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This paper aims to investigate the impact of perceived usefulness of online reviews and crowd cues on restaurant selection. In addition, the authors also examine the moderating role of perceived crowding and gender in this process.

The proposed hypotheses were tested with survey data (N = 200) collected from customers visiting full-service restaurants in Malaysia. The data were analyzed using SEM through Smart PLS.

The findings supported that the perceived usefulness of online reviews and perceived crowding have a positive effect on a consumer's purchase intentions, i.e. their decision of restaurant selection. Besides, a higher level of perceived crowding strengthens the relationship between the perceived usefulness of online reviews and their purchase intentions. This finding delineates that consumers prefer to dine in a crowded place with useful online reviews in an unfamiliar place. Finally, the results show that the effect of the usefulness of online reviews on purchase intentions does not vary with respect to gender (no significant contingent effect). However, the effect of perceived crowding varies with respect to gender – male customers have higher intentions to join crowded restaurants as compared to females.

Limitation of this study is its cross-sectional research design; data were collected in a single time frame. Longitudinal research design can be used to get in-depth knowledge of this phenomenon. Secondly, a non-probability sampling technique was used in this study, future research can used probability sampling technique to enhance generalizability of the study. Moreover, this study focused on the human crowding aspect, future studies can cover both aspects of crowding (human crowding and spatial crowding) in retailing or other service sectors (Blut and Iyer, 2020).

This study has multiple practical implications.

This study extends the current research on usefulness of online reviews and perceived crowding by investigating its direct and conditional effects. Specifically, the authors contribute in extant research by explaining its differential effects for male and female customers, when they select which restaurants to dine.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

The purpose of this study is to offer implications and future research directions related to new organizational forms like crowds. Organizations are increasingly relying on online crowds to innovate through mechanisms such as crowdsourcing, open innovation, innovation challenges and tournaments. To leverage the "wisdom of crowds", crowdsourcing platforms that enable heterogeneous knowledge sharing in crowds lead to novel solution generation by individuals in the crowd. Based on the associative variety memory model of creativity, the authors hypothesize that when a crowd contributes a heterogeneous knowledge in form of a variety of knowledge associations, individual crowd members tend to generate solutions that are more novel. In contrast to the brainstorming view that focuses on ideas as knowledge, the authors propose, test, find and elaborate on implications of crowd sharing of heterogeneous knowledge for the generation of innovation, i.e. novel ideas. The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges leveraging online temporary crowds that were structured to foster knowledge sharing as part of the idea generation process. The analysis shows a positive relationship between the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd and the generation of novel solutions by individuals in the crowd. Further, the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared. The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds.

The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges. They also designed and ran these challenges in collaboration with corporate sponsors. The ideas in the challenge were rated by senior executive at each company using a creative forecasting method.

The variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared.

The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds.

The authors propose several ways in which companies running innovation challenges can moderate and encourage crowd to generate a variety of knowledge.

The authors believe that we are the first empirical paper to emphasize and show that associative variety of knowledge sharing in crowds has impact on novel idea generation by crowds. This view is counter to "electronic brainstorming" view where crowd is asked to just generate these ideas and often just submit their ideas to the sponsor. Their view also goes beyond knowledge refinement of ideas by crowds to more of knowledge integration by crowds.

The rapid development of live-streaming commerce has increased companies’ marketing effectiveness. While previous studies have explored the effects of its technical features on consumers, the effects of marketing-related factors remain unknown. This study aims to investigate the effects of the marketing elements of live-streaming commerce on consumers’ purchase intentions.

The research model is derived from the Yale model and the benefit–risk framework. To test the study hypotheses, data were collected through a questionnaire survey of 392 live-streaming shoppers and analyzed using SmartPLS.

The empirical results indicate that broadcaster competence and online crowding increase consumers’ perception of price attractiveness while reducing their perceived uncertainty. Information diagnosticity also reduces consumers’ perceived uncertainty. Furthermore, purchase intention is positively and negatively affected by perceived price attractiveness and perceived uncertainty, respectively. Finally, product scarcity moderates the relationships between broadcaster competence, online crowding, information diagnosticity, perceived price attractiveness and perceived uncertainty.

The study identifies the different marketing elements in live-streaming commerce and their effects on consumers’ value evaluations and purchase intentions. The findings provide comprehensive insights into the antecedents of live-streaming shopping and offer new perceptions and recommendations for practitioners.

The purpose of this chapter was to deconstruct the underlying contradictions of crowdfunding practices and to show how crowdfunding practitioners develop a schizophrenic use of these contradictions.

The main contradictions of crowdfunding practices are introduced with theoretical references. Then short cases are used to illustrate how crowdfunding practitioners try to cope with these contradictions.

The crowd addresses many contradictions, first because it is a syncretic concept, second because online crowds are still to be proven crowds. In any case, crowdfunding practitioners do their best to take the advantage of these contradictions, and run the risk of falling between two stools.

An attempt to provide an analysis of crowdfunding as a social, and not only economic, phenomenon, to suggest avenues for further critical research on crowdfunding.

The purpose of this paper was to decipher the contradictions and the ambiguities of crowdfunding as a term and as a practice to reveal the deeper significance of its underlying Zeitgeist.

Three steps were followed. In the first one, the authors underline the ambiguities of crowd as a concept in its traditional meaning as well as in the realities, it may depict when referring to connected people. Thereafter, the many practices of crowdfunding with the apparent univocity of this term were confronted.

These analyses led the authors to consider crowdfunding as ideology: an incantatory use of crowd can conceal an effective profit-making process, as well as a new way to unblock a stalling social elevator.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to try to conceptualize the social roots of crowdfunding and to analyze its deeper significance, as complementary to an already developed “how-to-do-it” literature. It is worth confronting this piece of reflexivity with the emerging literature on the assessment of specific crowdfunding operations.

This paper aims to explore the effect of participant composition and contribution behavior of the different types of participants on the quality of knowledge generation in online communities.

This study samples all the featured articles in Chinese Wikipedia and performs a Cox regression to reveal how participant composition and contribution behavior affect the quality of articles in different contexts.

The results show that an increase in the number of participants increases the possibility of either enhancing or reducing the article quality. In most cases, the greater the proportion of core members (people who frequently participate in editing), the higher the possibility of enhancing the article quality. Occasional participants’ editorial behavior hinders quality promotion, this negative effect weakens when such editorial behavior becomes more frequent.

The findings help to better leverage the role of online communities in practice and to achieve knowledge collaboration in a more efficient manner. For example, an appropriate centralized organizational form should be established in online communities to improve the efficiency of crowd contributions. And it is worth developing mechanism to encourage participants to frequently participate in editing the article.

This study contributes to the research on the organizational forms of online communities by showing the effect of participant composition and behavior in the new form of organizing on knowledge generation. This study also contributes to the research on wisdom of crowds by revealing who in a group of participants, in what context, and by what means influence knowledge generation.

The ubiquity of digitally intermediated interactions is changing the ways in which social interaction creates the cognitive and institutional underpinnings of new markets. Logics that define markets used to be localized, but they now emerge from crowds that span – and persist – across time and space. This article builds a theory of how crowds emerge and evolve in a way that influences the emergence of shared logics and helps explain why some markets are viable while others are not. What is revealed is that a crowd has a hidden niche structure that determines the fate of a new market.

The purpose of this paper is to portray an example of how organizations can harness their employees’ insight. The procedure described here can complement traditional methods such as interviews, open forums, round tables and employee surveys, and can assist HR managers to acquire a unique look inside the company.

The described procedure was facilitated at Intel Corporation and was about The Future of Work. 145 Intel employees took part in an online crowd-deliberation with a methodology called Real-Time Imen-Delphi (RTID). The methodology guided them to initiate 689 questions that were then organized into 258 mission statements, which were rated by importance, priority and feasibility.

A main theme was identified to represent the collective notion with regards to The Future of Work. The participants leaned toward the fractal model for a preferred work environment. This model includes employees who will no longer have a single job description, but rather repeatedly sign up for tasks and projects based on their interests, capabilities, availability, aspirations and future beliefs regarding the path their organization needs to take in manufacturing, research and development.

The result provides an example of how organizations can harness their employees’ wisdom to bring to the table cutting-edge ideas, debate their relevancy to the organization, agree collectively on their vision and generate applicable ideas toward realizing their preferred future.

As social media tools evolve and become a central part in organizations, they will seek to involve employees in effective conversations and in decision-making processes. RTID is a solid way with which they can do this.

This study furthers one’s understanding of the motivations of the crowdfunding crowd by empirically examining critical factors that influence the crowd's decision to support a crowdfunding project.

Backer's comments from a sample of the top 100 most funded technology product projects on KickStarter were collected. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis strategy was adopted to investigate critical motivational factors. Three experts mapped those factors to the known theoretical constructs of social exchange theory (SET).

Although backers are motivated by value, they are also motivated by far less tangible social factors including trust and a feeling of psychological ownership. Findings suggest that the crowd is far more than a passive group of investors or customers and should be viewed as participatory stakeholders. This study serves as guidance for project owners hoping to motivate the crowd and for future investigators examining backer motivations in other types of crowdsourcing projects.

Online chatter in the form of user-generated comments is an excellent data source for researchers to mine for value and meaning.

Given strong feelings of psychological ownership, project owners should actively engage the crowd and solicit the crowd for advice and help in order to motivate them.

The study presents the first empirical exploration of backer motivations using LDA guided by theory and the knowledge of experts. A framework of latent motivational factors is proposed.