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A major transformation in retail logistics over the few years is backed by enormous improvements in internet technologies. It is now easy for e-retailers to entertain delivery progression, or consumers can share use-experience with future customers and thereby reducing information asymmetry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different signals on consumer behavior in the presence of information asymmetry, in the context of online group buying (OGB) markets in China.

Based on the lemon market theory (LMT) and signaling theory, the study develops a research model of the OGB consumers’ context in China, which is validated using data from an online survey. A total of 528 responses are used for data analysis applying structural equation modeling technique.

The findings of the study show that perceived vendor quality (PVQ) and perceived product quality (PPQ) have significantly positive effects on intention to purchase from OGB websites. PVQ is associated with perceived reputation and perceived trustworthiness (PT) of vendor, and the determinants of PPQ are quality assurance information of products, and information about mer-chants. Further, PT has a mediating effect, while asymmetry of information has a moderating effect.

The research model is valid as a generic OGB model that can be investigated in other contexts to understand the generalizability of the findings. Future research is needed to incorporate additional relevant factors (e.g. price, advertising activity/investments) that may help increase the acceptability of the model to a wide range of e-commerce contexts. Two of the control variables (gender and prior internet experience) were found to be significant; this could be further examined in future studies to determine the relative impact on each causal relationship.

Whereas prior studies in the domain of consumer service proposed different signaling mechanisms that were believed to eliminate information asymmetry from a market, the study sheds light on the effectiveness of the signals in the OGB context. This is a unique effort that applies and extends LMT and signaling theory in OGB context by theorizing the associated dimensions and their causal effects.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the “evaluation deadlock” or “stasis” diagnosed by many authors. The explanation relies on a thought experiment.

The paper is conceptual and builds on a thought experiment inspired by qualitative research such as interviews with communication consultants in Sweden. It makes use of principal–agent theory and Akerlof’s theory of lemon markets.

A plausible explanation for the evaluation stasis requires consideration of practitioners’ self-interest as businesspeople. The deadlock is explained by an anomaly in practitioner populations and passive or active but covert resistance. If the long-time neglect of measurement and evaluation has led to expectation inflation and overpromising, even well-performing actors might shy away from rigorous measurement and evaluation practices in their own mandates, since they fear being measured against promotional, not realistic standards. At the same time, on the level of industry discourse, these practitioners would still advocate for measurement and evaluation in principle, so as to avoid the suspicion of underperformance.

The paper suggests an explanation for further empirical investigation. It does not attempt to demonstrate anything else than that the suggestion is plausible and that it warrants further investigation.

The scientific community engaged in the measurement and evaluation debate appears puzzled by the discrepancy between practitioners’ words and actions. The authors hope that the paper contributes to a more realistic and thus more constructive dialogue between practitioners and academics in the measurement and evaluation debate.

Inspired by Alvesson and Spicer’s concept of functional stupidity, the paper argues that attempts to explain the evaluation stasis have been marked by circumspection and narrowness. At present, explanations for the evaluation stasis tend to focus on lack of knowledge or inadequate systems or frameworks. The paper offers a more comprehensive explanation.

Grounded in lemon market theory, this paper aims to examine the influence of corporate governance (CG) on stock market liquidity in Bangladesh, where stock market manipulation because of speculative trading is a common concern.

This study is based on a sample of 2,420 firm-year observations covering all non-financial firms in Bangladesh from 1996 to 2011.

This study’s results show a significant relationship between governance and liquidity within firms over time. In particular, within firms, when governance quality increases, liquidity significantly improves. For instance, a rise in the governance quality by one standard deviation decreases the illiquidity ratio by 55.97%. The results are unlikely to be confounded by endogeneity.

The results have important policy implications for security regulators, investors, traders and managers. The results support the current regulatory trend of strengthening CG practices in the listed firms in Bangladesh.

This study contributes to the understanding of the role of effective firm-level CG on stock liquidity in the context of an emerging country. Consistent with prior research mostly conducted in the advanced economies, it provides further empirical support that higher CG quality reduces the information asymmetry problem and enhances stock liquidity even in a speculative market.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the impact of Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) platform reputation directly and indirectly (mediate effect) affects investors’ (lenders) investment choices.

Using data collected from 478 P2P platforms, this paper calculates platform reputation via a β function after establishing a reputation mechanism by game analysis. This is followed by testing both the direct effect of platform reputation on investors’ investment choices (proxying by transaction volume) and the indirect effect through credit-enhancing information using three regression models (median regression, OLS regression and random effect OLS regression). A robustness test by adding instrument variables is conducted to confirm the findings from the main regressions.

In China, P2P lending platform reputations have played both a direct and indirect (through credit-enhancing information) role on investors’ investment choices.

This paper expands the boundary of P2P online lending research by not only examining the direct, but also, importantly, the indirect effects of platform reputations.

This study aims to investigate customer experience (CE) and its relationship with intermediate variables to analyze the impact of digital banking (DB) on banks’ financial performance (FP) before Covid-19 and during the lockdown in Vietnam.

These research data are from a survey of Vietnamese customers. The survey was deployed to a sample of 238 and 218 customers of 20 Vietnamese commercial banks via email in 2018Q4 and 2020Q2, respectively. FP is measured using banks’ quarterly financial statements before Covid-19 and during the lockdown.

CE with DB had a significant and positive impact on FP via customer satisfaction before Covid-19, while the other two intermediate variables (word-of-mouth [WoM] and trust) had no considerable impact. During the lockdown, only WoM had a positive impact on FP. These findings indicate that before Covid-19, when customers could easily interact with their bank through many touchpoints, customer satisfaction with DB services created higher FP for the bank. However, during the lockdown, DB became the customer’s main touchpoint and WoM mediated the CE–FP relationship.

During the national lockdown from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2020, customers in Vietnam may have had different experiences with DB when no alternate modes of payment were available. The study uses Covid-19 as a moderator variable to offer different viewpoints and findings related to CE with DB and its impact on FP.

This paper aims to explore how consumer's purchase intentions and word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions of local tea are influenced by the signal effects of geographical indication labelling (GIL) on the basis of theory of reasoned action and social identity theory.

This study has developed a structural equation model (SEM) to explain the effects of consumer's attitudes, social norms and social identities on behavioural intentions, considering purchase of foods with geographical indication labels. This study collected responses from 318 consumers of tea in Taiwan.

Three main results are reported: (1) the prevention-focused benefit, which is a risk-aversion consideration, and the promotion-focused benefit, which is a taste and joy of quality, have higher influence compared to perceived concerns (price) on attitude towards GIL produce. (2) Compared to subjective norms, consumer attitude affects purchase intention more, yet the effects are opposite when they influence the WOM intentions. (3) Global identity impacts purchase intentions but not WOM intentions, whereas local identity influences both intentions.

Findings indicate attitude, social influence and social identity play critical roles in affecting consumer behavioural intentions. Global identity and local identity play different roles in purchase intention and WOM intentions.

This paper aims to investigate how user expectations affect value-added service (VAS) investment and pricing decisions of two-sided platforms. It draws on the information asymmetry theory and offers suggestions on how platform operators can manage user expectations.

According to the game theory, this study considers three user expectations (responsive, passive and wary). By framing the Hotelling duopoly model and comparing the VAS investment, price and platform profits, the optimal platform decision is analyzed and discussed.

The conclusions demonstrate that the monopolistic two-sided platform obtains more profits from the informed users with responsive expectations than uninformed users with passive or wary expectations. The marginal investment cost and cross-network externalities are two key factors that determine the platform's VAS investment and pricing strategies of passive or wary users. Furthermore, considering the expectation preferences, i.e. the uniformed users hold wary expectations with more information and hold passive expectations with less or no information, the results suggest that the proportion of wary users to all uninformed users increases the platform's VAS investment, profits and the price of informed users, and increase (decrease) the price of uninformed users when the cross-network externalities of informed users are relatively small (larger).

These results can provide insightful enlightenment into how platform operators utilize bilateral users' expectations and information level to guide their VAS investment and pricing decisions.

This paper is one of the first to explore the impact of three user expectations and the heterogeneity of preferences in informing users' passive or wary expectations, based on different levels of information on the decision-making of two-sided platforms regarding VAS.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting quality and to determine whether the evolution of reporting quality is linked with the type of information reported based on the “search”, “experience”, and “credence” typology.

The method is based on the content analysis of GHG reporting in 245 sustainability reports by 45 oil and gas companies between 1998 and 2010. The content analysis disclosure index developed links GHG reporting requirements with seven quality dimensions. The information associated with each item on the content analysis index is classified as “search”, “experience” or “credence”. Statistical analysis is used to determine whether any significant change occurred in either overall GHG reporting quality or in the quality of reporting in any of the individual dimensions of quality over the period of the study.

GHG reporting quality has not improved significantly between 1998 and 2010. The quality of reporting is not the same in each of the seven dimensions of quality and this can be explained by information typology.

This paper provides the first longitudinal analysis of the quality of GHG reporting. The methodology developed advances current measures of reporting quality by linking reporting requirements with particular quality dimensions. The results show that the type of information is important in terms of quality evolution and that this can dictate the measures required to improve quality.