Search results

This paper aims to examine and highlight the influence of perceived restrictiveness on online communication, and in relation, the reduction of uncertainty in purchasing decisions.

By testing statistical associations between such variables as uncertainty, perceived restrictiveness and online communications, the authors are to establish the prevalence of a phenomenon with quantitative methods that collect survey data from more than 500 real customers of a popular Chinese e-commerce site – Taobao.com.

The findings show that the perceived restrictiveness of a shopping website has a significantly role in motivating individuals to engage with each other by initiating online communication that leads to information acquirement and exchange. In addition, online communication that takes place between buyers and sellers, or among buyers, is found to be an important factor in the process of making purchasing decisions by customers.

This paper adds significance to the extant academic literature as well as assists the appropriate e-commerce vendors in assessing the determinants of customer’s purchasing behavior in the context where online shopping platforms do not support buyers’ desired decision options. It further reconciles and supplements the findings of the previous e-commerce-related studies that focus on the website characteristics only without bringing in the role of customer’s perceived restrictiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to review the current application of organization theory (OT) in the humanitarian supply chain (HSC) and identify the future OT-based research opportunities that can advance knowledge of humanitarian operations.

The study uses a systematic literature review methodology to identify the current status and future direction of the OT-based study in HSC literature. The applied theories are those that have been mentioned in at least two research articles in the HSC literature. The proposed theories are either adopted from the top four referred organizational theories in the supply chain literature or those that can explain the issue of information asymmetry in HSC.

The study identifies and describes eight organizational theories and their possible future research questions in HSC. Among these, the first four theories (i.e. resource-based theory, resource dependence theory, social exchange theory and contingency theory) have already been initially applied in the humanitarian field, while the remaining theories (i.e. institutional theory, stakeholder theory, transactional cost theory and information theory) have potential for future application.

The reviewed literature is limited to peer-reviewed journals listed in Thomson Reuters’ journal citation reports.

This study may help future researchers better understand and solve, using organizational theory, the behavioral challenges faced by humanitarian operations.

The study presents current applications of and future prospects for OT-based research in HSC, effectively providing the first review of OT applications in this area. The novel framework and new theories proposed herein may enable fresh directions for HSC research.

Dashang refers to a reward given voluntarily to street performers in return for their performance. Some social media platforms have created a way to integrate this as a function, referred to as the dashang feature, to allow users to reward live performers online as well. Over the last few years, this function has become extremely popular among social media users, as it recreates the nostalgic experience of watching street performances. Platforms now consider it indispensable, as it has become a source of substantial revenue (commission on rewards earned by performers). However, not all users reward performers. For each user who pays, there are many more who lurk on the platform. This study examines the reasons for these differences using the Big Five personality perspective and justice theory.

We develop an empirical model using the Big Five theory and justice theory and test it using empirical data collected through a survey of WeChat users.

The results indicate that distributive justice, interpersonal justice and informational justice are essential factors in relation to social media users' use of the dashang feature. It is also found that personality type affects these three factors.

This study makes three key contributions. First, it examines the factors that influence users' voluntary use of the dashang feature using the lenses of the Big Five theory and justice theory. Second, this study extends previous results on perceived justice to examine use of the dashang feature in social media. Third, this study applies these theories to the study of consumer behavior by exploring the role of user characteristics in social media use.

Mobile appstores have fast sprung up during the last few years. The large number of apps in these appstores results in increased search effort for the customer as well as fierce competition leading to poorer revenues for both appstores as well as developers. Therefore, appstores allow developers to resort to bundling apps so as to increase the revenues and improve customer loyalty. Since an app-bundle is a mix of two or more apps, it may induce both positive and negative emotions simultaneously in the consumer. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of app-bundling strategy from consumers’ perspective, and help developers design app-bundles.

Based on ambivalence theories, this research investigate different antecedents and influence of positive attitude and negative attitude on purchase behavior, and derives seven key app-bundles attributes through an exploratory study. The data were collected from 930 consumers of app-bundles in China and analyzed using SEM approach.

The findings indicate that positive attitude and negative attitude are two separate concepts and the identified seven app-bundling attributes have distinct effect on shaping consumers’ positive and negative attitude.

This study makes three key contributions to theory and practice. First, this study identifies the specific attributes of app-bundles using exploratory study. Second, this study addresses the challenges involved in examining bundles using ambivalence theory. In doing so, it characterizes attitude as positive and negative and treats them as separate constructs. Third, as called forth by previous studies, this study establishes the co-existence of positive attitude and negative attitude.

Consumers interacting with smart wearable devices is on the rise in the current health-AI market, which offers a great opportunity for companies to execute interactive marketing. However, this opportunity is mainly reliant on consumers' use of smart wearable devices. This paper aims to develop a model considering health and privacy factors to elucidate consumers' use of smart wearable devices for unleashing their full potential in interactive marketing.

The authors collected 250 samples via an online survey to validate the smart wearable devices usage model that elucidates factors that stimulate consumer usage, including privacy concerns, health consciousness and consumer innovativeness. The authors used structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis to test the hypotheses.

Privacy concerns of consumers have a negative effect on smart wearable devices usage, while health consciousness positively impacts consumers' usage of smart wearable devices. Consumer innovativeness indirectly affects smart wearable devices usage via effort expectancy. Experienced consumers are less sensitive to the performance expectancy but more affected by effort expectancy regarding smart wearable devices.

The present study contributes to the literature stream of health-AI usage by unraveling the impacts of privacy concerns and health consciousness and examining the moderating role of prior experience. The findings suggest marketers in the health-AI industry should endeavor to build transparent and sound privacy protection mechanisms and promote smart wearable devices by fostering health awareness of potential consumers.

Drawing upon the Elaboration Likelihood Model, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the characteristics of social media moderate the effect of a firm’s apology on the attitude of its customers.

An online experiment including 360 active users of internet was employed to test the research model.

Results revealed that an after-crisis apology and firm reputation both have a positive effect on after-crisis user attitude toward the firm. Furthermore, the positive effect of apology becomes stronger as online media interactivity increases, whereas the positive effect of reputation becomes weaker.

This study included only one important characteristic of social media, and experimental scenarios were limited to car recall crisis. Considering that social media has so many platforms that may have different kinds of interactivity, further studies can be conducted to figure out the most suitable social media for firms to deal with an online crisis.

The results inform managers of the importance of after-crisis apology and firm reputation. It is worthwhile for managers to find out the levels of online media interactivity at which users focus on apology and reputation and accordingly conduct an effective online crisis management response strategy.

This study extends the literature on online crisis management and the literature on ELM by highlighting the role of online media interactivity in influencing the persuasive effectiveness of firm’s crisis response in the context of social media.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore the negative consequences of ubiquitous connectivity enabled by personal IT ensembles (PITEs) usage; and second, to investigate the gender differences in the adverse effects of ubiquitous connectivity.

This study employs a socio-technical approach to identify the technical and interpersonal dimensions of PITE-enabled ubiquitous connectivity and develops a theoretical model to investigate their stress-inducing effects based on the framework of technostress. Furthermore, the moderating role of gender is examined based on the social role theory. The authors test the model on a sample of 439 Chinese netizens.

Ubiquitous technical and interpersonal connectivity induce four stressors: information overload, communication overload, life invasion and privacy invasion. These stressors further lead to psychological exhaustion and reluctance to try new ITs. The ubiquitous technical connectivity exerts stronger effects on stressors for female users than male users, and interpersonal connectivity exerts a stronger effect for male users than female users.

This study primarily contributes to the small amount of research on PITE-enabled ubiquitous connectivity by considering ubiquitous connectivity from a socio-technical perspective and examining the stress-related effects and outcomes of both technical and interpersonal dimensions of ubiquitous connectivity. This study also provides valuable insights into the gender differences in the stress-inducing effects of the two dimensions of ubiquitous connectivity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the use of social media by citizens has impacted the traditional conceptualization and operationalization of political participation in the society.

This study is based on Teorell et al.’s (2007) classification of political participation which is modified to suit the current context of social media. The authors classified 15,460 tweets along three parameters suggested in the framework with help of supervised text classification algorithms.

The analysis reveals that Activism is the most prominent form of political participation undertaken by people on Twitter. Other activities that were undertaken include Formal Political participation and Consumer participation. The analysis also reveals that identity of participant does not play a classifying role as expected from the theoretical framework. It was found that the social media as a platform facilitates new forms of participation which are not feasible offline.

The current work considers only the microblogging platform of Twitter as the data source. For a more comprehensive insight, analysis of other social media platforms is also required.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the few analyses where such a large database covering multiple social media events has been created and analysed using supervised text classification algorithms. A large proportion of previous studies on social media have been based on case study and have limited analysis to only a particular event on social media. Although there exist a few works that have studied a vast and varied collection of social media data (Gaby and Caren, 2012; Shirazi, 2013; Rane and Salem, 2012), such efforts are few in number. This study aims to add to that stream of work where a wider and more generalized set of social media data is studied.

Sustainable success of group-buying web sites implies that consumers not only accept them initially but also use them continuously. Most group-buying web sites, however, are unable to achieve such sustainable success. Drawing on expectation-confirmation model (ECM), the purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that influence group-buying web sites continuance.

In total, 605 valid responses were collected via a survey of a leading group-buying web site in China. Structural equation modeling was used to test the research model. This study also compared the three competing models of continued use behavior, namely, ECM, the research model and the integrated model.

The results show that perceived web site quality, perceived price advantage and confirmation are important determinants of consumer satisfaction, while perceived web site quality, perceived reputation, satisfaction and perceived critical mass significantly influence consumers’ continuance intention. The research model accounts for more variance in satisfaction and continuance intention than ECM and is the best-fitting model among the competing models.

Drawing on ECM, this research proposes a model by incorporating three online group-buying characteristics (perceived price advantage, perceived reputation and perceived web site quality) and two social influence factors (subjective norm and perceived critical mass). Specially, this study uses these three online group-buying characteristics to represent perceived usefulness in ECM. These constructs are found to influence consumer satisfaction and continuance intention. This study extends ECM and provides a better explanation of consumers’ post-purchase behavior in the online group-buying context.

The purpose of this paper is to : first, examine information systems (IS) infusion from a user commitment perspective, and second, examine the formation of user commitment toward the use of IS in terms of job design.

This study adopts a survey approach with structural equation modeling to test the developed research model and hypotheses.

A survey of 236 enterprise system users shows that user commitment has a positive effect on IS infusion. User commitment, in turn, is influenced by task technology fit, technology self-efficacy, and task autonomy. Further mediation and direct effects to IS infusion are explored.

This study offers implications for research, such as explaining a driver of IS infusion; and extending commitment theory by finding antecedents of user commitment.

The results of this study offer suggestions to management on how to improve IS infusion in terms of user commitment and, consequently, how to develop user commitment based on the socio-technical system (STS) design.

The study highlights the critical impact of technology autonomy on IS infusion. An individual user’s authority in using and regulating the system is required for IS infusion.

This study has proposed a theoretical model of IS infusion based on commitment and socio-technical job design factors.