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This paper aims to examine the interesting but largely unexamined effects of pride-tagged money and surprise-tagged money on consumers’ spending and product-choosing behaviors.

The present research utilizes experimental design and survey methods to collect data and the ANOVA and bootstrap analysis methods to verify the assumed hypotheses.

Study 1 shows that people with pride-tagged (vs surprise-tagged) money are more likely to spend the money for themselves (vs others) and the personal achievement-expression motive plays a mediating role between the pride-tagged money and self-spending behavior. Study 2 replicates the findings of Study 1 and suggests that people with pride-tagged money are less likely to spend the money for others (e.g. donating). Study 3 shows that people with pride-tagged (surprise-tagged) money are more likely to purchase a self-relevant (other-relevant) product than those with surprise-tagged (pride-tagged) money.

The current research has classified products into self-relevant products (e.g. fitness card, supermarket gift card and mobile game equipment) and other-relevant products (e.g. restaurant set meal, pizza, movie ticket and hot pot) on the basis of perceived self-relevance on the products. Therefore, marketers could frame certain conditions that elicit self-relevant versus other-relevant choices and manipulate self-relevant versus other-relevant primes to shift preferences in favor of certain options. For example, around graduation time, graduates often feel proud of their accomplishments. In this case, marketers could take advantage of that feeling with a message like “treat yourself”, which could prompt them to spend more money for themselves. In addition, the marketers selling other-relevant products (e.g. pizza and hot pot) might develop and promote advertisements that deliver information about “sharing with your friends”. For example, in 2016, Pizza Hut began to use its new slogan of “love to share” to convey the idea of “double happiness as a result of sharing”.

From a theoretical standpoint, first, this research contributes to the emotional accounting research by advancing the notion that money associated with different positive feelings could influence consumers’ spending behaviors in different ways. Second, the research distinguishes self-relevant products from other-relevant products. Third, it shows that people with pride-tagged money and those with surprise-tagged money have different preferences for products. Self-relevant products, such as fitness card, supermarket gift card and mobile game equipment, that represent a certain degree of independence are more used and/or consumed by consumers with pride-tagged money, whereas other-relevant products, such as restaurant set meal, pizza, movie ticket and hot pot, that involve the perceptions of interdependence are more bought by consumers with surprise-tagged money to share with others.

With the rise of social media, online tipping has developed markedly in recent years. Drawing on emotional accounting, this research examined the effects of pride-tagged money (PTM) and surprise-tagged money (STM) on online tipping. It examined the mediating role of self-inflation and the moderating role of the perceived importance of money in the proposed relationship.

Five experimental studies were conducted to test the hypotheses using ANOVA, SmartPLS3 and bootstrap analyses.

The results reveal that pride-tagged (vs surprise-tagged) money leads to higher self-inflation, which leads to an increased willingness to engage in online tipping. It illustrates that when the perceived importance of money is low, PTM results in a higher willingness to engage in online tipping than STM. However, when the perceived importance of money is high, the effect of PTM (vs STM) on the willingness to conduct online tipping is attenuated, and no significant difference exists in the willingness to engage in online tipping between people with PTM and those with STM. In addition, it shows that PTM (vs STM) leads to a higher amount of online tipping, and self-inflation mediates the proposed relationship.

Practically, web-based marketing managers should design programs (e.g. content that encourages users to feel pride in their achievements) that cause users to emotionally tag their money with pride as a means of increasing their willingness to engage in online tipping and to increase the amount of such tipping.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study provides the first evidence of how different sources of money influence online tipping.

The purpose of this research is to explore the nature of virtual tipping in live game streaming from the perspective of tippers.

This qualitative research involved six naturalistic group interviews with 27 young adult game streaming tippers in China.

The research revealed a typology of four virtual tipping exchanges – perfunctory exchange, transactional (commodity) exchange, relational (gift) exchange and hybrid exchange. The most notable finding is hybrid exchange, a synergistic hybrid of transaction and gift-giving.

The authors recommend that both streamers and streaming platforms acknowledge and accommodate both transactional and relational tipping motivations. The authors also recommend platforms to recruit skillful streamers with high emotional intelligence to better convert perfunctory tippers into tippers who tip more generously.

The result of hybrid exchange suggests going beyond the traditional commodity vs gift dichotomy to examine the potential market-gift complementary in a single exchange in the sharing economy.