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Emerging market multinationals often face a variety of legitimacy challenges as they engage in cross-border acquisitions in developed countries, which requires an assortment of legitimacy strategies best aligned with the legitimacy challenges they face. This study advocates for a configurational perspective that examines how different configurations of legitimacy challenges, organizational characteristics, and legitimacy strategies influence the likelihood of deal completion in cross-border acquisitions by emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs).

Based on 328 cross-border acquisition cases by Chinese firms, this study adopts the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the combined effects of institutional distance, political affinity, equity sought, architecture design, sensitive·industry and state-owned and enterprise (SOE) on cross-border acquisition completion.

This study identifies six pathways with different configurations for deal completion, suggesting that a deal's overall legitimacy falls at the intersection of the country-level institution and the firm-level characters and strategy evaluations.

This study investigates how nested legitimacy influences cross-border acquisition completion by offering a holistic and configurational understanding of the deal completion of cross-border acquisitions by EMNEs and yields useful insights for future research on cross-border acquisition completion and legitimacy.

This study aims to build a theoretical model including intermediate-level outside-in marketing capabilities (ILOIMC), radical and incremental technological innovations and management innovation.

This research used 272 pairs of survey questionnaires from Chinese firms’ managers to examine the hypotheses.

The results indicate that ILOIMC enhance management innovation by stimulating radical technological innovation. Furthermore, the mediating effect of incremental technological innovation depends on technological turbulence.

This study may have several limitations which future research could try to overcome: cross-sectional data, Chinese samples, exclusive focus on ILOIMC, sociotechnical approach to innovation typology and measuring ILOIMC as a first-order variable.

ILOIMC can significantly improve innovations in technology and management systems by using customer value and market information.

This study proposes a new taxonomy to classify marketing capabilities into lower-level inside-out marketing capabilities, ILOIMC and higher-level outside-in marketing capabilities. It also provides an explicit discussion and examination of the influence of ILOIMC on technological and management innovations and the contingency effect of technological turbulence. Thus, it responds to Musarra and Morgan’s (2020) call for more research into the mechanism that explains when (the conditions under which) and how (the process by which) outside-in marketing capabilities could contribute to firm innovation.

This study aims to develop a chain-mediated model to examine how streamer and product characteristics influence consumer behavior inertia (CBI) based on an extended cognitive-affective-conative (CAC) perspective.

This study used an online survey concerning the livestreaming activities of 250 experienced shoppers to measure the proposed model.

Streamer (product) attractiveness mediates the relationship between streamer (product) characteristics and shopping experience memory. Streamer (product) attractiveness and shopping experience memory have a chain mediating effect between the streamer (product) characteristics and CBI.

Theoretically, the study demonstrates the critical role of attractiveness and shopping experience memory in the formation of consumer inertia and complements current explanations of consumer continuance of buying through livestreaming. From a managerial standpoint, the findings provide guidelines for enterprises carrying out livestreaming business on how to improve inertia to realize a stable profit source.

This paper explores how the blockchain food traceability system (BFTS) affects consumers' affective brand commitment and subsequent willingness to pay premium prices.

From February 11 to May 23, 2023, this study collected data from 236 Chinese customers, who had purchased blockchain-traced food in Jingdong Mall within the past three months. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The main findings were as follows: (1) BFTS information transparency, information immutability and product diagnosticity are significant predictors of consumer-perceived trustworthiness; BFTS information transparency, product diagnosticity and product safety are significant predictors of consumer-perceived informativeness, (2) Perceived trustworthiness and perceived informativeness build consumers' affective brand commitment, (3) Affective brand commitment affects willingness to pay premiums and (4) Health consciousness positively moderates the relationship between consumers' affective brand commitment and willingness to pay premiums.

This paper complements the research on consumer behaviour in the BFTS, and the research results provide important enlightenment for guiding food enterprises to formulate reasonable and perfect marketing strategies of blockchain-traced food.

This paper explores the driving factors of parasocial relationship (PSR) in the virtual reality (VR) shopping environment, and how this relationship affects brand equity. The study also investigates the moderating role of the celebrity endorser dynamism (CED) in the relationship between PSR and its antecedents.

The primary data collection tool is a survey administered to Chinese consumers (n = 531) who have experienced the products of UNIQLO brand on Taobao Buy + platform, and who had a PSR with the endorser in their VR shopping process. Structural equation modeling is employed to examine the hypothesized relationships among all variables.

The findings show that VR shopping factors (i.e. physical attractiveness, social presence and technology novelty) perceived by consumers to affect PSR, and this relationship and brand equity are positively associated, while CED moderates the relationship between PSR and its antecedents.

This study sheds light on how PSR in the VR shopping environment can improve brand equity. It contributes to the theory of PSR and persuasion as well as marketing strategies. From a managerial perspective, guidelines are provided for firms to implement value communication activities using VR, and to increase their brand equity.

Based on the involvement and customer-delivered value theories, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework with which to examine the relationships between food traceability system, consumer perceived value and purchase intention. The study also investigates the moderating role of consumer expertise in the relationship between food traceability system and perceived value.

Survey approach is the primary data collection tool, through which a total of 238 useable responses were obtained. Structural equation modelling is employed to examine the hypothesized relationships among all variables.

The findings show that the information quality, perceived reliability and product diagnosticity of food traceability system affect consumer perceived value, and the perceived value and purchase intention are positively associated, while consumer expertise acts as a moderator on the relationship between food traceability system and consumer perceived value.

This study sheds light on how consumer perceived value of food traceability system can enhance their intention to purchase traceable food. It contributes to the theory of customer-delivered value and involvement as well as traceable product marketing strategies. From a managerial perspective, guidelines are provided for traceable food producers and marketers to implement reasonable strategies to attract consumers to purchase and promote the sustainable development of food industry.

The usage of augmented reality (AR) in online shopping websites provides a “try-on” experience for consumers. AR technology combines the virtual and real world. Previous studies have addressed AR usage’s benefits to consumers’ online shopping experience. However, this study aims to explore the dark side of AR usage in consumers’ online purchasing process.

The authors conduct six experiments to examine whether AR usage leads to adverse effects on consumers’ purchase intention and explain the mechanism of its dark side.

The result shows that AR usage in online shopping websites reduces consumers’ purchase intention. The authors further reveal that the usage of AR leads to more vital psychological ownership of the product, and psychological ownership positively relates to cognitive conflict. Cognitive conflict explains the negative influence of AR usage on purchase intention.

First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of embedded AR function of websites on consumers’ decision-making process. Also, it is the first study on the application of AR in a real shopping scene, which makes the study of AR close to reality. Second, psychological ownership is introduced in this study. Although there are many types of research on psychological ownership, few scholars have explored it in AR research. Third, most studies stress the advantages of using AR during purchase; this research demonstrates that embedding AR function in a shopping website may negatively affect purchase intention.

Product discounts have been widely applied in digital commerce as a method to attract and retain customers to purchase in China. Given that digital channels differ in their attributes, customers may behave differently when they respond to the same discount across channels. However, little attention has been paid to explore the heterogeneity of customer responses to discounts across channels. This study aims to fill in the gap by exploring how customers’ purchase responses to price discounts differ across digital channels.

This study applies a Poisson regression to an unbalanced data set of purchasing history from Chinese footwear brands with 3,510 customers in a two-year time window across the three digital channels (i.e. personal computer [PC], app and mobile website), with a correction for endogeneity by using the Gaussian copula method.

This paper finds that price discounts have the strongest positive effect on consumers’ purchase volumes on the PC channel, followed by the app channel, while discounts show the weakest impact in the mobile website channel. By so, this paper demonstrates that customers respond differently to online and mobile channels, and they also respond differently within mobile channels when they purchase products with price discounts.

This study is original in analyzing the difference in customers’ discount responses across digital channels, offering valuable contributions to existing research on multichannel marketing as well as mobile marketing and providing helpful insights for multichannel merchants to design digital discount strategies.

Building on work that explores the relationship between individual beliefs and ability to recognize discrimination (e.g., Kaiser and Major, 2006), we examine how an adherence to beliefs about gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism, and meritocracy shape one’s interpretation of an illegal act of sexual harassment involving a male supervisor and female subordinate. We also consider whether the role of the gendered culture of engineering (Faulkner, 2009) matters for this relationship. Specifically, we conducted an online survey-experiment asking individuals to report their beliefs about gender and meritocracy and subsequently to evaluate a fictitious but illegal act of sexual harassment in one of two university research settings: an engineering department, a male-dominated setting whose culture is documented as being unwelcoming to women (Hatmaker, 2013; Seron, Silbey, Cech, and Rubineau, 2018), and an ambiguous research setting. We find evidence that the stronger one’s adherence to gender egalitarian beliefs, the greater one’s ability to detect inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment while gender essentialist beliefs play no role in their detection. The stronger one’s adherence to merit beliefs, the less likely they are to view an illegal interaction as either inappropriate or as sexual harassment. We account for respondent knowledge of sexual harassment and their socio-demographic characteristics, finding that the former is more often associated with the detection of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at work. We close with a discussion of the transferability of results and policy implications of our findings.

The purpose of this paper is to overcome the application limitations of other multi-variable regression based on polynomials due to the huge computation room and time cost.

In this paper, based on the idea of feature selection and cascaded regression, two strategies including Laguerre polynomials and manifolds optimization are proposed to enhance the accuracy of multi-variable regression. Laguerre polynomials were combined with the genetic algorithm to enhance the capacity of polynomials approximation and the manifolds optimization method was introduced to solve the co-related optimization problem.

Two multi-variable Laguerre polynomials regression methods are designed. Firstly, Laguerre polynomials are combined with feature selection method. Secondly, manifolds component analysis is adopted in cascaded Laguerre polynomials regression method. Two methods are brought to enhance the accuracy of multi-variable regression method.

With the increasing number of variables in regression problem, the stable accuracy performance might not be kept by using manifold-based optimization method. Moreover, the methods mentioned in this paper are not suitable for the classification problem.

Experiments are conducted on three types of datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed regression methods. The best accuracy was achieved by the combination of cascade, manifold optimization and Chebyshev polynomials, which implies that the manifolds optimization has stronger contribution than the genetic algorithm and Laguerre polynomials.