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Improving the creative performance of customers is critical to improving the competitive advantage of service firms. Customers that perform creatively and generate novel and useful ideas contribute to firm profitability by helping the firm save on costs and improve its services rather than merely relying on its employees. This paper aims to focus on creative customer behavior and examine its antecedents.

The analysis is based on a dyadic data set involving salespeople and their customers, collected over two periods across various industries in the context of business-to-business service deliveries.

Results indicate that customer task complexity affects creative customer behavior not through intrinsic motivation but through customer stress, and reveal that customer learning orientation and customer creative ability positively moderate these relationships.

Customers, salespeople and their managers should enrich the customers’ tasks with core job characteristics, in particular significance and feedback, and treat task stress as a positive, surmountable challenge that facilitates customer value creation. The results also indicate that to enhance creative customer behavior, managers should appreciate and develop customers’ learning orientation and creative ability, which in turn leads to increased sales performance and service quality.

The ubiquity of smartphones has changed how people communicate, work and entertain. In view of conservation of resources theory and the positive spillover effect, this study explores the effect of non-work-related instant messaging (IM) in the workplace on daily task performance.

The authors use the experience sampling method to collect day-level data from 75 employees over a period of 10 workdays. Multilevel path analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

Non-work-related IM exerts a significant negative indirect effect on daily task performance through diminished cognitive engagement. This negative indirect effect disappears when social support is high, thereby showing the function of social support as a neutralizer of the detriment of non-work-related IM on daily task performance.

The findings suggest that organizations can neutralize the harm of non-work-related IM in the workplace by promoting social support perceived by employees.

This study advances the technology and management literature by developing and testing a balanced perspective on the ambivalent effect of workplace smartphone use that considers social and cognitive resource implications.

This paper aims to enrich the literature on negotiation by theorizing and empirically validating that power is an important moderator of the relationship between negotiator emotion and behavior.

Data were collected from 322 students of an MBA program and executive education programs. The students participated in a two‐stage, mixed‐motive negotiation simulation during which they reported pre‐negotiation emotion, as well as their negotiation behavior.

The empirical analyzes showed that the relationship between negotiator emotion and behavior was stronger for high‐power negotiators than for their low‐power counterparts. Interestingly, high‐ and low‐power negotiators' emotions were more predictive of their dominating and yielding behavior, respectively. Perhaps, because of their dependence, low‐power negotiators were more sensitive and responsive to the emotions of their high‐power counterparts than vice versa. The results also showed that low‐power negotiators' gratitude substantially reduces their distributive outcome.

The analysis revealed that the strength and the nature of the relationship between emotions and negotiator behavior depend on the power of the negotiator. The paper highlights the need for further theoretical specification with regard to boundary conditions for understanding the role of emotional states in the negotiation context.

This paper examines global imbalance and rebalancing issues from the viewpoint of Korea. As IMF (2009) notes, the unwinding of global imbalance seems inevitable and, in fact, it is in progress. We illustrate that Korea, with a flexible exchange rate system and relatively balanced current accounts, has little direct linkage to global imbalance. However, we also find that Korea is not immune to the costly adjustment process of imbalance due to the triangular trade between Korea, China and the U.S. The fact that Korea is ‘indirectly’ linked to global imbalance limits Korea’s ability to cope with the situation. Boosting domestic demand, often mentioned recommendation for East Asia, is not an appropriate solution for Korea with low personal savings rate. A lot depends on China’s policy. If China reduces its dependence on U.S. market and increases domestic consumption despite unemployment risk in export manufacturing sector, it will provide Korea with an opportunity for more stable growth based on China’s final demand. Korea can also make efforts to increase economic integration and expand monetary cooperation in Asia that would help to increase consumption demands and final goods trade in the region.

The maritime freight transportation industry has played an important role in the Korean economy. The Korean maritime freight transportation industry is faced with a period of transforming it competitively and efficiently in this global age. This paper, therefore, aims to identify the impact of the maritime freight transportation industry in the Korean national economy. Hence, this paper provides policy-makers with accessible and reliable information regarding the role of the Korean maritime freight transportation industry. This study employs input-output (I-O) analysis to examine the role of the maritime freight transportation industry in the national economy for the period 1995-2003, with specific application to Korea. This study pays particular attention to the maritime freight transportation industry by taking the industry as exogenous variable and then investigates its economic impacts. We identify inter-industry linkage effects in 20 sectors, production-inducing effects, added value-inducing effects, and supply-shortage effects of the maritime freight transportation industry.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the factors affecting consumer’s fast fashion brand loyalty by examining US college students’ perceptions and loyalty toward fast fashion.

Using consumer-based brand equity approach, a research model which examines the factors affecting consumer’s brand loyalty in the fast fashion context was proposed. It was hypothesized that consumer’s perceptions of fast fashion, including brand awareness, perceived quality, perceived value, brand personality, organizational associations, and brand uniqueness, affect consumer brand loyalty. Based on the valid data from 419 US college students, this study employed structural equation modeling to investigate the factors affecting US college students’ brand loyalty toward fast fashion.

Results reveal that for the US college students, brand awareness, perceived value, organizational associations, and brand uniqueness are the contributing factors to generating consumer’s loyalty toward fast fashion brands.

Due to the fact that fast fashion has become a key feature of the global fashion industry over the last decade, there is phenomenal growth in the availability of fast fashion brands in the US markets. This study provides valuable insights about young consumers’ perceptions of fast fashion brands and the factors’ contributions to their brand loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay of crisis type and felt involvement as well as product category on publics’ anger toward the company and empathy for the victims.

This study uses an experiment based on a 2 (crisis type: accident vs transgression) × 2 (publics’ felt crisis involvement: high vs low) × 2 (product category in crisis: food-related vs technology-related) mixed design.

Differential main effects on emotions were detected in different consumer product crises. One of the most interesting findings in this study was the main effects of high felt involvement over low felt involvement in strong feelings of anger toward a company and empathy for the victims in both food- and technology-related crisis situations. There was an interaction effect between crisis type and product category on feelings of anger toward a company. Participants in the food-related crisis condition reported more anger when exposed to a transgression crisis than an accident crisis.

Future research needs to study other important crisis emotions and to measure them with multiple items instead of a single item. It would be useful to find out what combinations among crisis variables would produce interaction effects to better understand how different publics’ emotions are inducted and processed in different crisis situations.

The role of felt involvement on public emotions may not be product category specific, but rather be affectively influential across different product categories. From the standpoint of crisis management practice, the main contribution of the present study is to provide empirical evidence that crisis communication managers could use the level of publics’ felt crisis involvement to better predict publics’ emotions that are likely to be felt and displayed in crisis situations.

This study investigates the crisis-generated discrete emotions as a function of crisis type and felt involvement. Felt involvement should be considered as an important construct due to its potential consequences on publics’ emotions and their behaviors beyond perceptions of crisis responsibility. Crisis response messages should be strategically developed with a consideration of the interplay of crisis type, publics’ felt involvement, and product categories.

This study aims to examine declines in audit quality after the COVID-19 travel restrictions/stay-at-home orders were issued in the USA in early 2020.

Taking advantage of variation in the dates of stay-at-home orders issued by different US states, this study identifies engagements that were significantly affected by the lock down orders.

The results suggest that engagements affected by the restrictions produced lower audit quality, as measured through restatements and discretionary accruals, relative to those completed before COVID-19 travel restrictions/stay-at-home orders. Further analysis reveals that this decrease in audit quality was attributable to firms with high inventory relative to assets, high R&D expenses relative to assets and non-Big 4 auditors.

This study finds that the restrictions on physical and on-site interaction caused auditors to universally struggle with resource/judgment-intensive accounts such as inventory and R&D expenditures. The results suggest that while Big 4 auditors managed to maintain their status quo level of audit quality following COVID-19 restrictions, non-Big 4 auditors were unable to overcome the challenges of an online work environment and their audit quality declined.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically examine changes in audit quality as a response to a substantial change in auditors’ working environment due to the global health crisis. As work-from-home becomes more prevalent in audit firms, the results suggest that, on average, this move does diminish audit quality.

Sitting in a chair is a typical act of modern people. Prolonged sitting and sitting with improper postures can lead to musculoskeletal disorders. Thus, there is a need for a sitting posture classification monitoring system that can predict a sitting posture. The purpose of this paper is to develop a system for classifying children’s sitting postures for the formation of correct postural habits.

For the data analysis, a pressure sensor of film type was installed on the seat of the chair, and image data of the postu.re were collected. A total of 26 children participated in the experiment and collected image data for a total of seven postures. The authors used convolutional neural networks (CNN) algorithm consisting of seven layers. In addition, to compare the accuracy of classification, artificial neural networks (ANN) technique, one of the machine learning techniques, was used.

The CNN algorithm was used for the sitting position classification and the average accuracy obtained by tenfold cross validation was 97.5 percent. The authors confirmed that classification accuracy through CNN algorithm is superior to conventional machine learning algorithms such as ANN and DNN. Through this study, we confirmed the applicability of the CNN-based algorithm that can be applied to the smart chair to support the correct posture in children.

This study successfully performed the posture classification of children using CNN technique, which has not been used in related studies. In addition, by focusing on children, we have expanded the scope of the related research area and expected to contribute to the early postural habits of children.

China is currently developing and promoting an industrial cluster policy at the government level. By enacting the ‘Opinion on promoting industrial cluster development’, China is supporting the development of industrial clusters. Building an industrial cluster is done by using a single factor but requires many additional factors like regional characteristics, competitiveness factors are also diversified. To evaluate the competitiveness of the Chinese automobile industry cluster, a competitiveness element index should be developed and a competitiveness evaluation method is needed to evaluate the importance of each element. To accomplish this objective, this research applied the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and focused on the importance of the competitiveness elements.

This research investigated the character is tics regarding cases of clusters and also analyzed the competitiveness of the Changchun automobile cluster located in northeastern China. The purpose of this research is to help Korean enterprises who enter China in the hopes that Korea will emerge as a top automobile production country.