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The integration of social media and e-commerce has resulted in a rising phenomenon among individual content providers (ICPs), who used to offer free content, to provide consumers with paid content, such as online courses, Q&As or consultations. Despite the prevalence of ICPs’ content monetization, empirical research has rarely studied its underlying mechanism. This paper examines how the characteristics of free content contributed by ICPs on social media platforms influence their paid content sales, focusing on the perspective of human brand.

The empirical setting is an online knowledge exchange platform, where users are allowed to provide free content (e.g. answers) on the social media platform and launch paid content (e.g. lectures) on the e-commerce platform. A machine learning technique is employed to construct measures for the characteristics of free content, and fixed-effects estimation is presented to confirm which factors have a significant influence on the sales of paid content.

The empirical results show that the quality, diversity and expertness of free content have a significant positive impact on the sales of the ICP-paid content, with the brand popularity of ICP playing a mediating role.

This study is the first attempt to demystify the relationship between content contribution and ICPs’ content monetization from the perspective of human brand. The findings validate the effectiveness of the “Selling by Contribution” strategy and provide valuable insights for ICPs and social media platforms.

Knowledge sharing in online health communities (OHCs) disrupts consumers' health information-seeking behavior patterns such as seeking health information and consulting. Based on social exchange theory, this study explores how the two dimensions of experts' free knowledge sharing (general and specific) affect customer transactional and nontransactional engagement behavior and how the quality of experts' free knowledge sharing moderates the above relationships.

We adopted negative binomial regression models using homepage data of 2,982 experts crawled from Haodf.com using Python.

The results show that experts' free general knowledge sharing and free specific knowledge sharing positively facilitate both transactional and nontransactional engagement of consumers. The results also demonstrate that experts' efforts in knowledge-sharing quality weaken the positive effect of their knowledge-sharing quantity on customer engagement.

This study provides new insights into the importance of experts' free knowledge sharing in OHCs. This study also revealed a “trade-off” between experts' knowledge-sharing quality and quantity. These findings could help OHCs managers optimize knowledge-sharing recommendation mechanisms to encourage experts to share more health knowledge voluntarily and improve the efficiency of healthcare information dissemination to promote customer engagement.

This paper contributes to a dialogue about the psychoanalytic concept of free association and its application in the context of qualitative research interviewing. In doing so, it also adds to wider discussion regarding the relationship between clinical psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy and qualitative research.

Critical consideration of different perspectives on the application of free association in the qualitative research interview, extending earlier work addressing this issue. Differences and similarities in the way the concept of free association is articulated are examined regarding its framing in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.

Whether researchers see themselves as borrowing, applying or drawing inspiration from free association, there is scope for muddling distinct ways of viewing it as it is conceived in psychoanalysis.

Considerations are outlined for researchers interested in psychoanalytically informed methods to be mindful of.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of H2 flow rate on improving the solder wettability of oxidized‐copper with liquid lead‐free solder (96.5Sn‐3Ag‐0.5Cu) by Ar‐H2 plasmas. The aim was to improve the solder wettability of oxidized copper from 0 per cent wetting of copper oxidized in air at 260^oC for 1 hour to 100 per cent wetting of oxidized‐copper modified by Ar‐H2 plasmas at certain H2 flow rates and to find correlations between the surface characteristics of copper and the solder wettability with liquid lead‐free solder.

To reduce the copper oxides on the surfaces of oxidized‐copper for improving solder wettability with liquid lead‐free solder, this study attempted to apply Ar‐H2 plasmas to ablate the copper oxides from the surfaces of oxidized‐copper by the physical bombardment of the Ar plasmas and to reduce the surfaces of oxidized‐copper by the chemical reaction of H2 plasmas with the surfaces of oxidized‐copper.

The solder wettability of oxidized‐copper was found to be highly dependent on the surface characteristics of the copper. The values of polar surface free energy and dispersive surface free energy on the surfaces of oxidized‐copper modified by Ar‐H2 plasmas were close to those values of solid lead‐free solder, which resulted in improved solder wettability with liquid lead‐free solder. Auger spectra indicated that the Ar‐H2 plasma modification was used to remove the copper oxides from the surfaces of oxidized‐copper.

The surface characterization of copper surfaces is typically determined by expensive surface analysis tool such as Auger Electron Spectroscopy (AES). This paper reports the results of a study of a promising technique called the sessile drop test method, for examining the surface free energies such as total surface free energy, polar surface free energy and dispersive surface free energy on the surfaces of copper to clarify how the solder wettability of oxidized‐copper with liquid lead‐free solder was enhanced by Ar‐H2 plasmas.

The electronics industry will implement lead‐free soldering in the near future. Lead‐free implementation steps are divided into lead‐free process and lead‐free product. The eutectic Sn/Ag/Cu alloy seems to have become the most widely used alloy in the implementation of lead‐free processes. In this study, the requirements for component placement are discussed from the lead‐free process point of view. Experiments concerning the self‐alignment capability and tack strength of both tin‐lead and lead‐free solder pastes are presented. According to the results, a bigger variation in self‐alignment capabilities can be expected when using a lead‐free paste. The paste properties affecting the self‐alignment mechanism and tack strength are also discussed.

A boundary integral technique is developed to study the free surface flow of a steady, two‐dimensional, incompressible, irrotational and inviscid fluid flow which is produced by two submerged sinks (or sources) which are of equal strength, placed along a solid horizontal boundary with a stagnation point on the free surface in a two layer stratified fluid in the presence of gravity. A special form of the Riemann‐Hilbert problem, namely the Dirichlet boundary problem, is applied in the derivation of the governing non‐linear boundary integral‐differential equations which are solved for the fluid velocity on the free surface and this involves the use of an interpolative technique and an iterative process. Results have been obtained for the free surface flow for various values of the Froude number and sink locations on the solid horizontal boundary and we have also studied the largest value of the Froude number for which no convergent solutions are possible, namely the critical Froude number. We have found that the free surface profile is dependent on two parameters, namely the Froude number on the free surface and the non‐dimensional distance between the two sinks.

Destinations have in the scholarly literature been labeled as communities of interdependent organizations that collectively coproduce a variety of products and services. The paradigm comes close to describing destinations as firms which are embedded in interfirm networks. Recent studies provide crucial insights into an understanding of destinations' orchestration and structuration as coproducing interfirm networks. However, systematic knowledge about how these systems evolve and develop is lacking. This chapter addresses this issue and elaborates how the concepts of scale-free and small-world networks together can explain the process of destination evolution. The discussion also suggests how such theorizing can spur avenues for future research.

A surge in demand for ethical products, including cruelty-free products, has been well documented in recent years, with direct ramifications for businesses. This trend towards ethical consumption seemed to be swiftly replicated in Eastern countries, especially in South Asian nations, as a result of westernisation. Based on the theory of planned behaviour and the concept of the attitude-behaviour gap, this study aims to investigate the impact of westernisation on the purchase intention of cruelty-free cosmetic products.

A positivist research paradigm was utilised in this study. Accordingly, an online self-administered questionnaire was shared among 242 consumers of cosmetic products in Sri Lanka in order to collect responses. The statistical techniques of correlation analysis, the Sobel test and moderator regression analysis have been utilised in this study.

It was found that there seems to be a positive impact of westernisation and the cruelty-free purchase intention of consumers. Moreover, consumer empowerment appears to mediate this relationship, while the attitude behaviour gap tends to further impact the relationship between consumer empowerment and the purchase intention of cruelty-free products.

This study seems to shed light upon the impact of westernisation on the purchase intention of consumers, especially from an ethical dimension and this study is likely to extend existing studies which have focussed on consumer empowerment, attitude-behaviour gap as well as the theory of planned behaviour, especially in the context of South Asia, where there seems to be a dearth of such investigations. Moreover, this study has attempted to contextualise the construct of “Westernisation” to the South Asian region in line with the tone set by an editorial article Dewasiri et al. (2021).