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The aim of the study is to examine the effect of public attitude on petty corruption.

This is a survey study on customers of a licenses providing authority (N = 390) in Cairo, Egypt. The authors use Akers social learning theory of crime and deviance and take into consideration criticisms of it. The authors control for individual and organizational level determinants that are identified by scholars as influencing people's attitudes toward corruption and which could be known through the authority customers' experiences. Because the dependent variable is binary, whether a person paid a bribe during last transaction with this authority or not, the authors use binary logistic regression.

The findings indicate that people are more likely to engage in petty corruption when they see it as acceptable, have previous petty corruption experience and when they use a mediator. Also, of those who dealt with that civil service authority during and directly after the 25th of January Revolution (N = 161) 31% reported that they did not engage in petty corruption in comparison to previous years. They referred this to a change in attitude at the time.

The policy implications of the research are important. Social science theories could generate cultural and policy relevant solutions for petty corruption; however, they have not been taken full advantage of. Also, experience-based country-specific corruption survey studies are important input for an effective anti-corruption policy.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of product-related description abstractness/concreteness on perceived trustworthiness and the role of consumer product expertise and shopping-stage mindset in the persuasiveness of abstract vs concrete product descriptions.

Two online experiments were conducted: Study 1 (description abstractness – manipulated between-subject; consumer product expertise, perceived trustworthiness, purchase intent – measured), Study 2 (consumer shopping-stage mindset – manipulated between-subject; description abstractness – manipulated within-subject; consumer product expertise, perceived trustworthiness, abstract/concrete description preference – measured).

The negative effect of the abstractness (abstract descriptions vs the ones supplemented with relevant product details) on description trustworthiness was evidenced in Study 1. Trustworthiness was positively related to purchase intent, especially for high product expertise. Study 2 replicated the effect of product description abstractness on its trustworthiness in terms of two other forms of abstractness (abstract descriptions vs the ones supplemented with irrelevant product details and product benefits vs attributes). The goal-oriented (vs comparative) mindset had a positive effect on the benefit (vs attribute) description preference, especially for high product expertise.

For marketers, the results suggest the positive consequences of presenting concrete information on product attributes and the conditions enhancing the effectiveness of presenting product benefits.

The paper integrates the existing views on consumer response to abstract vs concrete information (lexical abstractness/concreteness, means-end chain theory) and links them to consumer product expertise and shopping-stage mindset.

Lack of acceptance of insects as food is considered a barrier against societal adoption of the potentially valuable contribution of insects to human foods. An underlying barrier may be that insects are lumped together as one group, while consumers typically try specific insects. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which Dutch consumers, with and without insect tasting experience, are more or less willing to eat different insects.

In a quasi-experimental study (n=140), the participants with and without prior experience in eating insects were asked to give their willingness to eat a range of insects, and their attitudes and disgust towards eating insects.

Insects promoted in the market were more preferred than the less marketed insects, and a subgroup of preferred insects for participants with experience in eating insects was formed.

Although well-known insects were more preferred, general willingness to eat remained low for all participants. The results indicate that in future research on insects as food the specific insects used should be taken into account.

Continued promotion of specific, carefully targeted, insects may not lead to short-term uptake of insects as food, but may contribute to willingness to eat insects as human food in the long term.

The paper shows substantial differences between consumers who have and who have not previously tasted insects, with higher acceptance of people with experience in tasting insects for the specific insects that are frequently promoted beyond their generally more positive attitude towards eating insects.

Intellectual capital (IC) is believed to be more important resources to add the value of a company rather than physical assets. This gives rise to the increasing practice of reporting IC information in corporate annual report. Over the past fifteen years, considerable numbers of studies have employed content analysis to examine the extent and nature of IC information in several countries, but they presented different results. These results might partly contribute to different methods in counting information. In fact, the previous studies have been critised for not explicitly clarifying how information was recoded and counted which led to incomparable findings. Therefore, this paper firstly seeks to discuss an illustrative example of ‘sense-making‘ process in identifying, categorizing, and counting of IC information in annual reports of pilot sample company. Secondly, the method refined in the pilot study was applied over the final samples of six large companies in the UK from 1974 to 2008 The contribution of this paper is to primarily refine the previous method in recoding information, to send a message that transparency is crucial in content analysis and to facilitate method replication for future studies. Overall, this study demonstrates a marked increase in IC information disclosure was identified over the 35 years. The relational capital information disclosure was relatively more prominent over time, followed by human capital and structural capital.

In this paper, the authors explore the reasons for reluctance to use mobile banking with the help of the technology acceptance model (TAM) and modifications proposed by the literature that is particularly adequate for developing countries and mobile banking: the theory of trying (TT) and the concept of attitude strengths.

This study intends to shed more light on the acceptance of mobile banking in Ethiopia from the banking industry's perspective. To this end, the authors identify models used in the literature for explaining acceptance and fit them to a sample of Ethiopian bank customers. The authors' sample of 394 mobile banking subscribers does not include non-banked individuals, because the authors' main intention is to help banks understanding why banks' platforms are not used as desired.

The authors' findings suggest that attitude is the most significant factor determining acceptance, a multi-dimensional approach to attitude is more recommendable to understanding how mobile banking users shape users' attitude and combining TAM and TT is impactful and better explains the factors influencing attitude.

The authors' analysis suggests focusing on improving the attitude of users toward mobile banking since users' attitude is the integral component for acceptance decisions. In doing so, banks shall concentrate on making mobile banking services/platforms easy to use than promoting the usefulness of mobile banking, because the perception of ease of use has a more significant influence on attitude than usefulness.

Practical application of the authors' findings may guide future marketing decisions while individuals can elucidate where individuals stand on mobile banking.

This study aims at building a framework for the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) response under the social media environment. The elaboration likelihood model was adopted to explain how message source credibility and message appeal jointly influence the eWOM response process, while source credibility provides a central route and message appeal plays a peripheral route for information processing.

This study used a scenario design to test the decision behavior in the Facebook environment through message content manipulation. A convenience sampling method was adopted in this study. We collected 203 valid questionnaires and tested this research model with LISREL 8.8. This study used a two-stage structural equation modeling data analysis method with LISREL 8.8, by which the measurement model was assessed through confirmatory factor analysis for the reliability and validity of the research model, and the causal relationship among factors was assessed through exploratory factor analysis .

The results showed that 53% variance of eWOM responses could be explained by message source credibility and emotional message appeal from the elaboration likelihood model perspective. Message source credibility plays a central role in the social media environment. The model was further tested with a demographic profile analysis for both gender and age. It is found that a female user is influenced by both source credibility and emotional appeal, but a male user is only influenced by message source credibility. The mature age group is more responsive to eWOM messages.

The sample might not represent all social networking sites (SNS) users. The participants represent a small segment of the Facebook population around the globe. Secondly, this research design could be improved by using more recreational messages to test the effects of message appeal and message source credibility. Thirdly, the mobile phone is a type of physical product rather than an experiential product. Future studies could try to identify the same eWOM determinants with different SNS functions, for example, the inbox message function. Similarly, Facebook users are allowed to use both text and pictures to disseminate promotional messages.

This study provides an insight for SNS administrators regarding the determinants of driving more customer responses toward a message. Message source credibility and message appeal are identified as the antecedents for eWOM responses in SNS. Companies could make use of this finding to improve their marketing communication strategy in SNS. The finding can inform administrators of the importance of focusing on both customers’ psychological state and message attributes during the dissemination of promotional messages to improve the efficiency of the promotional effort. Companies aimed at receiving different types of eWOM responses in SNS may need to consider other factors for creating their promotional messages.

Previous studies have mainly identified factors influencing eWOM responses from the people-centered variables such as personal traits and social relationships. This study proposes that the eWOM response is a dual information processing process that can be explained by the ELM. When a user processes information in SNS, he follows both the central route and the peripheral route (i.e. source credibility and message appeal) which can influence the eWOM response. It is the first time that the source credibility is investigated as the central route in ELM model.

The impact of the intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) on the cost of equity capital (COEC) is not well established in the aspect of the Indian scenario. So the objective of this paper is to examine not only the overall effect of ICD but also the individual effect of human capital disclosure (HCD), relational capital disclosure (RCD) and structural capital disclosure (SCD) on COEC.

This research work is conducted by regressing COEC, firm size, leverage, industry type and disclosure index. The disclosure index is prepared based on content analysis of disclosure made in the annual reports of a sample of 50 companies listed in the Nifty 50 index for the year 2018–2019. But in this paper 20 companies are eliminated due to their negative COEC and rest 30 companies are used as the sample companies for this study.

The outcome of this study indicates a negative association between the disclosure of intellectual capital (IC) as a whole and the COEC. But a negative association only for two components (human capital and structural capital) with the COEC is found only when the association of COEC with the categories of ICD is considered.

This is the first study that examines the nexus between the level of ICD and its impact on the COEC in India context.