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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the underlying differences in the intention to participate in online commercial experiments through the social network considering users’ gender and age.

The model of this paper uses two relevant variables, trust and attitude, to test the behavioral intention. There were 269 data sets from social network’s users. Factorial analysis and linear regression were used in the analysis of the data obtained to investigate the differences in gender and age in the intention to participate in online commercial experiments.

The results of this paper show that there exist differences among women and men, and among youthers and adults. Women and youthers are the most desirable groups to conduct commercial experiments through social networks.

From the point of view of the academics, this paper increases the knowledge of social network’s possibilities as a marketing tool.

This study and its conclusions are relevant for entrepreneurs in any field who want to reach their customers through a horizontal social network because they can improve the online experiments’ profit. Entrepreneurs can know and understand their customers better, taking into account their wishes, tastes and interests through when participating in a commercial experiment.

This paper describes the possibilities that social networks like Facebook offer entrepreneurs to know the intention of users to participate in an online commercial experiment. Moreover, the differences in gender and age allow in adapting the contents of the online commercial experiments to get better results. In addition, this research contributes to the investigation in the possibilities of social networks as marketing tools.

Harmonizing religion and economic pursuits is treacherous because mixing the two rarely resonate with consumers, often resulting consumers’ greed perceptions. This paper aims to explore the antecedents and consequence of consumers’ greed perceptions in the context of for-profit religious-affiliated companies (FPRCs) and how they can harmonize religious and commercial missions by using different ad types (direct vs indirect appeal).

The authors conducted two experiments: Study 1 was an online experiment with participants from the USA collected through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 410) to reveal the overall mechanism. Study 2 was a field experiment (n = 292) to corroborate Study 1’s findings. The authors analyzed the data using a multigroup structural equation model.

First, consumers perceive greed against FPRCs’ dual identities incurred by their commercial activities. Second, when FPRCs obscure their religious identities by using third-party organizations (TPOs) as its promoter (i.e. indirect appeal), consumers’ greed perceptions decline, but this does not increase consumers’ future patronage intentions. Finally, in online and field experiments, consumers enhance their purchase intentions and behavior, respectively, under indirect appeal.

First, further investigation of the cognitive dissonance mechanism when consumers face seemingly contradictory identities of organizations is crucial to identify bottlenecks in promoting FPRCs’ commercial offerings. Second, examining boundary conditions of indirect appeal is important to enhance our understanding of FPRCs’ advertising, such as consumers’ awareness of TPOs’ intentionality. Lastly, not every type of indirect appeal brings the same effects. Future studies may explore diverse forms of indirect appeal, such as using artificial intelligence-based algorithms without TPOs.

Despite heightened interest in supporting dual missions (i.e. purpose and profit), this study shows why doing well while doing good is inherently challenging in practice creating marketing liability. To deal with this, the present findings suggest that, first, rather than exposing an FPRC’s religious (or communal) identity upfront, providing subtle cues through a TPO of its religious affiliation can be persuasive to win the hearts of target customers. Second, given the short-term effectiveness of indirect appeal, FPRCs need to use both direct and indirect appeal flexibly, as each type of ad delivers a distinctive advantage. Lastly, indirect appeal is particularly effective in offline promotional activities in the context of FPRCs.

First, by meshing paradox theory, the authors show that dual identities of FPRCs expose them to a marketing liability that single-mission enterprises rarely face. Second, when FPRCs use indirect appeal, they face a tradeoff between mitigating greed perception and securing future patronage. Third, results from the online experiment and field experiment show when consumers’ intention and actual behavior align.

This paper aims to examine the joint influence of incidental affect and mood-changing prices on consumers’ hotel booking intention in an online purchase context.

Based on the integrative framework of affect evaluation and affect regulation, a 3 × 2 full factorial between-subject online experiment in an online booking scenario is developed to investigate how consumers’ booking intentions change by mood inductions (happy, neutral and sad) and price levels (below versus above reference price).

Results showed that when the observed price was a mood-threatening cue, participants who were induced to feel either happy or sad by a commercial had a higher booking intention than those who were induced to feel neutral. However, there were no significant differences in participants’ booking intentions across pre-purchase affective states when the observed price was a mood-lifting cue.

The current study contributes to a better understanding and prediction of consumers’ action tendencies resulting from the interactions between specific incidental affects and mood-changing opportunities in an online hotel reservation environment.

Online booking companies and online travel agencies in general may wish to incorporate mood-changing components into their booking web pages to enhance potential bookers’ purchase intentions at any given price.

This research is one of the first empirical studies to instantiate the integrative affective mechanism in an online purchase setting. As e-commerce and online marketplaces are taking the place of traditional brick-and-mortar retailing, it is critical for hospitality industry marketers to fully understand how consumers’ pre-purchase emotions influence their purchase decisions.

Enterprises' multichannel operations provide various avenues for customer interaction; however, existing literature investigating customer-to-customer interaction (CCI) mainly focuses on a single channel. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the spillover effect of CCI and potential underlying mediating mechanisms in different information channels.

Three between-subjects experiments with 946 participants were employed to empirically validate the proposed hypotheses in the context of an experiential product and a material product.

Results suggest the clear spillover effect of CCI, indicating that positive CCI improves focal customers' satisfaction and purchase intention, whereas negative CCI reduces focal customers' satisfaction and purchase intention. Moreover, CCI's spillover effect varies based on the CCI channel. Offline CCI has a stronger positive spillover effect than online CCI. Contrarily, online CCI has a stronger negative spillover effect than offline CCI. Customer experience and trust are demonstrated to have mediating roles in this process.

This study is the first to comprehensively understand and compare the CCI spillover effect of the two information channels. The findings add to the existing knowledge of information processing in the psychological mechanisms influencing the belief in addition to providing insights for companies engaged in multichannel operations management across different channels.

This paper aims to determine the effect of the congruence between a website's background color and its context (product category) on online trust and resulting behavioral intentions in emerging markets.

An online experiment, conducted on 240 web-surfers, compared two versions of a website (high vs low color-context congruence) in terms of online trust and resulting behavioral intentions. The authors also studied the moderating role of the online shopping experience on the color-context congruence impact on online trust.

Results revealed that a website's color-context congruence enhances online trust. The authors have also demonstrated that online trust plays a mediating role in the relationship between color-context congruence and behavioral intentions. Moreover, they found out that the influence of the color-context congruence on online trust is enhanced when the web-surfer is highly experienced in online shopping.

This research contributes to fill in the theoretical gaps and to better understand the influence of color-context congruence on online trust and behavioral intentions in emerging markets. Indeed, past studies had focused on the color impact on online trust without taking into consideration congruence with the website context. However, this study is limited to a single category of products (tourist products) and only two colors (blue and red) were manipulated in the experiment.

This study highlights the importance of selecting a background's color that matches with the sold product category to reassure web-surfers so that they trust the commercial website and express some favorable intentions like buying.

Prior studies had focused on the website's color effect on online trust neglecting color-context congruence. Our study helps to highlight the importance of selecting background colors matching the product category.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Through two experiments, this study assessed source and message effects of Instagram-based pro-veganism messages.

Experiment 1 (N = 294) examined effects of organization (brand vs nonprofit) and message types (egoistic vs altruistic) on consumer responses to Instagram-based pro-veganism content. Experiment 2 (N = 288) examined effects of source type (celebrity vs noncelebrity) and message valence (positive vs negative) on consumer responses to Instagram-based pro-veganism content.

Results demonstrated significant main effects of organization type, with consumers indicating more positive attitudes and higher credibility toward the brand. Significant main effects of message type were also found, with altruistic messages eliciting higher perceived information value than egoistic messages. Subjective norms had moderating effects on attitude toward the organization, while attitude toward veganism had moderating effects on perceived information value. Results also indicated significant main effects of message valence on perceived information value of pro-veganism Instagram posts and significant interaction effects of the two manipulated factors on intention to spread electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) about pro-veganism.

Implications for use of Instagram-based health marketing communication about veganism were discussed. Specifically, organizations looking to use social media to influence attitudes and behavioral intentions toward health issues should seek to reach their target audiences through selecting endorsers and messages that will optimally present the health issue in a relatable and engaging way.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

Consumer-generated online product reviews (OPRs) have become a crucial source of information for consumers; however, OPRs are increasingly being incentivized. The purpose of this paper is to find a method of sponsorship and disclosure that could be considered ethically sound.

This study adopted a quasi-experimental approach to clarifying how the method of sponsorship impacts reader perceptions of OPRs in terms of helpfulness, credibility and purchase intention. Two experiments were performed on an online platform using data from 480 participants. Hypotheses were tested using analysis of covariance.

Meaning under the premise that sponsorship information is disclosed and not withheld from the readers, Study 1 revealed that experiential sponsorship is the best sponsorship. Study 2 revealed that featuring reviewers with greater influence in the online community increases the positive influence of disclosing experiential sponsorship on OPR persuasiveness.

The findings in this study provide rational incentives for firms to disclose sponsorship information, i.e. demonstrate high ethical standards in marketing. This was shown to create a win-win-win situation for consumers, firms and reviewers. Managerial implications for online marketing managers are also discussed.