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Online games are popular applications of Internet technology, with over 2.8 billion users worldwide. Many players engage in team gameplay, indicating that online games are suitable media through which players connect with their friends. However, past studies have not examined the ability of games to assist players in connecting with their friends, indicating a gap. To fill this gap, the authors propose a new concept, the friend-connecting affordance, which is the ability of an online game to enable players to contact friends within the game.

The authors built a model to explain how games' friend-connecting affordances influence game loyalty. The authors gathered responses from 1,347 online players and used structural equation modeling to test the model.

The authors found that friend-connecting affordances and team participation influence game loyalty. Gaming intensity and gaming history can moderate the impact of friend-connecting affordances.

This new affordance can be realized through various game elements, offering unique and actionable insights to game makers. The authors also compared the friend-connecting affordances among a number of popular online games, providing insights specific to each game and increasing the practical value of the findings.

Using a GED-GARCH model to estimate monthly data from January 1990 to February 2022, we test whether gold acts as a hedge or safe haven asset in 10 countries. With a downturn of the stock market, gold can be viewed as a hedge and safe haven asset in the G7 countries. In the case of inflation, gold acts as a hedge and safe haven asset in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, China, and Indonesia. For currency depreciation, oil price shock, economic policy uncertainty, and US volatility spillover, evidence finds that gold acts as a hedge and safe haven for all countries.

This study aims to investigate the role of green strategic alliances (GSAs) in fostering a green shared vision (GSVis) and green shared value (GSV) and their impact on green organizational identity (GOI) and sustainability.

The authors employed structural equation modeling to analyze data collected through a 60-item questionnaire administered in Portugal and China, allowing the authors to test their theoretical model.

The findings of the authors' study indicate that green strategic alliances have a positive influence on the development of a GSVis and GSV in both countries. This, in turn, contributes to improved sustainability and the establishment of a GOI. Furthermore, the authors' results demonstrate that these alliances enhance GSV, resulting in enhanced sustainability performance and a stronger green identity, with a notable increase in awareness of environmental and social practices.

This article is innovative as it applies organizational learning and value creation theories to gain a deeper understanding of how alliances can shape the green identity of companies and contribute to their overall sustainability.

This study aims to examine the public’s acceptance of film-induced tourism and develops the relationship among placement marketing, involvement, place attachment and travel intention. The film Your Love Song shot in the Hualien and Taitung regions in Taiwan was selected as the case study.

An online sample survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire, and statistical tests and overall structural equation modeling analysis using the SPSS and AMOS statistical software packages, respectively, were performed.

This study results demonstrate that destination placement marketing has a significant positive effect on the level of destination involvement, place attachment and travel intention of viewers. Moreover, the level of involvement has some intermediary effect on the interrelationship between placement marketing and travel intention. Hence, this study suggests that relevant government agencies and tourism operators should promote local tourism through films and television shows and attract more tourists by retaining the original shooting scenes.

While previous studies have only analyzed two or three of the four concepts of film-induced tourism, placement marketing, travel intention, involvement and place attachment, this study completely integrates these four concepts and proves the correlation between them.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework that establishes the linkages among green dynamic capability (GDC), green innovation (GI), organisational creativity (OC) and organisational agility (OA), which influence small and medium enterprises (SMEs) sustainability performance (SP) in trade and service sectors in Thailand.

This paper conducts a search of existing literature regarding SMEs SP. A conceptual framework is provided that can be used by SMEs to enhance their SP driving sustainable business growth.

A framework for SMEs sustainability is proposed, which demonstrates the connection between GDC and SME SP, with GI and OC as mediators and OA as a moderator.

This paper is limited in terms of the scope of SME sustainability in the context of the trade and service sector. Future empirical study should be conducted to validate the proposed framework and hypotheses in this study.

This study forms the basis for the enhancement of SMEs SP in relation to boosting their GDC, GI, creativity and agility.

This paper presents a comprehensive framework that leads to the conceptualisation of SME SP. It will help practitioners and academics to better understand the causes of SMEs SP.

Since 2017, China's digital economy has accounted for more than 30% of the country's GDP. The digital economy has become the main driving force of China's economic development. Moreover, the digital economy has also changed the traditional modes of production and distribution between urban and rural areas. This paper aims to explore the influential mechanism of digital economy infrastructure (DEI) on the urban-rural income gap (URIG).

By analyzing the theoretical model of the URIG, this paper constructs a theoretical analysis framework and clarifies the key roles of rural land circulation (RLC) and resident population urbanization (RPU) in the relationship between DEI and the URIG.

The DEI can effectively reduce the URIG; the regression coefficient (RC) was −0.109. The reduction effect is mainly reflected in: 1) the wage income gap between urban and rural residents (RC = −0.128) and 2) the net property income gap of urban and rural residents (RC = −0.321). Also, for the spatial spillover effect, the path effect of “DEI – RLC – URIG” is almost equal to the path effect of “DEI – RPU – URIG”; for the local effect, the path effect of the former is far smaller than the latter. Moreover, when the RPU reaches the threshold of 86.29%, the DEI will expand the URIG (RC = 0.201).

This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the impact of DEI on the URIG, explores the mechanism of RLC and RPU in the DEI and URIG and enriches the theory of traditional research on URIG.

The optimal level of customer participation is an important factor in service design. However, researchers know little about the impact of customer participation for their willingness to pay and hence organizations’ financial outcomes. This paper examines the impact of customer participation in a pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing system, allowing customers to pay any price they want for a product or service.

This paper reports the results of three experiments, in which the authors manipulated the level of customer participation (Study 1: Low versus high, Study 2: Medium versus high, Study 3: Low versus medium versus high) and measured customers' PWYW payments (Studies 1–3), customer satisfaction (Studies 1–3), perceived equity (Study 3) and perceived enjoyment (Study 3). Studies 1 and 3 were scenario-based experiments, while study 2 was a field experiment. Study 3 was preregistered.

The results support a direct effect of customer participation in service production on customer PWYW payments, yet only when comparing low to high levels of customer participation. High levels of customer participation lead to a decrease in perceived equity and an increase in perceived enjoyment, which in turn spilled over to customer PWYW payments through customer satisfaction.

This research provides causal evidence at the individual level of analysis for the relationship between customer participation in service production and financial results. The paper also provides insights into its underlying mechanisms.

This study attempts to fill the research gap by extending sustainability literature and providing empirical evidence that considers sustainability marketing commitment (SMC) as a fundamental attribute of effective marketing strategy that consequently improves tourism service quality, as represented by service attractiveness.

In the current study, data was collected from 313 tourism and hospitality firms. To test the model, this study applied structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate the relationships among environmental strategy, SMC, supplier trust and service attractiveness in a mediation-moderation setting.

The results indicate that the multiple mediation effects of environmental strategy may indirectly influence tourist attractiveness through SMC and tourism services. The two-way moderating effects reveal that supplier trust and socialization strengthen the service attractiveness development process, while three-way interaction discovered that socialization and supplier trust positively moderate the relationships between tourism services and service attractiveness.

Sustainable strategy is a future trend for tourism business management; however, unknown to most is the role of marketing and environmental strategy in tourism business due to lack of integration with concepts in marketing strategy, with the multidimensionality of tourism services, and with the function of trust and socialization, critically undermining analyses of service attractiveness. This paper combines corporate sustainability and sustainability marketing methods to explore how an environmental strategy can improve tourism services and enhance a destination's attractiveness based on a mediation-moderation mechanism.

The effectiveness of a message and its attributes have become important for digital media. This study aims to investigate how different elements of a website including both argument-oriented and emotional stimuli based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) can affect the issue involvement and change the attitude of the website visitors of a healthcare service provider.

The Ministry of Health and Education (MOHME) website was selected to explore how its content and design can persuade visitors. An online survey was conducted on 355 adults engaging in health protection behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis showed that one design element, i.e. website navigation and one social cue, i.e. social connectedness, have positive impact on issue involvement, while social presence and website satisfaction have a negative effect on issue involvement because of the random fluctuation suppressor effect. In addition, prior knowledge significantly influenced the issue's involvement. Further, website satisfaction has impacted attitudes directly. There was no significant relationship between argument quality and issue involvement.

Previous works have studied health-related behaviors in offline contexts; however, the scholars have not focused on the individuals' persuasion using ELM regarding the healthcare services provided in online communities. The results of the current study have theoretical and practical implications for scholars, website designers and policymakers.