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A group of n (> 1) peers are required to cooperate with each other in distributed applications on P2P overlay networks. A P2P group is distributed without a centralized controller and is scalable and heterogeneous. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how to realize a scalable group in P2P overlay networks.

In a group, messages have to be causally delivered to every peer. In order to realize a scalable group, messages are ordered by taking advantage of linear time (LT) and physical time (PT) since message length is O(1). Here, each peer has to hold information on the accuracy of physical clock of each peer and minimum delay time among every pair of peers. Since the size of the information is O(n²), it is difficult for each peer to hold the information and so the authors discuss a multi‐layered model to reduce the size of group information.

Through the evaluation studies, it is shown how the size of the group information can be reduced in a multi‐layered group compared with a traditional flat group.

In this paper, the authors discuss a multi‐layered group model for a scalable group, to reduce the size of group information; and also order messages by using both the linear time and physical time.

Heretofore, it has been extremely expensive to install and use distributed databases. With the advent of Java, JDBC and other Internet technologies, it has become easy and inexpensive to connect multiple databases and form distributed databases, even where the various host computers run on different platforms. These types of databases can be used in many peer‐to‐peer applications which are now receiving much attention from researchers. Although it is easy to form a distributed database via Internet/intranet, effective sharing of information continues to be problematic. We need to pay more attention to the enabling algorithms, as dedicated links between computers are usually not available in peer‐to‐peer systems. The lack of dedicated links can cause poor performance, especially if the databases are connected via Internet. Discusses the problems of distributed database operation with reference to an example. Presents two statistical selection algorithms which are designed to select the jth smallest key from a very large file distributed over many computers. The objective of these algorithms is to minimise the number of communication messages necessary to the selection operation. One algorithm is for the intranet with broadcast/multicast facilities while the other is for Internet without broadcast/multicast facilities.

This paper aims to systematically investigate the direct and indirect effects of four types of support – peer instrumental support, peer emotional support, platform business support and platform communication support – on seller trade volume in social commerce. It also aims to uncover the path of support-to-sales of the seller from a platform perspective and provides a more complete picture of the social commerce phenomenon.

This paper uses multi-source data including primary survey data and secondary data on trade volume to test the hypotheses. PROCESS mediation model is used to analyze the multi-source data set.

This study finds that the positive effects of peer instrumental support, platform business support and platform communication support on seller trade volume are fully mediated by seller collaborative information exchange. Also, peer emotional support has a significant negative effect on seller trade volume and collaborative information exchange can serve as a buffer to mitigate the negative effect.

The authors provide new insights into what types of support are or are not conducive to improving transaction volume of individual sellers and highlight the mediating role of seller information exchange in this value generation process in social commerce. These findings advance current knowledge of how seller interactions increase value in social commerce. The chosen research setting may limit the generalizability of the findings of this study.

This paper offers valuable implications for social commerce platforms on how to better serve their sellers to achieve high growth. Specifically, the findings suggest that platforms should encourage instrumental support and information exchange among peer sellers. In addition, platforms should expand seller support from a single-focus on sellers’ business to a dual-focus on both sellers’ business and socialization in social commerce.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how sellers can better derive value from the social interactions and how social commerce platforms can effectively influence transactions, support sales and serve as a selling platform.

Mobile peer‐to‐peer communications is an essential phase in the evolution of mobile communications technologies, motivating this research which aims to focus on how established industry stakeholders and new entrants can adapt themselves to the new situation.

Based on existing literature, the authors identified three distinctive evolution paths for mobile peer‐to‐peer communications and developed an analysis framework for their comparison. The authors validated the analysis by conducting a questionnaire study among domain experts, and analyzed its results using statistical analysis.

Internet‐driven evolution has high value proposition, is profitable and has subscription fees as an important revenue model. Telecom‐driven evolution creates value, leverages markets, leverages competence, is likely to encounter regulatory intervention and benefits all customer segments. Proprietary evolution has a successful revenue model, results in alliances of competitors and is competence‐enhancing to mobile device vendors.

Future work consists mainly of analyzing quantitatively the implications of the new technologies when they become readily available and evaluating the value analysis framework in other applicable cases.

Internet‐driven evolution enables new business opportunities to independent service operators and equipment vendors by enabling opportunities in profiting from sales of advanced devices and networks. Telecom‐driven evolution benefits mostly incumbent mobile network operators. Proprietary evolution enables limited competition against incumbent actors by independent service operators.

This study is one of the first journal publications on mobile peer‐to‐peer communications from a holistic techno‐economic point of view, beneficial to both academics and practitioners.

The purpose of this study is to examine the intergenerational influence across dyads of mothers and daughters from the USA and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), with a particular interest in discovering the cross-national differences in terms of the level of mother–daughter brand preference agreement, the directional influence from daughter to mother and leading factors for the observed differences.

Using a parallel survey method, responses were obtained regarding participants’ brand preferences, as well as their perceptions of their dyad partners’ preferences, for 20 product categories. A total of 76 dyads in the USA and 114 dyads in the PRC were collected.

Results not only confirmed the existence of intergenerational influence in mother–daughter dyads’ brand preferences after removing the nominal bias that previous studies commonly suffered but also suggested two interesting cross-national differences. Specifically, the authors find that US mother–daughter dyads possess a higher level of brand preference agreement than their PRC counterparts; however, the influence from daughters to mothers in the PRC is greater than in the USA. The authors further find that two potential leading factors contribute to the observed cross-national differences; mother–daughter communication is stronger but less influential in the USA than in the PRC, while children’s peer influence, measured as information influence of peers, is weaker but more influential in the USA than in the PRC.

Understanding intergeneration influences in different cultural contexts may be applicable in developing communication strategies leading to brand preference.

This study contributes to the consumer socialization literature by examining the cross-national differences of intergenerational influence in brand preferences and their leading causes of such differences in the context of the two biggest economies.

The peer-to-peer perspective on open data is an interesting topic to research, taking into account that data-driven innovations and related startups are often developed independently by civic and private stakeholders in a highly collaborative manner and are tentatively beginning to directly compete with traditional e-government solutions, providing arguably better services to citizens and businesses. In this regard, the paper aims to further debate on the potential of such independent data-driven collaboration not only to transform the traditional mechanisms of public sector innovations but also provide more democratic ways to ensure greater transparency of government and its responsibility before the society.

The research is based on a cross-country case study, resorting to the content analysis of three demonstrative cases in the development of open data-driven projects, which specifically promote peer-to-peer communication between its stakeholders. In this regard, the case study itself relies heavily on the analysis of rich empirical data that the author collected during his field studies in the Northern European region in 2015–2017, particularly in Estonia, Finland and Sweden. The practical research itself consists of three major parts, which reflect peer-to-peer perspectives of correspondingly civic, public and private stakeholders through manifested examples of related independent projects in the area.

The paper's results demonstrate that the use of peer-to-peer mechanisms in advancing related public sector reforms allows to transform the traditional understanding of e-government phenomena in a conceptually new way. E-government or its last more political interpretation – from the perspective of its peers could be regarded not necessarily as a platform to provide digital public services but as a source of raw material for various third party projects in, respectively, civic, government and business peer-to-peer dimensions of such reforms. As a result, open data provides an interesting playground to change the very nature of public sector innovations in the area.

The choice of countries for research was motivated by purposive and convenience sampling because all these countries are situated in one region, have both similarities and differences in historical, political and socioeconomic backgrounds and, therefore, provide an ideal playground to investigate open data as a context dependable phenomenon. In this regard, the unique political and socioeconomic contexts of these countries provide an interesting playground to debate on the potential of social democracy, egalitarian society and social equality, i.e. public values that are deeply embedded into the fabric of societies there, to benefit the open data movement in a fundamental manner.

This paper reports on unique practical approaches for peer-to-peer collaboration and cooperation in advancing open data-driven platforms among stakeholders. The results of the case studies in three Nordic countries, which are currently among global leaders in advancing the concept of open government, are presented in an intrinsically illustrative manner, which could help practitioners and policymakers to understand better the potential of such a peer-to-peer perspective on open data. In this regard, the models proposed, of citizen-to-citizen, business-to-business, government-to-government interactions, could be interesting to a wide audience of e-government stakeholders in many nations.

The paper also enters into philosophical debates about societal implications of digital peer-to-peer data-driven communication among people. Recent efforts to digitize almost every part of social life, starting from popularization of solutions for distant work and ending to online access to various public services, incentivize individual members of civil society to communicate in an inherently peer-to-peer way. This fact will definitely increase the demand for related digital services. Social distancing in a digital context will allow to paradoxically emancipate technically savvy and entrepreneurial people in creating new services, including using open data, which could meet the demand.

The research is intrinsically of an empirical character because recent e-government reforms in the public sector in many countries, including in the open data area, provide rich practical knowledge to test the limits of new technologies to advance society in socioeconomic and, more importantly, political development. In this regard, this paper provides the first research in analyzing open data from a unique peer-to-peer perspective with an ultimate goal of the whole investigation to draw the attention of other e-government scholars and initiate debates on the collaborative nature of the phenomena to empower civil society and ensure transparency of government.

Previous studies have often yielded mixed results in relation to the similar-to-me effect on extra-role behaviors. Based on social exchange theory, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the contribution of personality similarity to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), a type of extra-role behaviors.

Questionnaire surveys were conducted in a multinational bank in Hong Kong. The participants were matched sample of 403 customer service representatives from 81 teams and their corresponding team supervisors.

Personality similarity to peers and supervisors had a positive impact on individual OCB (OCB-I) and organizational OCB (OCB-O), respectively, through better communication and social integration. Moreover, personality similarity to peers was related only to OCB-I, whereas personality similarity to supervisor was associated only with OCB-O.

Subordinates perform different facets of OCB depending on the subjects they are similar to in terms of personality. Being similar to others could facilitate communication and social integration, which in turn promote OCB targeted at similar individuals. The importance of distinguishing the similarity effects of peers and supervisors separately as well as scrutinizing the effects of different forms of OCB warrants future research attention.

Managers can promote OCB by enhancing communication and social integration among employees and supervisors.

As OCB enhances organizational effectiveness, the economic development of society in general will eventually benefit from having more effective organizations.

This study addresses the inconsistent findings of previous studies regarding the impact of similarity on OCB. It demonstrates the contribution of personality similarity to OCB beyond the confounding effects of judgment bias. It also advances theory by studying personality similarity to peers in addition to the commonly studied similarity to supervisors.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an underlying model to examine the similarities/differences between spoken and written peer-to-peer (P2P) communication.

An embedded mixed methods experimental design with linguistically standardized experimental stimuli was used to expose the basic linguistic differences between P2P communications that can be attributed to communication medium (spoken/written) and product type (hedonic/utilitarian).

The findings show, empirically, that consumer’s spoken language is not linguistically equivalent to that of written language. This confirms that the capability of language to convey semantic meaning in spoken communication differs from written communication. This study extends the characteristics that differentiate hedonic from utilitarian products to include lexical density (i.e. hedonic) vs lexical sparsity (i.e. utilitarian).

The findings of this study are not wholly relevant to other forms of consumer communication (e.g. viral marketing). This research used a few SFL resources.

This research shows that marketers should ideally apply a semantic approach to the analysis of communications, given that communication meaning can vary across channels. Marketers may also want to focus on specific feedback channels (e.g. review site vs telephone) depending on the depth of product’s details that need to be captured. This study also offers metrics that advertisers could use to classify media and to characterize consumer segments.

This research shows the relevance of SFL for understanding P2P communications and has potential applications to other marketing communications.

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors that may contribute to physicians’ dissatisfaction with their work environment, and subsequently, their likelihood to recommend a hospital to their peers.

A mixed method research design was used to identify, through qualitative interviews and focus groups, and measure, through quantitative surveys, physicians’ satisfaction with organizational communication, perceptions of empowerment and their likelihood to recommend a hospital to their peer physicians.

The results of the study indicate that physicians’ communication satisfaction and perceptions of empowerment contribute both directly and indirectly to their likelihood to recommend their organization to peers. The findings suggest that hospitals that facilitate positive workplace communications and provide work environments that allow professional discretion and autonomy are more likely to have satisfied physicians and positive word‐of‐mouth referrals.

Although multiple methods of data collection were used to triangulate the findings, there is the potential of common‐method variance and response bias from the use of single source questionnaire data. Ideally, future studies would use longitudinal data and a more comprehensive model of antecedents and consequences of physician satisfaction.

By understanding sources of physician dissatisfaction, hospitals can develop appropriate interventions to minimize the adverse effects of dissatisfaction on costs, quality of care, and physician turnover.

This study focuses on physicians’ satisfaction with their hospital work environment, an often overlooked area in studies of the health care industry that more commonly center on patient–physician satisfaction. The current study's results provide suggestions for better hospital management and further insight into the challenges of improving physician satisfaction in the health care industry.

Collaborative consumption (CC), a unique business model, provides several monetary and non-monetary benefits to customers. Several adapted theory of planned behaviour (TPB)-based models were developed and tested to understand this consumption behaviour with the findings inconsistent and fragmented. Thus, this study aims to develop a general and consistent TPB model using a meta-analytic path analysis to better understand customers’ CC adoption behaviour.

Using 37 studies, a meta-analysis was performed adopting several analytical methods; bivariate analysis, moderation analysis and path analysis.

The universal TPB model shows that factors, that is, trust, attitude, perceived environmental responsibility and communication facilities, drive both perceived usefulness and CC. However, subjective norms, such as perceived behavioural control and emotional value, drive only perceived usefulness. Moderation analysis shows that the relationships between variables used in the proposed TPB model tends to vary depending on five moderators, that is, countries’ economic development level, type of CC, sample size, sample type and survey administration method.

The consideration of only quantitative papers and papers written in English language in this meta-analysis may bias the study’s findings.

Based on the findings regarding important factors that consumers consider when adopting CC, this study provides insightful recommendations to companies facilitating CC.

By developing the universal TPB model, this study theoretically contributes to the TPB model, and by conducting the moderation test, the study contextually contributes to the TPB literature in the CC context.