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Service encounters are becoming increasingly virtual through the infusion of computer-mediated technologies. Virtual services separate consumers and service providers both spatially and temporally. With the advent of virtual services is the need to theoretically explain how service separability is psychologically perceived by consumers across the spectrum of computer-mediated technologies. Drawing on construal-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a theoretical framework depicting consumer’s construal of spatial and temporal separation across a continuum of technology-mediated service virtuality.

The authors conducted two studies: first, to investigate consumers’ levels of mental construal associated with varying degrees of service separation across a spectrum of technology-mediated services; second, to empirically examine consumer evaluations of service quality in response to varying degrees of spatial and temporal service separation. These relationships were tested across two service industries: education and tourism.

Consumers mentally construe psychological distance in response to service separation and these observations vary across the spectrum of service offerings ranging from face-to-face (no psychological distance) through to virtual (spatially and temporally separated – high psychological distance) services. Further, spatial separation negatively affects consumers’ service evaluations; such that as service separation increases, consumers’ service evaluations decrease. No such significant findings support the similar effect of temporal separation on customer service evaluations. Moreover, specific service industry-based distances exist such that consumers responded differentially for a credence (education) vs an experiential (tourism) service.

Recent studies in services marketing have challenged the inseparability assumption inherent for services. This paper builds on this knowledge and is the first to integrate literature on construal-level theory, service separability, and virtual services into a holistic conceptual framework which explains variance in consumer evaluations of separated service encounters. This is important due to the increasingly virtual nature of service provider-customer interactions across a diverse range of service industries (i.e. banking and finance, tourism, education, and health care). Service providers must be cognisant of the psychological barriers which are imposed by increased technology infusion in virtual services.

Smart tourism has become an inevitable trend in future tourism development. However, despite significant investment in its technological foundation, little is known about whether and when tourists are willing to be involved in smart tourism. This study explores tourists' willingness to contribute to smart tourism development by empirically examining their intention to share personal information and use smart technology.

Based on construal level theory (CLT), a 2 (far/near spatial distance) × 2 (gain/loss persuasive information frame) × 2 (altruistic/egoistic value orientation) laboratory experiment with different contextual features was designed to examine tourists' willingness to contribute to smart tourism.

Tourists are most willing to share personal information and use smart technologies when spatial distance aligns with information framing, spatial distance aligns with value orientation and information framing aligns with value orientation.

This study provides essential insights for destination management organizations (DMOs) about tourists' perceptions of smart tourism, enabling DMOs to develop more precise marketing strategies to encourage tourists to contribute to smart tourism development and enrich tourists' travel experiences.

This study enriches theoretical knowledge of DMOs' boundaries in encouraging tourists to contribute to smart tourism and provides critical insights into future smart tourism development for researchers and practitioners.

This study aims to focus on peer-to-peer accommodation services in the sharing economy. Adopting construal level theory as the theoretical foundation, this study investigates the main and interaction effects of social and spatial distances on guest loyalty toward peer-to-peer accommodation.

This study uses a secondary source of online observational data archived on Xiaozhu, a leading peer-to-peer accommodation sharing platform in China. It consists of 2,612 observations of 1,304 unique travelers who stayed at 559 listings managed by 281 hosts in four major metropolitan areas of China over four years from August 2012 to August 2016. Non-linear binary choice panel models of probability regressions were used to estimate the effects of psychological distances (social and spatial) between hosts and guests on the likelihood of repeat purchase. The software used for the econometric analyses is STATA 14.

The results indicate that social distance negatively affects guest loyalty toward the listing hosts, while spatial distance has a positive influence on guest loyalty. The results also show significant interactions between the two psychological distance dimensions in influencing loyalty. The findings provide important insight into the influences of psychological distances on travelers’ repeat purchase behavior toward peer-to-peer accommodation providers.

This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence that supports the importance of psychological distances in forming a loyal relationship between hosts and guests in the peer-to-peer accommodation sector of the sharing economy.

According to construal level theory, close (versus far) psychological distance is associated with low (versus high) construal level. Despite the evidence for discount frame effect, it is unclear whether psychological distance and product nature play moderating roles. In addition, little has been known whether the effect of discount frame can extend to other dependent variables such as willingness to pay (WTP). Driven by construal level theory, five experiments were conducted to explore whether the effect of discount frame is dependent on psychological distance and product nature (i.e. utilitarian versus hedonic product).

The experimental method was used, with discount frame, psychological distance and product type as the independent variables and purchase intention, attitude towards the advertisement, perceived value and WTP as the dependent variables. Participants were presented with promotion scenarios in which psychological distance and discount format were manipulated. In order to test the generalizability of results, promotional scenarios for both utilitarian (i.e. backpack bag and shampoo) and hedonic products (i.e. scenery ticket and perfume) were presented. Data were collected via the online experiment platform (i.e. www.Credamo.com).

The authors found an interaction between discount frame and spatial distance in that consumers had more positive attitude toward percent off than amount off under near-spatial distance. However, no interaction was observed between discount frame and temporal, social or hypothetical distance.

Taken together, the current study for the first time reveals that the effect of discount frame is contingent on a specific dimension of psychological distance (i.e. spatial distance), regardless of whether the product is utilitarian or hedonic. Findings from this study for the first time pose a challenge to the notion that construal-level match necessarily leads to more favorable consumer responses, suggesting that there may be a unique mechanism underlying the joint effects of spatial distance and discount frame. The current findings can provide important implications for marketers and retailers in an effort to design effective promotional messages.

The authors proposed a conceptual model by examining the influence of threats to their freedom on tourists’ psychological distance including social distance, spatial distance, and temporal distance, which effect psychological reactance and the consequent online Airbnb booking intentions. Furthermore, media intrusiveness as a moderator determines the boundary conditions between perceived threats to their freedom and social distance, spatial distance, and temporal distance.

Data was gathered from 491 Chinese travelers to provide empirical evidence. The authors performed data analysis in Amos 26.0 using structural equation modeling (SEM) and Hayes (2013) PROCESS macro.

The findings positively reinforced all the structural relationships of the study. Notably, media intrusiveness significantly moderates the association between perceived threats to their freedom and psychological distance (i.e. social distance, spatial distance, and temporal distance).

The findings contribute significantly to the field of social psychology, advertising, and consumer behavior derive prolific implications for policymakers and sharing economy platforms. Lastly, by identifying limitations, this research opens doors for future scholars.

Governments' acute precautionary measures in response to the COVID-19 outbreak have confined individual freedom across the globe. This study illuminates how tourists conceive these preventative measures as perceived threats to their freedom, and subsequently engage psychological reactance.

We investigate the effect of distance – political, economic, cultural and spatial, on developed-economy multinational enterprises’ (MNEs’) ownership decisions in cross-border (CB) acquisitions. We start with the premise that distance discourages full and majority ownership in CB acquisitions, and further investigate the moderating role of distance-reducing factors. We examine how the relationship between distance and acquisition ownership decision is moderated by firm-specific characteristics, such as firm size, general international experience, and specific host country experience. Our data sample consists of 1,041 CB acquisitions under taken by Finnish MNEs in 58 countries during the time period 1990–2010. We find substantial support for all our hypotheses and conclude that the negative effects of distance on CB acquisition equity stake are positively moderated by the three firm-specific resources but their individual importance is conditional on the host country type (developed or emerging).

This study aims to propose and evaluate a searching scheme for a bichromatic reverse k-nearest neighbor (BRkNN) that has objects and queries in spatial networks. In this proposed scheme, the author’s search for the BRkNN of the query using an influence zone for each object with a network Voronoi diagram (NVD).

The author’s analyze and evaluate the performance of the proposed searching scheme.

The contribution of this paper is that it confirmed that the proposed searching scheme gives shorter processing time than the conventional linear search.

A future direction of this study will involve making a searching scheme that reduces the processing time when objects move automatically on spatial networks.

In BRkNN, consider two groups in a convenience store, where several convenience stores, which are constructed in Groups A and B, operate in a given region. The author’s can use RNN is RkNN when k = 1 (RNN) effectively to set a new store considering the Euclidean and road distances among stores and the location relationship between Groups A and B.

In the proposed searching scheme, the author’s search for the BRkNN of the query for each object with an NVD using the influence zone, which is the region where an object in the spatial network recognizes the nearest neighbor for the query.

Although the literature has established the effect of online reviews on customer purchase intentions, the influence of psychological factors on online ratings is overlooked. This paper aims to examine these factors under the perspective of construal level theory (CLT).

Using review data from TripAdvisor and Booking.com, the authors study three dimensions of psychological distances (temporal, spatial and social) and their direct and interaction effects on review valence, using regression analysis. The authors examine the effect of these distances on the information content of online reviews using a novel bag-of-words model to assess its concreteness.

Temporal distance and spatial distance have positive direct effects on review valence. Social distance, on the other hand, has a negative direct effect. However, its interaction with the other two distances has a positive effect, suggesting that consumers tend to “zoom-out” to less concrete things in their ratings.

The findings provide implications for the interpretation of review ratings by the service providers and their information content.

This study extends the CLT and electronic word-of-mouth literature by jointly exploring the effect of all three psychological distances that are applicable in post-purchase evaluations. Methodologically, it provides a novel application of the bag-of-words model in evaluating the concreteness of online reviews.

A common approach to predicting the price of residential properties uses the hedonic price model and its spatial extensions. Within the hedonic approach, real estate prices are decomposed into internal characteristics of an apartment, apartment characteristics and external characteristics. To account for the unobserved quality of the surrounding environment, price models include spatial price correlation factors, where the distance is usually measured as the distance in geographic space. In determining the price, a seller focuses not only on the observed and unobserved factors of the apartment and its environment but also on the prices of similar marketed objects that can be selected both by geographic proximity and by characteristics similarity. The purpose of this study is to show the latter point empirically.

This study uses an ensemble clustering approach to measure objects' proximity and test whether the proximity of objects in the property characteristics space along with spatial correlation explain the significant variation in prices.

In this paper, the pricing behaviour of sellers in a reselling market in Perm, Russia is studied. This study shows that the price transmission mechanism includes both geographic and characteristics spaces.

After testing on market data, the proposed framework for the distance construct could be used to obtain higher predictive power for price predictive models and construction of automated valuation services.

This study tests the higher explanatory power of the model that includes both the distance measured in geographic and property characteristics spaces.

The field of service research has devoted considerable attention to the customer’s role as value creator, but there is a lack of research on understanding customers’ psychological processes in value creation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of psychological distance in value-creation processes. Psychological distance is the customer’s perceived distance from service interactions in terms of spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance and hypothetical distance. Critically, psychological distance influences cognitive processes and can influence how customers think and feel about the service interaction. An appreciation of psychological distance within service contexts can help managers to tailor the interaction in order to facilitate value creation.

In this conceptual paper, the authors build on psychology research and service research to develop seven propositions that explore how psychological distance can operate within service interactions and how this might influence value creation.

The authors divide the propositions into three sections. The first concerns how perceived psychological distance from the service interaction can act as a barrier to entering a service interaction. In particular, the authors consider the influence of social distance and spatial distance within the context of service interactions. The second section examines how psychological distance to the expected point of service use can influence how customers construe the service and the value creation. The third aspect addresses customer-specific characteristics that can impact on value creation by influencing perceived psychological distance toward the service.

Existing research suggests that customers ultimately decide if value is created in the interaction. This paper proposes that perceived psychological distance influences customers’ value creation by examining the service interaction from the customer perspective. The authors suggest that complex context-specific features of the service interaction can be understood by considering psychological distance from the service interaction and from the service itself and evaluating how this impacts on value-creation processes.

From a practical point of view, the paper helps managers to better understand how to manage the service interaction with customers by identifying psychological antecedents of customer value creation.

The paper introduces the notion of psychological distance into service research about value, proposing that the customer’s role in creating value in interactions with the service provider is influenced by the psychological distance to the interaction and to the service offered in this interaction.