Search results

The purpose of this study is to examine the trends and developments of subscription business models (SBMs) over the past two decades.

The study extracted 469 documents (articles and reviews) from the Scopus database during 2000–2022 and analysed 132 documents (articles and reviews). A bibliometric methodology of scientific mapping was employed, including a cluster analysis based on the bibliographic coupling of documents. Content analysis was also conducted to reveal emerging trends in SBMs.

The study revealed six emerging themes in SBMs related to consumer behaviour, digital advertising, online news media, journal publications, circular economy and sustainability strategies.

The results of this study provide new and unique insights into the development and trends of SBMs over the past two decades and offer guidance for future researchers to investigate further the phenomenon of SBMs in emerging areas.

This study aims to explicate consumers’ intentions to use online food delivery systems (OFDS) subscription services. The study revisited the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology.

A typical methodology that involved a confirmatory factor analysis, followed by structural equation modeling, was used to test the hypotheses using a sample of 573 OFDS users from the USA.

The results revealed that social influence has the most significant impact on consumers’ intentions to use OFDS subscription services, while effort expectancy and perceived security have relatively lower impacts on consumers’ intentions to use OFDS subscription services. In addition, the study revealed the role of compatibility and convenience orientation in shaping consumers’ OFDS system perceptions (e.g. performance and effort expectancy).

The results provide several theoretical and managerial implications and open new avenues for future research. The study advances the literature by validating the set of antecedents of important core perceptions (e.g. performance expectancy and effort expectancy). The study also provides implications for two types of practitioners, such as OFDS and restaurants.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine consumers’ intentions to use OFDS subscription services. This study is also the first to examine key factors influencing consumers’ intentions to use OFDS subscription services.

本研究旨在阐明消费者使用在线订餐（OFDS） 订阅服务的意图。该研究重新审视了 Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 理论（UTAUT2）。

本研究采用典型的量化研究方法, 包括确认性因子分析和结构方程建模, 并使用来自美国的573名OFDS用户的样本来测试假设。

结果显示, 社会影响对消费者使用OFDS订阅服务的意图具有最显著的作用, 而努力期望和感知安全对消费者使用OFDS订阅服务的意图影响较小。此外, 研究揭示了兼容性和便利性取向在塑造消费者对OFDS系统感知（例如, 性能和努力期望）方面的作用。

研究结果提供了多方面的理论和管理启示, 并为未来研究开辟了新的途径。本研究通过验证重要核心感知（例如, 性能期望和努力期望）的前因完善了相关文献。另外, 本研究还为OFDS和餐厅等两类从业者提供了重要启示。

本研究是第一个调查了消费者使用OFDS订阅服务意图的研究, 也是首次研究了影响消费者使用OFDS订阅服务意图的形成因素。

The purpose is to review literature on sports season ticket subscriptions to distil current knowledge and guide future research and practice.

A systematic literature review is conducted of research on sports season tickets, a long-established and innovative subscription category.

In-depth examination of 28 papers showed a focus on drivers of satisfaction, churn and renewal causes, and product utilisation rates. Subscription markets typically involve many “solely loyal” consumers, most purchasing one or two subscriptions in a category. From reduced barriers to entry and exit to “curated” subscriptions, subscription marketing is changing very quickly. Sports marketers build relationships with subscribers using behavioural data, tier benefits to distinguish between casual and subscribing customers, and create recall and scarcity around key aspects of subscription to combat churn and increase utilisation.

Scarce research on subscription marketing practices remains the primary limitation. Existing research suggests that strong connections between subscriber and organisation, heavy product utilisation and/or strong barriers to switching drive customer satisfaction and retention.

Rapid expansion of subscription products should reduce “excess loyalty”, meaning that subscription models' main benefit will be limited to reoccurring revenue. Exceptions occur when consumers are heavily connected to the product or have little provider choice, so allocate their category buying exclusively. New subscription products face myriad challenges. Guidance on effective subscription marketing from sports marketing research and practice is outlined.

By combining research on market structure, marketing empirical generalisations and subscription marketing, this paper guides future research and practice.

With the popularity of paid apps and increasing concerns about privacy hazards, this paper aims to investigate the impact of mobile services’ fee-charging models on consumers’ privacy concerns, and generate insights for app developers’ fee-charging strategies.

Three experimental studies including 550 participants were conducted. All studies were between-subjects designs and based on the context of financial mobile services. The implementations of fee-charging models were manipulated by both visualized and test-based stimuli.

The results reveal that consumers are less concerned about potential privacy violations when using subscription-based (vs. purchase-based) financial mobile services (study 1). This effect is mediated by consumers’ perceptions that app developers that charge subscription fees (vs. one-off prices) are more likely to be consumer-serving motivated (study 2 and 3).

This paper advances the current understanding of consumer response toward paid apps, by proposing and testing a novel attribution-based mechanism to explain why the implementation of a subscription-based versus purchase-based fee-charging model can result in more favorable consumer reactions. Furthermore, this paper identifies the implementation of contrasting fee-charging models as a market-related factor that affects the extent to which consumers are concerned about potential privacy violations, extending extant literature on consumer privacy concern.

The recent surge of subscription box services calls for research to understand how consumers respond to curation services. This study aims to develop and test a theoretical model to predict consumer response to AI (vs human). Particularly, the authors tested the role of stereotyping in shaping consumer perception of creativity in this context while considering the contextual moderators, shopping goals (hedonic vs utilitarian) and product category (fashion vs meal).

Two preliminary studies and the main study (total n = 761) tested the assumptions and hypotheses of the study. Preliminary study 1 (n = 511 Amazon mTurk, online survey) confirmed consumer stereotypes of humans and machines. Preliminary study 2, a single-factor between-subjects online experiment (recommender: human vs AI), was conducted at a large Midwestern university in the US (n = 56). The main study was conducted as a 2(recommender: human vs AI) × 2(product: fashion vs meal) × 2(goal: utilitarian vs hedonic) between-subjects online experiment (n = 194, Amazon mTurk).

The results confirmed that consumers are more likely to follow recommendations made by a human more than recommendations made by AI and the perceived creativity of the recommender explained the effect. Significant differences across product categories and shopping goals of the consumers were observed, calling for attention to the context of consumption.

This study extends the understanding of consumers' responses to recommendations in curation subscription services by highlighting the role of perceived creativity of humans versus AI.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of Chinese young consumers’ traits (fashion leadership, quality consciousness, price consciousness, environmental consciousness and social media usage) as the external factors on their behavioral intention toward using clothing subscription rental services.

Quantitative research was conducted, and empirical data were collected from 255 Chinese college students. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

The study offered convincing evidence that fashion leadership, price consciousness and social media usage are the three main drivers of Chinese young consumers’ favorable attitudes toward clothing subscription rental services, which together with social norms further lead to their intention to use clothing subscription rental services. Contrary to expectations, the study showed that consumers’ quality consciousness and environmental consciousness have no significant impact on consumer attitudes toward clothing subscription rental services. Moreover, the findings of the study demonstrated the impact of attitude and subjective norms on Chinese young consumers’ intention to use clothing subscription rental services.

This study contributes to the literature by integrating additional factors (fashion leadership, quality consciousness, price consciousness, consumer environmental knowledge, social media usage) into the traditional theory of reasoned action model to investigate how Chinese young consumers’ characteristics impact their attitudes and how their attitudes and subjective norms impact their intention toward using clothing subscription rental services.

The publish/subscribe paradigm is useful for content diffusion in the internet. The purpose of this paper is to propose subscription covering to reduce the size of routeing table and notification matching time.

The paper proposes a necessary and sufficient condition of correct routeing table configuration when using SSCBR algorithm.

Experiments show that both SSCBR and RSCBR can reduce the size of routeing table, network traffic and time.

All these experiments are based on high speed wireline network. For wireless network, the results may be different.

The paper proposes a necessary and sufficient condition of correct routeing table configuration when using SSCBR algorithm and can easily validate the correctness of brokers' routeing table through it. Because RSCBR calculates less subscription covering relation, its performance in network traffic and average notification processing time may be better than SSCBR in certain scenarios.

This paper is aimed primarily at academic library managers and acquisition librarians. By analogy to Pareto studying the relationship between clients and turnover, the paper will study subscriptions to e‐journals and usage statistics. The aim is to evaluate the long tail of usage statistics and to compare it with subscription lists of individually selected titles and packages (big deals).

The paper exploits usage statistics and subscription data from a national usage study of an academic publisher. Data are from 2010.

Usage statistics are partly shaped by the long tail effect. Individual subscriptions of journals are more selective than big deals, and trend towards a traditional retail curve. Unlike subscriptions through packages, usage and individual subscriptions can be related by a similar inclination. But both types of subscriptions fail to predict the popularity of a title in its usage.

The paper uses data from a national usage study and tries to identify global trends. Thus, it does not distinguish between customer categories, disciplines or activity domains.

The paper considers the opportunity provided by big deal for acquisition policy. Ready‐made big deals sometimes appear as an unbounded and excessive supply, not suited to true and sufficient users' needs, but on the other hand, selective acquisition policy cannot completely anticipate online usage behaviour.

Only a few studies distinguish Pareto from long tail distributions in usage statistics, and there is little empirical evidence on the impact of selected subscriptions versus big deals on these statistics.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify issues related to the contemporary study of audiobook practices, in order to aid subsequent research on topics related to reading, digital audiobooks and streaming subscription services.

Using the concept of remediation, this paper covers four messy issues for audiobook researchers, primarily by developing the concept of reading by listening and then exploring the different remediations of the audiobook, clarifying the audiobook as a book and exploring the context of streaming subscription services.

Reading is here conceptualised according to the human sense used when making meaning from text, with reading by listening suggested for reading done with the help of the ears. Three different forms of remediation can be seen in subscription-based audiobooks, related to format, content and sense. Audiobooks simultaneously follow traditions of reading aloud, remediates the printed book and previous audiobook formats. It is suggested that the content is what makes an audiobook a book. The concepts library model and bookshop model are introduced to understand different audiobook subscription service models.

This is a research area on the rise with several messy issues and the concepts and clarifications in this paper may benefit future research.

COVID-19 preventive measures disrupted the media and entertainment business ecosystem, increased over the top (OTT) consumption, brought new OTT players, thus increased competition, and shaped consumer behaviour and habits. Despite this knowledge, in-depth insights into OTT's consumer behaviour, new usage habit and strategies used by subscription-based OTT platforms to maintain resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic are unknown. This paper aims to fill the two gaps in the extant OTT literature.

This study used Eisenhardt's multiple case studies approach to derive the strategies used by the top-performing subscription-based OTT platforms in India. Moreover, a purposive semi-structured Google survey was used to explore consumers' OTT experience during the pandemic. This study analysed data using NVivo 12 (survey) and MS Excel 2010 (case studies).

This study derived seven resilient OTT strategies; competitive low pricing, enhancing customer experience, launching innovative service plans, content localisation, strategic collaboration, flexibility in technology adoption and proactive sales promotion. Consequent to adopting these strategies, consumers' usage of OTT evolved from occasional to habitual. Convenience, ease of accessibility, risk of contracting COVID-19, variety and quality of content, online reviews and affordability drive consumer preference for OTT. Also, this study revealed consumers' varied OTT experiences.

The contribution is two-fold; the derived strategies for maintaining resilience and the in-depth insights into habit formation and consumer behaviour during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is valuable for media and entertainment stakeholders like streaming service providers, OTT services, cable operators, etc.