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The goal of this paper is twofold: (1) to investigate how relatedness-supportive corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives influence brand happiness among retail bank customers through a mediating mechanism of customer participation in brand CSR movements; and (2) to analyze how relatedness-supportive CSR initiatives’ effect may be moderated by cause choice and customer-brand goal congruence.

Data were collected from 379 retail bank customers via a paper-and-pencil survey. The hypothesized moderated-mediation effects were tested using Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS (Model 3, Model 4 and Model 7).

Results show that relatedness-supportive CSR initiatives increase brand happiness among retail bank customers through increasing their participation in brand CSR movements. Furthermore, the use of customer determination in the choice of cause enhances the positive effect of relatedness-supportive CSR initiatives on customer participation in brand CSR movements. Similarly, when customers choose the cause and the customer-brand goal is congruent, the effect of relatedness-supportive CSR initiatives on brand happiness is stronger than when the customer-brand goal is incongruent and cause choice is not aligned.

This research is grounded on the relationship motivation theory (RMT), basic psychological needs theory and self-congruity theory to unpack the relationship between relatedness-supportive CSR programs on brand happiness. Integrating three research streams (i.e. CSR, brand management and retail banking), this study proposes customer participation in brand CSR movements as a novel mechanism and sheds light on how relatedness-supportive CSR interplays with cause choice/customer-brand goal congruence to affect brand happiness among retail bank customers in emerging markets.

Once a corporate crisis is entangled with a social issue, how consumers make sense of the crisis can be impacted by issue-based opinion polarization. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms as consumers go through this process. This study also examines whether corporate social advocacy (CSA) can be an effective crisis-response strategy for mitigating reputational loss.

Theoretical inquiries were empirically tested using an online experiment (N = 792). The experiment set the context in China, in a working-overtime-issue-related crisis. It had a 2 (online exposure: anti-issue opinion vs. pro-issue opinion) × 2 (CSA: absence vs. presence) between-subject design with a continuous variable (pre-existing issue attitudes) measured before the manipulation.

This study found that pre-existing issue attitudes can be directly and indirectly associated with corporate reputation, for the issue attitudes influence how consumers attribute crisis blame. Such a direct effect of pre-existing issue attitudes varies depending on which polarized opinion consumers were exposed to on social media. This study also found CSA to be a robust crisis response strategy, through multiple mechanisms, in protecting the corporate reputation.

Scholars are scarcely aware of the threats that issue-based opinion polarization poses to corporate reputation. This study serves as an early attempt to provide theoretical explanations. In addition to this, this study extends the current conceptual understandings of CSA during corporate crises that involve social issues while adding fresh insights into the established typology of crisis-response strategies.

Understandings of house prices and their interrelationships have undoubtedly drawn a great amount of attention from various market participants. This study aims to investigate the monthly newly-built residential house price indices of seventy Chinese cities during a 10-year period spanning January 2011–December 2020 for understandings of issues related to their interdependence and synchronizations.

Analysis here is facilitated through network analysis together with topological and hierarchical characterizations of price comovements.

This study determines eight sectoral groups of cities whose house price indices are directly connected and the price synchronization within each group is higher than that at the national level, although each shows rather idiosyncratic patterns. Degrees of house price comovements are generally lower starting from 2018 at the national level and for the eight sectoral groups. Similarly, this study finds that the synchronization intensity associated with the house price index of each city generally switches to a lower level starting from early 2019.

Results here should be of use to policy design and analysis aiming at housing market evaluations and monitoring.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of job-hopping executives at their former and subsequent firms.

We conduct regression analyses using a sample of firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges from 2010 to 2020 to examine whether CSR performance is similar from one firm to the next as executives switch jobs.

We find a positive relationship between the CSR performance of former and subsequent firms under job-hopping executives. This relationship is the strongest in the year of the job switch; it weakens in the second year and eventually disappears in the third year. In addition, we show that this relationship benefits different CSR stakeholder groups and is contingent on executive and subsequent firm attributes and job-hopping characteristics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that firms that hire a new chief executive officer from a firm with a strong track record in CSR, the new firm experiences a significant surge in CSR performance compared with firms that do not experience such a shock.

This study has implications for executive hiring decisions.

This study extends the understanding of CSR determinants through the lens of inter-organisational ties associated with job-hopping executives.

The purpose of this study is to understand the psychological mechanism that affects consumer trust by focusing on the formation and influence process of psychological contracts, and taking this opportunity, explore the influence paths of food quality, food safety and service quality on consumer trust in the online food market, and provide theoretical suggestions for building trust in food businesses' consumers.

This study is based on an empirical investigation and uses partial least square structural equation modeling for analysis. Survey data were collected online from 359 APP users of online food transaction platforms in China.

Food quality, food safety and service quality influence consumer trust through the mediating effects of relational and transactional psychological contracts. However, the differences between these influencing paths are obvious and shift with changes in the marketing channels.

This study contributes to the body of consumer trust research by exploring online food transactions as an emerging trend in China. Some optimization strategies for food quality, food safety and service quality are provided for enterprises involved in online food transactions.

This is a pioneering study revealing psychological contracts as a missing but significant mediator between consumer trust and its antecedents.

This paper covers the development of a novel defect model for concrete highway bridges. The proposed defect model is intended to facilitate the identification of bridge’s condition information (i.e. defects), improve the efficiency and accuracy of bridge inspections by supporting practitioners and even machines with digitalised expert knowledge, and ultimately automate the process.

The research design consists of three major phases so as to (1) categorise common defect with regard to physical entities (i.e. bridge element), (2) establish internal relationships among those defects and (3) relate defects to their properties and potential causes. A mixed-method research approach, which includes a comprehensive literature review, focus groups and case studies, was employed to develop and validate the proposed defect model.

The data collected through the literature and focus groups were analysed and knowledge were extracted to form the novel defect model. The defect model was then validated and further calibrated through case study. Inspection reports of nearly 300 bridges in China were collected and analysed. The study uncovered the relationships between defects and a variety of inspection-related elements and represented in the form of an accessible, digitalised and user-friendly knowledge model.

The contribution of this paper is the development of a defect model that can assist inexperienced practitioners and even machines in the near future to conduct inspection tasks. For one, the proposed defect model can standardise the data collection process of bridge inspection, including the identification of defects and documentation of their vital properties, paving the path for the automation in subsequent stages (e.g. condition evaluation). For another, by retrieving rich experience and expert knowledge which have long been reserved and inherited in the industrial sector, the inspection efficiency and accuracy can be considerably improved.

Based on stakeholder, agency and institutional theory, this study aims to examine the role of institutional ownership in the relationship between environmental, social and governance practices and CEO compensation.

Utilizing a fixed-effect panel regression analysis, this research utilized a panel data approach, analyzing data spanning from 2014 to 2021, focusing on US companies listed on the S&P500 stock market index. The dataset encompassed 219 companies, leading to a total of 1,533 observations.

The analysis identified that environmental scores significantly impact CEO equity-linked compensation, unlike social and governance scores. Additionally, it was found that institutional ownership acts as a moderating factor in the relationship between the environmental score and CEO equity-linked compensation, as well as the association between the social score and CEO equity-linked compensation. Interestingly, the direction of these moderating effects varied between the two relationships, suggesting a nuanced role of institutional ownership.

This research makes a unique contribution to the field of corporate governance by exploring the relatively understudied area of institutional ownership's influence on the ESG practices–CEO compensation nexus.

This study aims to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) award and sustainability assurance levels for the French CAC 40 companies.

A sample of 57 French companies in the CAC 40 index corresponding to 448 observations was analyzed between 2008 and 2020 using an ordinal regression.

The main results conclude that the inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index World, the CSR award and the introduction of the Grenelle 2 law have a significant influence on sustainability assurance levels. However, incentive compensation does not appear to be relevant to explain sustainability assurance levels.

The present study focuses on a sample, limited to companies belonging to the CAC 40 index. To enhance the understanding of sustainability assurance levels, this research may include other global sustainability indices, such as the MSCI World and the FTSE4Good World, in the CSR awards.

This study could be useful for audit practitioners, leading them to reconsider their evaluation methods and take into account CSR incentives for a more objective analysis. Regulators should investigate the current CSR issues to improve CSR disclosure standards. Finally, these findings could motivate other researchers to expand the scope of the research to diverse contexts.

This study helps fill the gap existing in sustainability assurance literature by highlighting the relationship between CSR rewards and sustainability assurance levels.

This study aims to use the extended model of goal-directed behavior (EMGB) to examine the interaction between wine purchasing motivations and prior knowledge and their impact on consumers’ wine purchase intentions and decisions.

The survey was conducted in large discount retail stores in South Korea, and structural equation modeling analysis reveals EMGB’s strong predictive ability to understand wine buying behavior.

Notably, the findings reveal that social life and enjoyment motivations play a significant role in shaping consumers' attitudes. In addition, positive emotions, attitudes, prior knowledge, subjective norms and negative anticipated emotions all have a positive effect on desire, while desire, prior knowledge and frequency of past behavior have a significant impact on behavioral intention. Contrary to previous studies, celebration motivation has no significant effect on attitude and perceived behavioral control has no significant effect on desire and behavioral intention.

The findings provide practical insights for marketers to conduct targeted wine marketing campaigns and increase consumers' intention to purchase wine.

This study furthers the understanding of the complex mechanisms involved in shaping the intention to purchase wine using the EMGB framework.

This study aims to explore the role of the linguistic style used in the brand-posted social media content on consumer engagement in the Fintech domain.

A total of 3,286 tweets (registering nearly 1.35 million impressions) published by 10 leading Fintech unicorns in India were extracted using the Twitter API. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary was used to analyse the linguistic characteristics of the shared tweets. Negative Binomial Regression (NBR) was used for testing the hypotheses.

This study finds that using drive words and cognitive language increases consumer engagement with Fintech messages via the central route of information processing. Further, affective words and conversational language drive consumer engagement through the peripheral route of information processing.

The study extends the literature on brand engagement by unveiling the effect of linguistic features used to design social media messages.

The study provides guidance to social media marketers of Fintech brands regarding what content strategies best enhance consumer engagement. The linguistic style to improve online consumer engagement (OCE) is detailed.

The study’s findings contribute to the growing stream of Fintech literature by exploring the role of linguistic style on consumer engagement in social media communication. The study’s findings indicate the relevance of the dual processing mechanism of elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as an explanatory theory for evaluating consumer engagement with messages posted by Fintech brands.