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Drawing from social comparison theory, this study investigates the factors influencing benign or malicious envy toward influencers and the effects of envy on social media users' choice of endorsed or rival brands.

A sample of 453 social media users was obtained to examine the research model.

Homophily and symbolism positively affect both benign and malicious envy. Credibility affects benign envy positively but malicious envy negatively. Deservingness affects malicious envy negatively but exerts no effect on benign envy. Benign envy has a greater influence on choosing brands endorsed by influencers than it does on choosing rival brands; these effects are more substantial under conditions of high perceived control. By contrast, malicious envy significantly affects the choice of purchasing rival brands; however, this effect is not influenced by perceived control.

This study unveils a key aspect of the endorser–follower relationship by analyzing the effect of envy toward social media influencers on followers' intention to purchase endorsed or rival brands. This study identifies the differential effects of two types of envy on brand choice.

This paper aims to understand the importance of young female consumers in Asia as a market and propose strategies for retail marketers to effectively engage with them while respecting their evolving gender roles and identities.

Data are derived from self-administered questionnaires completed by Malaysian female secondary school students aged 13 to 19. Using statements about gender roles and identities, the authors first segment respondents based on their perceptions of ideal female gender roles and identities and subsequently investigate each segment’s shopping orientation.

This study identifies four segments of young female consumers based on gender identity: civic intellectuals, presentable intellectuals, career-oriented and family-oriented. While young female young consumers with higher presentable intellectual traits are more likely to go window shopping (recreational shoppers), those with higher civic intellectual traits are more inclined to look for things they wish to buy and spend less time doing so (utilitarian shoppers).

Marketers and retailers should continue to use profiling of young female customers to predict the psychological changes related to societal and economic changes. Merely focusing on females’ appearance and family responsibilities may no longer be relevant due to the evolving social order. This implication is especially critical for marketers and retailers targeting the female market.

The results of this study will have important theoretical and managerial implications for marketers and retailers interested in understanding the changing needs and beliefs among young female consumers and how these impacts their shopping orientation.

Expressions of pride may elicit others’ envy. In the consumer context, prior research has repeatedly demonstrated that such envy significantly affects consumers’ attitudinal and behavioural responses towards the object of envy. This paper aims to investigate whether this pride-envy relationship is bi-directional. Does being envied by others affect consumers’ self-directed feelings of pride, as well as their subsequent attitude towards a product (i.e. the object of envy)?

Three experiments examined how emotional reactions of envy from others may influence consumers’ subsequent affective and attitudinal responses towards their own product or purchase. The first experimental study (n = 129) examined whether exposure to benign envy from others evokes higher levels of authentic pride and positively influences product attitude. The second experiment (n = 159) investigated whether exposure to malicious envy from others evokes high levels of hubristic pride, and therefore, negatively influences product attitude. The third study (n = 80) was a quasi-field experiment seeking to provide further empirical support for the relationship between benign (vs malicious) envy and authentic (vs hubristic) pride and their effects on attitude.

The first experiment showed that when participants observed expressions of benign envy towards them, they expressed authentic pride, which ultimately increased positive attitudes towards the product. The second experiment showed that when participants observed expressions of malicious envy towards them, they expressed hubristic pride, which, in turn, reduced positive attitudes towards the product. The effect of malicious envy was further moderated by susceptibility to social influence, whereby the indirect effect of malicious envy on product attitudes was only significant among participants with high susceptibility. The third experiment demonstrated the relationship between benign (vs malicious) envy and authentic (vs hubristic) pride and the effects on attitude in a quasi-field study.

The present paper aims to fill a research gap by showing how being the recipient of others’ malicious or benign envy affects consumers’ self-directed feelings of pride, as well as their attitude towards a product that is the object of envy.

The current research is among the first to show that the emotional expressions of other consumers can influence existing consumers’ affective responses and attitudes towards a product. These findings highlight the importance of building a positive culture and community around brands and products, whereby other consumers’ consumption of the brand or product is perceived positively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical evidence demonstrating that others’ expression of benign (malicious) envy may lead to the self-feeling of authentic (hubristic) pride, which has a downstream effect on attitude towards the product.

This study aims to investigate the fit of a promotion (prevention) focus with malicious (benign) envy and how this fit influences positive and negative behaviours, depending on the context.

Four empirical studies (two laboratory and two online experiments) were used to test key hypotheses. Study 1 manipulated regulatory focus and envy in a job application setting with university students. Study 2 engaged similar manipulations in a social media setting. Studies 3 and 4 extended the regulatory focus and envy manipulations to the general population in pay-what-you-want (PWYW) and pay-it-forward (PIF) restaurant contexts.

The findings showed that a promotion (prevention) focus fits with the emotion of malicious (benign) envy. In the social media context, promotion and prevention foci demonstrated negative behaviour, including unfollowing the envied person, when combined with malicious and benign envy. In the PWYW and PIF contexts, combining envy with a specific type of regulatory focus encouraged both positive and negative behaviours through influencing payments.

Future research could validate and extend this study’s findings with different product/service categories, cross-cultural samples and research methods such as field experiments.

The four studies’ findings will assist managers in formulating marketing strategies to enhance their positioning of target products/services, possibly leading to higher prices for PWYW and PIF businesses.

The conceptual model is novel as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior research has proposed and tested the fit between envy type and regulatory foci.

Little is known about how religious-related beliefs (i.e. karmic beliefs and beliefs in a just world) might affect consumers to engage in more environmentally friendly behavior. Drawing on the justice motive theory, this study aims to explore the individual, complementary, congruent and incongruent impacts of karmic beliefs and belief in a just world on consumers’ proenvironmental consumption.

A sample of 736 consumers was recruited by means of a mall-intercept survey in the most populus cities in Vietnam. An advanced technique – polynomial regression with response surface analysis – was used to test the hypothesized model, whereas the PROCESS macro approach was used to estimate indirect effects.

The findings indicate that while karmic beliefs do not directly affect proenvironmental consumption, they can inspire environmentally friendly behaviors through belief in a just world. High levels of both beliefs enhance proenvironmental consumption, but imbalanced levels erode such behaviors. Importantly, the findings revealed gender differences concerning the role of religious beliefs in influencing proenvironmental consumption among male and female consumers.

The findings of this study offered several theoretical and managerial implications for proenvironmental consumption.

The research provides new insights into how religious beliefs (karmic beliefs and belief in a just world) affect, interact, balance and imbalance with each other to trigger proenvironmental consumption. The research also contributes to the sustainable consumption literature by indicating the mediation roles of belief in a just world and proenvironmental consumption intention in the relationship between beliefs in karma and actual proenvironmental consumption behavior, as well as offering empirical evidence about the gender differences regarding these relationships.

New Public Management-informed pay-for-performance policies are common in public sectors internationally but can be controversial with delivery agents. More attention is needed on contingent forms of bottom-up implementation of challenging policies, in emerging market economies, for professionals who face tensions between policies and their codes of practice. Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) mediate policy implementation through discretionary practices; health professionals have enhanced space for discretion based on autonomy derived from professional status. The authors explore policy implementation, adaptation and resistance by physicians, focusing on payments for health workers in Turkey.

The researchers conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 12 physicians in Turkish hospitals and thematic analysis of interview transcripts, using a blended (deductive and inductive) approach.

The policy fostered discretionary behaviours such as cherry-picking (high volume, low risk procedures) and pro-social rule-breaking (e.g. “upcoding”), highlighting clinical autonomy to navigate within policy restrictions. Respondents described damage to relationships with patients and colleagues, and dissonance between professional practice and perverse policy incentives, sometimes leading to disengagement from clinical work. Policymakers were perceived to be detached from the realities experienced by SLBs. Tensions between the policy and professional values risked alienating physicians.

This study utilises participant self-reported perceptions of discretionary behaviours. Further work may adopt alternative methods to explore the relationship between self-reporting and observed practice.

The authors contribute to research on differentiated, contingent roles of groups with high scope for discretion in bottom-up implementation, pointing to the potential for policy-professional role conflicts between top-down P4P policies, and the values and codes of practice of professional SLBs.

This research addresses the professional logics of street-level managers (SLMs) and bureaucrats (SLBs) working in the Brazilian National Social Security Agency (INSS) through their perceptions of distributive justice and discretion. Since SLMs have the authority to influence SLBs' actions, we investigate whether these two groups hold similar viewpoints.

We integrate the administrative data and survey responses (n = 678) with earlier thematic content analysis (n = 350) in three stages: mean-testing, regression analyses and complementary qualitative analysis, integrated through a mixed-methods matrix.

Whilst no significant differences emerge in distributive justice ideas between groups, SLMs demand wider benefit-granting discretion, praising professionalism whilst adopting managerial posture and jargon.

The study adds to the theoretical discussions concerning SLM’s influence on SLB’s decision-making, suggesting that other factors outweigh it. The finding concerning the managers’ demand for wider discretion asks for further in-depth approaches.

Findings supply valuable insights for policymakers and managers steering administrative reforms, by questioning whether some roles SLMs play are limited to symbolic levels. Further, SLBs’ heterogenous formations might be more relevant to policy divergence than managerial influence and perhaps an underutilised source of innovation.

By approaching street-level management professional logics within a Global South welfare state through a mixed-methods approach, this study offers a holistic understanding of complex dynamics, providing novel insights for public sector management.

This study aims to detail how employees’ experience of distributive injustice may compromise their job performance, with specific attention to how this detrimental process may be explained in part by their beliefs about organization-level underperformance and moderated by their own psychological entitlement.

The research hypotheses were tested with three-round, time-lagged data collected among employees and their supervisors.

A critical channel through which employees’ perceptions that their organization’s reward system is unfair translates into thwarted job performance is a conviction that their organization does not meet its own performance targets. As a mediator, such organizational underperformance beliefs have particularly salient effects on employees who believe they are more deserving than others.

This study gives HR managers insights into how they can reduce the danger that unfair reward practices escalate into a reduced propensity by employees to complete their job tasks diligently. HR managers should make employees aware of their possible entitlement and discourage them from expecting that things always must go their way.

This research unpacks the connection between distributive injustice and job performance, by delineating the unique roles of two pertinent factors (organizational underperformance beliefs and psychological entitlement) in this connection.

With the growing market for luxury fashion rental, we aim to examine how renting luxury fashion is related to consumers' construction of the material self, based on material self-framework. We propose that consumers adopt luxury fashion rentals to construct and manage the personal and social aspects of the material self and that their belief in brand essence facilitates the mechanism.

A total of 296 responses of US female participants collected from Cloudresearch were analyzed to test the relationships between constructs in the proposed model.

The results, using structural equation modeling analysis, supported the expected relationships. Specifically, whereas the social material self directly increased adoption intention, the personal material self indirectly increased such intention via the belief that rented luxury items preserve brand essence.

Our findings advance the literature by showing how the self is constructed and managed in collaborative luxury fashion consumption, from self-identity perspective. The current research reveals the important roles of two aspects of material self that respectively contribute to consumers' adoption of luxury fashion rentals.

This study empirically tests the material self theory in the context of luxury fashion rental and demonstrates the processes of how consumers regard a luxury fashion rental as a tool to construct their identity. This study not only validates the two-structure model of material self (social and personal), but also incorporate the role of brand essence in revealing how the two facets of material self differently facilitate luxury fashion rental adoption.

The shift in policy discourse towards individualism is affecting service provision and access, which has become increasingly conditioned on individual agency and the “deservingness” of the recipient. Gendered and intersectional experiences of homelessness and excluded populations less likely to be living on the streets remain overlooked and unaddressed. This study thus aims to uncover what drives “invisibility” in services for women experiencing multiple disadvantage and the gendered constraints the women are facing when exiting and navigating multiple disadvantage.

The paper draws on in-depth interviews with women who face severe and multiple disadvantage and their support staff. Data is also gathered through survey data and observations with a wide range of frontline service providers, as well as support notes and numerical progress data recorded by one of the service providers.

Contradicting the common assumption that people act as rational actors in their interaction with services, the author found that women’s decisions to (dis)engage may be blinded by forces of multiple disadvantage and mistrust. These are often developed as a result of systemic and gendered constraints that limit women’s capabilities and exercise of choice. Barriers in service access often amplified the personal barriers they were facing and reinforced women’s decisions to not engage with services.

The author hopes that this paper sheds light on the particular set of barriers women with multiple disadvantage face, which will be vital to reach women who face severe disadvantage and provide more effective policies, care and support.

This study gives voice to a particular hidden population: women with multiple disadvantage. It contributes to existing frameworks on agency and choice by understanding gendered barriers behind service engagement and how services themselves may be contributing to women’s invisibility.