel that it is right for them and consequently have no antagonism towards the method. Any such antagonism would create tension within the teaching situation and the learning efficiency would thus be impaired.

If rewards could make Pavlov's dog bark, then bright colours might make idle office workers pound faster at their keyboards. Unfortunately both for managers and architects it is not as easy as that: at least one hundred thousand other factors (such as pay, what you had for breakfast, promotional prospects) intervene between the simple physical environment and productivity.

In this article a generalisation of the Cournot oligopoly model is discussed, and it is shown that seemingly myopic conjectural behaviour is in fact in the (combined) interests of the market participants.

Investigates the medical factors affecting the reliability of artificial heart valves using the proportional hazards model. The data, from a database which is still being assembled at Killingbeck Hospital, Leeds, refer to patients who have had artificial heart valves implanted. The analysis of the data has been carried out using a suite of programs not specifically designed with this application in mind. Illustrates the exploratory analysis, the parameter estimation for the model and the validation of the model, being a preliminary study to assess the value of the proportional hazards model for this area. Follow‐up work, as the database is revised and augmented, is intended.