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The gift-giving literature has documented several cases in which givers and recipients do not see eye-to-eye in gift-giving decisions. To help integrate this considerable segment of the gifting literature, this paper aims to develop a social norms-based framework for understanding and predicting giver-recipient asymmetries in gift selection.

Five experimental studies test the hypotheses. Participants in these studies evaluate gifts used in previous research, choose between gifts as either gift-givers or gift-recipients, and/or indicate their level of discomfort with choosing different kinds of gifts. The gifts vary in ways that allow the authors to test the social norms-based framework.

Gift-giving asymmetries tend to occur when one of the gifts under consideration is less descriptively, but not less injunctively, normative than the other. This theme holds for both asymmetries recorded in the gift-giving literature and novel ones. Indeed, the authors document new asymmetries in cases where the framework would expect asymmetries to occur and, providing critical support for the framework, the absence of asymmetries in cases where the framework would not expect asymmetries to emerge. Moreover, the authors explain these asymmetries, and lack thereof, using a mechanism that is novel to the literature on gift-giving mismatches: feelings of discomfort.

This research has multiple theoretical implications for the literatures studying gift-giving and social norms. A limitation of this work is that it left some (secondary) predictions of its model untested. Future research could test some of these predictions.

Billions of dollars are spent on gifts each year, making gift-giving a research topic of great practical importance. In addition, the research offers suggestions to consumers giving gifts, consumers receiving gifts, as well as marketers.

The research is original in that it creates a novel framework that predicts both the presence and absence of gift-giving asymmetries, introduces a psychological mechanism to the literature on giver-recipient gift choice asymmetries, and unifies many of the mismatches previously documented in this literature.

This study investigates how social interaction-oriented content in broadcasters' live speech affects broadcast viewers' purchasing and gift-giving behaviors and how broadcaster popularity moderates social interaction-oriented content's effect on the two different behaviors in live-streaming commerce.

A research model was proposed and empirically tested using a panel data set collected from 537 live streams via Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), one of the most popular live broadcast platforms in China. A fixed-effects negative binomial regression model was used to examine the proposed research model.

This study's results show that social interaction-oriented content in broadcasters' live speech has an inverted U-shaped relationship with broadcast viewers' purchasing behavior and shares a positive linear relationship with viewers' gift-giving behavior. Furthermore, broadcaster popularity significantly moderates the effect of social interaction-oriented content on viewers' purchasing and gift-giving behaviors.

This research enriches the literature on live-streaming commerce by investigating how social interaction-oriented content in broadcasters' live speech affects broadcast viewers' product-purchasing and gift-giving behaviors from the perspective of broadcast viewers' attention. Moreover, this study provides some practical guidelines for developing live speech content in the live-streaming commerce context.

This research paper aims to understand how givers characterise and manage their gift giving networks by drawing on attachment theory (AT). This responds to the need to illuminate the givers–receivers’ networks beyond traditional role-based taxonomies and explore their changing dynamics.

A multi-method, qualitative approach was used involving 158 gift experiences captured in online diaries and 27 follow-up interviews.

Results show that givers organise receivers into gifting networks that are grounded in a contextual understanding of their relationships. The identification of direct, surrogate and mediated bonds reflects three different dimensions that inform gift-giving networks of support, care or belongingness rooted in AT. The relative position of gift receivers in this network influences the nature of support, the type of social influences and relationship stability in the network.

This study illustrates the complexity of relationships based on the data collected over two specific periods of time; thus, there might be further types of receivers within a giver’s network that the data did not capture. This limitation was minimised by asking about other possible receivers in interviews.

The findings set a foundation for gift retailers to assist gift givers in finding gifts that match their perceived relations to the receivers by adapting communication messages and offering advice aligned with specific relationship contexts.

This study illuminates gift-giving networks by proposing a taxonomy of gifting networks underpinned by AT that can be applied to study different relationship contexts from the perspective of the giver. This conceptualisation captures different levels of emotional support, social influences and relationship stability, which have an impact on the receivers’ roles within the giver’s network. Importantly, results reveal that the gift receiver is not always the target of gift-giving. The target can be someone whom the giver wants to please or an acquaintance they share with the receiver with whom they wish to reinforce bonds.

This study aims to broaden understanding of customer helping behaviour in the banking environment and provide strategic direction for much-needed further research regarding its role and management within the customer service journey.

Gift-giving literature was further explored to identify plausible characteristics of customer helping behaviour in the banking environment.

Customers’ acts of helping could be complex in nature and may involve multiple actors, including customer helpers, gatekeepers, and other members of customer helpers’ networks. Moreover, customer helpers and their helping networks may operate in both offline and online environments, in various stages of the service experiences, and ultimately in the customer journeys. Furthermore, the help customers provide to other customers could be framed by socially constructed arrangements that seem to be (1) dynamic in nature, (2) comprising of joint efforts by multiple actors, and (3) within diverse and interlinked helping environments. Accordingly, several research implications for the banking environment are identified.

Key to services in the banking environment may be the complex and synthesised helping systems among customers that evidently could affect product adoption, use, and customer loyalty of customers receiving help throughout the service experiences and customer journeys. Accordingly, guided by gift-giving literature, the current paper sets the research agenda.

Live streaming has become an extremely popular form of online service and allows live audiences to give virtual gifts or money to their favorite streamers. This study aims to investigate the impact of the audience's multidimensional social presence on their attitudes toward live streamers and intentions to give money or gifts to streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. This study considers live audiences' gift-giving intentions by integrating the theory of multidimensional social presence, which includes awareness, cognitive social presence and affective social interaction, and the theory of reasoned action (TRA).

This study invited audiences who had watched live streaming from several popular live-streaming platforms to respond to a web questionnaire. The unit of analysis was at the individual level. This study applied the purposive sampling technique for data collection. A sample of 258 eligible responses to the online survey was analyzed using SPSS software and the causal relationships between the measurement variables of this research model were verified through structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that the audiences' awareness of participating in live streaming enhanced their cognitive and affective social presence, which positively affected their attitudes toward live streamers. These attitudes had a further significant effect on their gift-giving intentions. Cognitive social presence and affective social presence were found to play significant mediating roles in the relationship between awareness and attitudes toward live streamers.

This study examines audiences' intention to give gifts to their favorite live streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. The interactive relationship between live streamers and online audiences is developed by audience members through the process of inner psychological transformation, which is measured through the multidimensional construct of social presence. This occurs through a mutual influence relationship in which awareness simultaneously influences cognitive social presence and affective social presence, and cognitive social presence impacts affective social presence.

The study contributes three noteworthy findings to the theory development through the integrated perspective of the TRA and the theory of social presence. (1) Exploring the influence of belief factors on internal psychological responses and intention in live streaming to expand an innovative application of the TRA. (2) Adopting the multidimensional social presence can help researchers more clearly describe various live-streaming situations and extend the research scope of the social presence theory to live-streaming interactive marketing strategies. (3) From the perspective of live-streamer marketing, this study broadens the research fields of electronic commerce and interactive marketing.

This study provides four practical implications for platform managers and live streamers. (1) To induce favorable attitudes toward live streamers, live streamers initiate various interactive activities sequentially to establish a social presence with the audience. (2) Live streamers should devote themselves to forming a joyful atmosphere for their followers, as this will trigger audiences' affective social presence to generate positive attitudes and increase followers' intentions. (3) To attract and retain young followers, live streamers must devise interesting content and provide fresh services. (4) Platform managers must create useful widgets to assist live streamers in managing their channels and followers.

Building friendly real-time interaction between the live streamer and the audience is an important task in live streaming and further influences the income of the live streamer and the platform. The study provides an effective approach to building friendly real-time interaction for the live streamer and manager of live-streaming electronic commerce through the interactive marketing perspective. The approach can help the live streamer manage nice communication with their audience and obtain virtual money and gift-giving from the audience.

Departing from conflicting findings on the role of involvement in the formation of the consideration set, the authors of this study seek to shed light to the wine consumer behaviour and expand previous findings in the bring-your-own-bottle (BYOB) of wine restaurant industry. The authors seek to determine the contradictory effect of involvement on the consideration set size and variety.

Three empirical studies were conducted. In Study 1, the relationships were tested in a personal consumption situation and in Study 2 in a gift-giving context. Finally, in Study 3, inconsistencies in the intensity of the hypothesised relationships were explored by testing the triple interaction amongst the three variables (i.e. involvement, decision-making context and decision domain).

According to the authors' findings BYOB of wine consumers form larger considerations sets in memory-based decision contexts. Involvement's effect on wine consideration set size is stronger in memory-based decisions. BYOB restaurant patrons form smaller sets of alternatives for personal consumption. BYOB restaurant patrons form more heterogeneous sets of alternatives in wine gift-giving. BYOB of wine restaurants should facilitate consumers' wine-selection process.

The authors make an effort to explain and determine the up-to-date contradictory effect of restaurant patrons' involvement on the BYOB of wine consideration set size and the amount of variety contained therein. The study offers new insights, by unfolding the moderating effect of decision-making contexts (i.e. memory-based versus stimuli-based) and decision domains (i.e. personal consumption versus gift-giving) on this effect of involvement on the properties of consideration sets.

Customization allows brands to provide goods that match customers’ preferences, but its impact on consumer–brand relationships is unclear. This study aims to examine the impact of two key moderators on the effectiveness of customization to enhance brand’s perceived partner quality, which mediates the relationship between customization and brand attitude.

Study 1 (n = 219) tests the moderated–mediation relationship, the effect of customization (IV) on perceived partner quality (mediator), and its indirect effect on brand attitude (DV), which is moderated by consumers’ self-construal orientation (Moderator 1). Study 2 (n = 416) extends the model tested in Study 1 by including an additional moderator, shopping task context (Moderator 2).

Results empirically demonstrate the impact of self-construal and shopping task context on the effectiveness of customization in improved customer–brand partner quality and eventual brand attitude.

Customization may not appeal to every customer for the same reason. Marketers must target customers’ individual traits (independents vs interdependents) and understand the context of the shopping task context (self-purchase vs gift-giving).

The work reveals how brands can enhance consumers’ perceptions of the brand by allowing them to customize the product. It is novel in demonstrating that customization is not just a fine-grained segmentation strategy but a brand building tool. It highlights contextual factors affecting the outcome of customization by demonstrating the conditions under which it is most effective.

This study aims to examine the ramifications of an unfavorable public incident resulting from an organizational leader’s transgression on member outcomes and their intentions to purchase associated symbolic products as gifts. This study also considers how members’ attributions of organizational control affect the relationship between members’ organizational identification and their purchase behavior.

The study applies a longitudinal design involving two rounds of data collection over two years to examine a case of leadership transgression. Using the customer panel of a privately owned retailer, sorority members were surveyed before and after an unfavorable public incident involving their president. This study applied t-tests of mean differences and regression analyses to test the hypotheses.

After the leader’s transgressions were publicized, sorority members exhibited lower levels of cognitive organizational identification, satisfaction with the organization and purchase intention of organizational gifts. The association between cognitive organizational identification and gift purchase intentions was stronger after the incident. Further, controllability attributions positively moderated the association between cognitive organizational identification and the intended purchase quantity of organizational products after the incident.

The sample limits the generalizability of the findings, as the study is conducted on one case of a leader’s transgression in an identity-based organization (IBO).

The findings imply that efforts to repair customer identification should be taken rather than satisfaction enhancement when a leader of an IBO commits a public transgression.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to apply identity threat theory to understand how an organizational leader’s public transgression affects member outcomes and purchasing. The findings imply that it is critical to repair members’ identification when these situations arise. The use of a real case and a longitudinal research design are rare contributions to this research stream.

The boom in live streaming has intensified competition among streamers for viewers' gifts, which makes it meaningful to study the factors that affect the viewers’ gifting behavior. Given the emotional attachment between streamers and viewers, the authors set out to elucidate a new driver on viewer gifting: expressions of the streamer. This research aims to explore the impact of streamer emotions on the viewer gifting behaviors, including free and paid gifting. The loyalty level of the viewers is also introduced as a moderating factor to investigate the heterogeneous effect of streamer emotions on gifting behavior.

The dataset the authors collected consists of two parts, including 1809.69 h of live streaming videos and 358,002 gift giving records. Combined with deep learning methods and regression analysis, the authors performed empirical tests on the 81,110 valid samples. Several robustness checks were also conducted to ensure the reliability of main results.

The empirical results show that streamer emotions do have effects on viewers' free and paid gifting behavior. The authors’ findings show that positive streamer expressions, such as happiness and surprise, have a positive influence on viewer gifting behavior. However, some negative expressions, like sadness, can also have a positive impact. Moreover, the authors discovered that higher viewer loyalty amplifies the positive effect of streamer emotions and reduces the negative effect.

This research contributes to the study about streamer emotions and viewers' consumption behavior, which extends the application of emotion as social information model (EASI model) in the live streaming setting. The authors carefully divide the gifting behavior into two types: free and paid, and study how these two types are affected by streamer emotions. Besides, these effects are analyzed within viewers of different loyalty levels. This study offers practical emotion management strategies for streamers and live streaming platforms to gain more economic profits.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Human resource management (HRM) can act as a lynchpin to support innovation within small- and medium-sized enterprises particularly through the support of gift/counter-gift relationship building.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.