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Information opacity in donation crowdfunding activities has constrained the healthy development of China’s public welfare activities. Addressing the trust crisis and enhancing public engagement warrants further investigation. This study aims to uncover the moderating effect of activity transparency by utilizing data from 1,029 donation crowdfunding projects on the Sina Weibo Public Welfare Social Platform. In this way, we seek to elucidate the impact of donation crowdfunding events on fundraising ability.

This study selects text complexity, number of supporters, creator experience, and social capital as explanatory variables; innovatively selects the number of updates of online crowdfunding activities and total reading volume as moderating variables; selects the number of shares of crowdfunding activities as a mediating variable; and constructs a moderated mediation multiple regression model for fundraising ability.

Our findings indicate that independent variables, such as text complexity, number of supporters, and social capital, can significantly affect the dependent variable, fundraising ability. However, creator experience does not influence fundraising ability. Furthermore, social interaction has a mediating effect, whereas activity transparency has a reverse moderating effect. These results indicate that social interaction can enhance the fundraising ability of donation crowdfunding events. However, with an increase in information transparency, the fundraising ability of social media decreases.

The originality of this research is in clarifying the internal factors affecting fundraising ability through induction, making bold assumptions, and focusing on how social media’s effective interaction and activity transparency will affect public welfare crowdfunding fundraising ability.

Charitable crowdfunding features are embedded in social media platforms to encourage pro-social behaviors. Although such new practice allows practitioners to leverage the power of a highly connected crowd, accomplishing the fundraising goal is still a challenge. This study seeks to understand what drives the donation intention in charitable crowdfunding features on social media platforms by examining the roles of social experience, empathy and personal impulsiveness.

A survey questionnaire was distributed to social media users in China to collect data. A total of 206 valid responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results showed that empathy mediates interaction with the fundraiser and perceived proximity with the donatee on a user's donation intention. We also found that social influence on social media platforms positively influences empathy and donation intention. In addition, personal impulsiveness was found to moderate the relationship between empathy and donation intention.

This study contributes to existing literature and practices. It identifies three dimensions of social experience and examines their effects on donation intention, providing insights into the charitable crowdfunding features on social media. Moreover, this study extends the understanding to empathy by delineating its mediating role in the relationship between social experience and donation intention and examining how personal impulsiveness moderates the effect of empathy on donation intention. Furthermore, this study provides valuable insights for practitioners to craft strategies to stimulate pro-social behaviors and increase donations.

Extant research shows mixed results on the impact of expressed negative emotions on donations in online charitable crowdfunding. This study solves the puzzle by examining how different types of negative emotions (i.e. sadness, anxiety and fear) expressed in crowdfunding project descriptions affect donations.

Data on 15,653 projects across four categories (medical assistance, education assistance, disaster assistance and poverty assistance) from September 2013 to May 2019 come from a leading online crowdfunding platform in China. Text analysis and regression models serve to test the hypotheses.

In the medical assistance category, the expression of sadness has an inverted U-shaped effect on donations, while the expression of anxiety has a negative effect. An appropriate number of sadness words is helpful but should not exceed five times. In the education assistance and disaster assistance categories, the expression of sadness has a positive effect on donations, but disclosure of anxiety and fear has no influence on donations. Expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have no impact on donations in the poverty assistance category.

This work has important implications for fundraisers on how to regulate the fundraisers' expressions of negative emotions in a project's description to attract donations. These insights are also relevant for online crowdfunding platforms.

Online crowdfunding research often studies negative emotions as a whole and does not differentiate project types. The current work contributes by empirically testing the impact of three types of negative emotions on donations across four major online crowdfunding categories.

Driven by artificial intelligence technology, chatbots have begun to play an important customer service role in the online retail environment. This study aims to explore how conversational styles improve the interaction experience between consumers and chatbots in different social crowding environments, and the moderating role of product categories is considered.

Three studies are conducted to understand the influences of conversational styles, social crowding and product categories on consumer acceptance, assessed using situational experiments and questions.

In a low social crowding environment, consumers prefer chatbots with a social-oriented (vs. task-oriented) conversational style, while in a high social crowding environment, consumers prefer a task-oriented (vs. social-oriented) conversational style, and warmth and competence mediate these effects. The moderating effect of product categories is supported.

This study expands the application of the stereotype content model to improve the interaction experience level between consumers and chatbots in online retail. The findings can provide managerial suggestions for retailers to select a chatbot's conversational style and promote a more continuous interaction between consumers and chatbots.

Tourism via virtual reality (VR) technology has become an interesting option for consumers to “travel.” The best approaches to optimizing the VR tourism environment, improving the interactive experience of tourists and encouraging tourists to adopt VR are not yet fully understood. This study explores the willingness of tourists to adopt VR tourism from the dual aspects, richness and dynamics, of virtual social cues.

To examine the effects of richness (multiple vs. few cues) and dynamic (changeable vs. static cues) on consumers' willingness to adopt VR tourism, three virtual tourism scenes were designed and presented by head-mounted displays. The data were collected for participants in the VR laboratory and tested by ANOVA and partial least squares–structural equation modeling.

Virtual social cues can generate mental imagery through interactivity, vividness and parasocial interactions, thus increasing the consumer's likelihood of adopting VR tourism. It was also found that imagination moderates mental imagery and adoption intention. When the consumer's imagination is stronger, their mental imagery stimulates a stronger willingness to adopt VR tourism.

The authors innovatively utilize concepts of parasocial interaction and mental imagery and discuss the various influences and mediation mechanisms of social cue characteristics on consumers' adoption of VR tourism. The conclusions may provide new insights for VR tourism managers and tourism scholars.

Drawing on signaling theory and the “signal transmission–interpretation–feedback” framework, this study explores the effects of perceived distributive justice and respect from managers on nurses' work meaningfulness and work effort in public hospitals in China and examines the moderating role of work self-efficacy.

We collected 341 paired questionnaires for nurses and managers from four public hospitals in China. The data were analyzed by structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression analysis.

Distributive justice and managers' respect for employees are positively related to work meaningfulness. Additionally, work self-efficacy negatively moderates this relationship. Work meaningfulness is positively related to work effort and fully mediates the relationships between perceived distributive justice and respect from the manager and work effort.

This study provides useful insights for healthcare organizations to improve nurses' work meaningfulness from the perspectives of their material and emotional needs, according to their work self-efficacy characteristics, thus promoting their work effort. The findings offer important guidance for improving the effectiveness of grass-roots human resources to cope with unpredictable situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study focuses on the organization's environmental factors that affect the primary staff's work meaningfulness. Further, it analyzes the differences in signal interpretation among nurses with different work self-efficacy characteristics, thus providing new insights into work meaningfulness. Through manager–nurse pairing data, it reveals the important role of work meaningfulness in motivating work effort.

This study examines the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance. Drawing on signaling theory, the authors investigate how funding-related signals (funding goal and duration), story-related signals (text length, text sentiment, and use of first-person pronouns), and donor-related signals (donor identity disclosure) affect medical crowdfunding performance.

This study analyzed the data of 754 medical crowdfunding projects collected from the Qingsongchou platform in China to test the proposed model.

The empirical findings reveal that both funding goal and funding duration exhibit a U-shaped relationship with crowdfunding performance. Additionally, the authors find evidence that story text length and donor identity disclosure are positively related to crowdfunding performance, whereas the use of first-person pronouns is negatively related to crowdfunding performance.

This study extends the understanding of the determinants of medical crowdfunding performance through the signaling theory. Specifically, this study provides new insights into the roles of funding goal and funding duration in predicting medical crowdfunding performance and identifies several new predictors of crowdfunding performance, including the use of first-person pronouns in project story text and donor identity disclosure.