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Based on the construal level theory, this research study examines the interactive effect between social crowding and corporate social responsibility (CSR) statement type on consumers' purchase intention.

The authors conducted two empirical experiments on a total of 508 subjects.

There is an interactive effect between social crowding and CSR statement type on consumers' purchase intention. Specifically, in high social crowding situations, concrete CSR statements lead to consumers' higher purchase intention, while in low social crowding situations, abstract CSR statements lead to consumers' higher purchase intention. Self-construal and processing fluency play a moderating and mediating role in the mechanism.

This research study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the interaction between social crowding and CSR statements, enriching the field of consumer behavior research on social crowding. Additionally, it offers practical insights for enterprises on how to present CSR information in crowded situations.

Driven by artificial intelligence technology, chatbots have begun to play an important customer service role in the online retail environment. This study aims to explore how conversational styles improve the interaction experience between consumers and chatbots in different social crowding environments, and the moderating role of product categories is considered.

Three studies are conducted to understand the influences of conversational styles, social crowding and product categories on consumer acceptance, assessed using situational experiments and questions.

In a low social crowding environment, consumers prefer chatbots with a social-oriented (vs. task-oriented) conversational style, while in a high social crowding environment, consumers prefer a task-oriented (vs. social-oriented) conversational style, and warmth and competence mediate these effects. The moderating effect of product categories is supported.

This study expands the application of the stereotype content model to improve the interaction experience level between consumers and chatbots in online retail. The findings can provide managerial suggestions for retailers to select a chatbot's conversational style and promote a more continuous interaction between consumers and chatbots.

Crowding in service environments is a constant concern for many firms due to the negative consequences it has on consumers and companies alike. Yet, scant empirical research exists on firm-generated initiatives aimed at improving customer service experiences in crowded situations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how information, a managerially actionable variable, influences social interactions (in the form of customer social withdrawal and citizenship behavior) and service experience.

Two experimental studies were conducted using an extended service context.

This research demonstrates that receiving information about crowds in advance results in heightened social withdrawal, which improves customer service experience. However, providing consumers with a platform to share crowding information increases customers’ citizenship behavior toward service employees and other customers, which, in turn, improves customer service experience.

For extended service encounters (e.g. air travel) where social interactions are inevitable, companies should encourage customers to share their real-time experiences with other customers in hopes of creating more positive social interactions (e.g. citizenship behavior) within the crowded environment.

Existing investigations of crowding stem from an overemphasis on the physical and atmospheric aspects of the environment by treating crowds as a “fixture” in the servicescape, rather than as “active participants” involved in the crowding environment. While the mere presence of crowds alone has negative effects, this research takes it a step further by examining interactions among and between customers and service employees within the crowded service environment.

The ubiquity of digitally intermediated interactions is changing the ways in which social interaction creates the cognitive and institutional underpinnings of new markets. Logics that define markets used to be localized, but they now emerge from crowds that span – and persist – across time and space. This article builds a theory of how crowds emerge and evolve in a way that influences the emergence of shared logics and helps explain why some markets are viable while others are not. What is revealed is that a crowd has a hidden niche structure that determines the fate of a new market.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interactive effect of social crowding and solo consumers’ sense of power on attitudes toward the restaurant menu with popularity and scarcity cues.

In total, 181 US consumers were recruited. Using a quasi-experimental design, social crowding and promotional cues on a restaurant menu were manipulated and solo consumers’ sense of power was measured.

Low-power individuals exhibited more favorable attitudes toward the menu with a popularity cue at a crowded restaurant. High-power individuals’ attitudes toward the menu were equally favorable across the two promotional cues and crowding levels.

Restaurant managers might want to leverage popularity cues on the menu during peak hours to appeal to solo diners. After diners indicate their dining type (alone vs with others) in kiosks and tablets, restaurants can tailor promotional cues accordingly. Restaurants can also embed more popularity cues in dinner (vs lunch) menus because dinner is more hedonic and social in nature.

This study contributes to the crowding literature by examining promotional cues on the menu and sense of power as moderators of consumer responses to crowding. This study further adds to the solo consumption literature by extending the notion of power and social crowding to ethnic dining contexts.

This study aims to explore the good crowding effect among Indian domestic travellers during the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of the city destination. This study uses the framework of social motivation theory to achieve the objective.

This study adopted a qualitative research design by taking the case of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. Using purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 37 respondents, and themes were drawn manually.

The analysis found four themes that create a good crowding effect among domestic tourists, namely, convenience and price; familiarity and place attachment; social affiliation; and safety. The themes indicated that despite the pandemic, and constant occurrences of new variants, Indian domestic tourists’ on-site attitude towards crowding was favourable.

Firstly, the good crowding effect during the pandemic could have been better understood using empirical data. Secondly, the results cannot be generalized, specifically for developed economies.

This study offers practical implications to destination managers and local administrative bodies for whom achieving sustainability in urban tourism has always been concerning. These include developing infrastructural facilities, encouraging cultural activities in city centres and improving the perception of safety to sustain the good crowding effect.

The affective dimension involved in making a travelling decision played a significant role in the post-pandemic phase. While suppliers needed survival, tourists needed social affiliation and escape from the mandated home isolation due to multiple phases of COVID-19 lockdown in India. This study adds value to society by emphasising that the need for social affiliation among travellers remains intact, and the tourism industry should embrace this transformation.

While most of the pandemic-related studies criticised crowd and tourists’ crowd averting behaviour, this study reported that the good crowding effect could also be an outcome owing to different factors. Therefore, this study offers distinctive nuance of tourists’ behaviour in the post-COVID-19 phase, allowing destination managers and tourism stakeholders to re-think their strategies.

As the application of crowdsourcing contests grows, leveraging the participation of superstars (i.e. solvers who have outstanding performance records in a crowdsourcing platform) becomes an emergent approach for managers to solve crowdsourced problems. Although much is known about superstars’ performance implications, it remains unclear whether and how their participation affects the size of a contest crowd for a crowdsourcing contest. Based on social contagion theory, this paper aims to examine the impact of superstars’ participation on the crowd size and studies how this impact varies across solvers with different heterogeneity in terms of skills, exposure and cultural proximity with superstars in crowdsourcing contests.

This paper uses secondary data from one crowdsourcing platform that includes 6,587 innovation contests to examine superstars’ main and contextual effects on the crowd size of a contest.

Our results reveal that superstars’ participation positively affects the crowd size of a contest in general. This finding suggests that social contagion is a fundamental mechanism underlying crowd formation in crowdsourcing contests. Our results also indicate that in contests that involve multiple superstars, superstars’ effect on crowd size becomes negative when we simultaneously consider other solvers’ heterogeneity in terms of skills, exposure and cultural background, and this negative effect will be intensified by increases in the skill gap, extent of exposure and cultural proximity between superstars and other solvers in the same contest.

Our research enhances the understanding of the influence of superstars and the mechanism underlying the emergence of contest crowds in crowdsourcing contests and contributes knowledge to better understand social contagion in a competitive setting. The results are meaningful for sourcing managers and platform supervisors to design contests and supervise crowd size in crowdsourcing contests.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which advocates of crowdsourcing reconfigure the classical sociological treatment of the crowd.

The approach taken conceives of the semantics of crowd theorizing in three phases, each of which makes sense of the power dynamics between the elite and the crowd. In phases one and two, the crowd is conceptualized as a problem generator; in phase three, the crowd is depicted as a problem solver and innovator.

This paper provides a critical look at phase three crowd theorizing. It explores how, by ignoring the disruptive power dynamic, crowdsourcing generates a credible image of the crowd as an innovator and problem solver. The work concludes with a discussion of the implications of phase three crowd theorizing for researchers in sociology.

Advocates of the wisdom of crowds, if interested in the sociological implications of their position, must attend to both the disruptive and costly implications of third phase crowd theorizing.

This paper maps the crowdsourcing process and places it in context. It argues that the distance between the classical social scientific treatment of the crowd is not nearly as great as crowdsourcing advocates would have one believe. Nevertheless, phase three crowd theorizing opens up sociologically relevant questions regarding the future portrayal of collective intelligence as a form of virtual property.

The purpose of this paper is to explore implicit crowdsourcing, leveraging social media in real-time scenarios for intelligent systems.

A case study using an illustrative example system, which systematically used a custom social media platform for automated financial news analysis and summarisation was developed, evaluated and discussed. Literature review related to crowdsourcing and collective intelligence in intelligent systems was also conducted to provide context and to further explore the case study.

It was shown how, and that useful intelligent systems can be constructed from appropriately engineered custom social media platforms which are integrated with intelligent automated processes. A recent inter-rater agreement measure for evaluating quality of implicit crowd contributions was also explored and found to be of value.

This paper argues that when social media platforms are closely integrated with other automated processes into a single system, this may provide a highly worthwhile online and real-time approach to intelligent systems through implicit crowdsourcing. Key practical issues, such as achieving high-quality crowd contributions, challenges of efficient workflows and real-time crowd integration into intelligent systems, were discussed. Important ethical and related considerations were also covered.

A contribution to existing theory was made by proposing how social media Web platforms may benefit crowdsourcing. As opposed to traditional crowdsourcing platforms, the presented approach and example system has a set of social elements that encourages implicit crowdsourcing. Instances of crowdsourcing with existing social media, such as Twitter, often also called crowd piggybacking, have been used in the past; however, using an entirely custom-built social media system for implicit crowdsourcing is relatively novel and has several advantages. Some of the discussion in context of intelligent systems construction are novel and contribute to the existing body of literature in this field.

The purpose of this chapter was to deconstruct the underlying contradictions of crowdfunding practices and to show how crowdfunding practitioners develop a schizophrenic use of these contradictions.

The main contradictions of crowdfunding practices are introduced with theoretical references. Then short cases are used to illustrate how crowdfunding practitioners try to cope with these contradictions.

The crowd addresses many contradictions, first because it is a syncretic concept, second because online crowds are still to be proven crowds. In any case, crowdfunding practitioners do their best to take the advantage of these contradictions, and run the risk of falling between two stools.

An attempt to provide an analysis of crowdfunding as a social, and not only economic, phenomenon, to suggest avenues for further critical research on crowdfunding.