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The purpose of this paper is to study the interaction of timing cues (active deals vs upcoming deals) and brand familiarity on consumers’ purchase intention.

The research design of this paper is based on one experiment conducted in a behavioural experimental laboratory and two experiments in Mechanical Turk. The data received from these experiments were analysed using one-way ANOVA technique and PROCESS models.

Results across three experiments show that consumers prefer upcoming deals over active deals when brands are of low familiarity. However, the effect is attenuated for brands with high familiarity. Further, the paper proposes and shows that the effects of timing cues and brand familiarity interactions on purchase intention are explained by temporal distance. Finally, results show that need for cognition moderates the effects.

The research results may vary when size of discounts is mentioned. There is a need to study various other moderators such as product type, self-other overlap and regulatory focus.

The paper offers managerial strategies and insights that can be adopted by the online retailing industry. Paper offers practical implications for brands, especially for ones with low familiarity.

This paper adds to the literature by studying new timing cues to understand the behaviour of consumers in retailing industries.

While academic research has been conducted on auditors’ ability to exercise professional skepticism in face-to-face client interviews, little is known about auditors’ application of professional skepticism in email communication with the client. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that impact auditor professional skepticism during client inquiries conducted through email.

A 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted with 69 undergraduate and graduate auditing students as surrogates for auditors. The experimental design crossed two levels of client expressed confidence (high and low) and two levels of client response timing to the auditor’s email inquiry (earlier than expected and later than expected).

Results indicate that management expressed confidence moderates the influence of management response timing on auditor professional skepticism and that auditor perceptions of client credibility mediate this interactive effect. When the client’s response is low in confidence, auditors perceive a later-than-expected response from the manager as less credible than an earlier-than-expected response, which leads to less reliance on management explanations, which signifies more skepticism. However, when confidence is high, response timing does not impact perceptions of the client’s credibility.

The results imply that junior auditors should be vigilant of how communication cues in client emails may impact their judgments. Even though management response timing and expressed confidence should not influence auditor skepticism per se, auditors seem to vary their level of skepticism with the timing of the client’s response when client confidence is low but not when client confidence is high, despite the information content of the client’s response being held constant.

This study contributes to the literature on professional skepticism by addressing the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s concerns about the need for auditors to exercise more professional skepticism in practice, particularly in an environment in which computer-mediated communication is increasing at a fast pace; and assists practitioners in better understanding the factors that influence the degree of skepticism auditors exercise when collecting audit evidence through email. The study should be of interest to audit firms, as it provides evidence on whether auditors use nonverbal cues such as chronemics, or time-related messages, in email communication to judge management and evidence reliability and credibility.

Proceeding from studies that, at a general level, identify the extrinsic price cue as a mediator between a wine's perceived and intrinsic merit, the authors aim to report on a tasting‐room experiment conducted to determine the impact of the price cue on sighted ratings across categories of gender, age, and relative experience.

A total of 73 subjects assessed seven merlot wines, first blind and then sighted. During the sighted tasting, the only available cue‐information was the price per bottle. The seven price points ranged from the cheap (R25) to the expensive (R160).

Across all segmentations, the authors' analysis of sighted scores revealed the marked extent to which price effects demean the intrinsic merit of a wine. Older, more experienced and female strata appear to respond the most to price information; their respective model price effects are shown to increase by 57, 33 and 24 percent relative to their base comparators.

These findings challenge the dogma that unbiased sighted assessments are best conducted by self‐proclaimed wine experts who are older and more experienced; and suggest alternately, and perhaps heretically, that such assessments would be better conducted by younger, less experienced, non‐experts.

Contextual cues have become a hot research topic in the field of mobile consumer behavior, owing to the continuous rise of digital marketing. However, the complex online shopping scene makes it challenging to directly identify the association between the characteristics of contextual cues and consumer behavior. Presently, few studies have only systematically extracted and refined the types and characteristics of contextual cues. The purpose of this study is to explore the types and mechanisms of contextual cues in online shopping scenarios.

This study uses the word2vec algorithm, grounded theory and co-occurrence cluster method, along with online shopping word-of-mouth (WOM) text and consumer behavior theory, in order to explore different types of contextual cues and its efficiency from 5,619 comment corpus.

This study puts forward the following conclusions. (1) From the perspective of online shopping, contextual cues comprise aesthetic perception cues, value perception cues, trust-dependent cues, time perception cues, memory attention cues, spatial perception cues, attribute cues and relationship cues. (2) Based on the online shopping scenarios, contextual cues and their interaction effects exert an effect on consumer satisfaction, recommendation, purchase and return behavior.

The study conclusions are helpful to further reveal the deep association between contextual cues and consumer behavior in the process of online shopping, thus providing practical and theoretical enlightenment for enterprises to not only effectively reshape the scene but also promote the consumers' active purchase behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to determine which design and operational attributes of e-commerce websites consumers use to assess website quality. Cue utilization theory is used to examine the explanatory power, robustness and relevance of the WebQual model. Results indicate which WebQual dimensions are the most relevant and salient to website users. These dimensions are categorized by their perceived and confidence values. A second study is conducted about how website users evaluate and utilize the WebQual dimensions.

Survey methodology was utilized to provide insight into the nomological validity of the WebQual model by examining it through a cue utilization lens.

The first study categorizes the WebQual dimensions on their ability to provide a diagnostic measure of website quality, and consumer confidence in their ability to use these cues when judging the website's overall quality. The second study presents results of each dimension in relation to the quality evaluation of an actual e-commerce website. Additional analysis also revealed gender differences in cue utilization.

This study provided insight into WebQual-based research and identified original differences in cue utilization across genders. Results suggest that it may be beneficial for brand managers to focus on a subset of quality dimensions, rather than assume that consumers are comfortable using all website attributes to formulate quality judgments. These, results contribute to multiple literatures by providing a model that developers can utilize to focus on the deterministic characteristics of overall website quality. Further, the cue utilization perspective provides additional avenues for fruitful further research into consumer decision-making in the e-commerce context.

This study aims to investigate the correlation between neural indexes of attention and behavioral indexes of attention and detect the most informative period of brain activity in which the strongest correlation with attentive performance (behavioral index) exists. Finally, to further validate the findings, this paper aims at the prediction of different levels of attention function based on the attention score obtained from repeatable battery for the assessment of neurophysiological status (RBANS).

The present paper analyzes electroencephalogram (EEG) signals recorded by a single prefrontal channel from 105 elderly subjects while they were responding to Stroop color test which is an attention-demanded task. Beside Stroop test, subjects also performed RBANS which provides their level of functionality in different domains including attention. After data acquisition (EEG during Stroop test and RBANS attention score), the authors extract the spectral features of EEG as neural indexes of attention and subjects’ reaction time in response to Stroop test as behavioral index of attention. Then, they explore the correlation between these post-cue frequency band oscillations of EEG with elderly response time (RT). Next, the authors exploit these findings to classify RBANS attention score.

The observations of this study suggest that there is significant negative correlation between alpha gamma ratio (AGR) and RT (p < 0.0001), theta beta ratio (TBR) is positively correlated with subjects’ RT (p < 0.0001), these correlations are stronger in a 500ms period right after triggering the cue (question onset in Stroop test), and 4) TBR and AGR can be effectively used to predict RBANS attention score.

Because of the experiment design, the pre-cue EEG of the next trail was very much overlapped with the post-cue EEG of the current trail. Therefore, the authors could analyze only post-cue EEG. In future study, it would be interesting to investigate the predictability of subject’s future performance from pre-cue EEG and mental preparation.

This study provides an insight into the research on detection of human attention level from EEG instead of conventional neurophysiological tests. It has also potential to be used in implementation of feasible and efficient EEG-based brain computer interface training systems for elderly.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among very few attempts for early prediction of cognitive decline in the domain of attention from brain activity (EEG) instead of conventional tests which are prone to human errors.

Introducing technology at work presents a special challenge as learning is tightly integrated with workplace practices. Current design-based research (DBR) methods are focused on formal learning context and often questioned for a lack of yielding traceable research insights. This paper aims to propose a method that extends DBR by understanding tools as sociocultural artefacts, co-designing affordances and systematically studying their adoption in practice.

The iterative practice-centred method allows the co-design of cognitive tools in DBR, makes assumptions and design decisions traceable and builds convergent evidence by consistently analysing how affordances are appropriated. This is demonstrated in the context of health-care professionals’ informal learning, and how they make sense of their experiences. The authors report an 18-month DBR case study of using various prototypes and testing the designs with practitioners through various data collection means.

By considering the cognitive level in the analysis of appropriation, the authors came to an understanding of how professionals cope with pressure in the health-care domain (domain insight); a prototype with concrete design decisions (design insight); and an understanding of how memory and sensemaking processes interact when cognitive tools are used to elaborate representations of informal learning needs (theory insight).

The method is validated in one long-term and in-depth case study. While this was necessary to gain an understanding of stakeholder concerns, build trust and apply methods over several iterations, it also potentially limits this.

Besides generating traceable research insights, the proposed DBR method allows to design technology-enhanced learning support for working domains and practices. The method is applicable in other domains and in formal learning.

Despite the potentially vital implications of time pressure for group performance in general and team effectiveness in particular, research has traditionally neglected the study of time limits and group effectiveness. We examine the small, but growing, body of research addressing the effect of time pressure on group performance and introduce our Attentional Focus Model of group effectiveness (Karau & Kelly, 1992). We examine recent research on the utility of the model and identify selected implications of the model for how time pressure may interact with other factors such as task type, group structure, and personality to influence team performance. Finally, we discuss methodological issues of studying attention, interaction processes, and team performance.

The purpose of this paper is to observe the decision‐making behavior of real estate investors, both novice and experts. In doing so, the study looks at the information content of the decision‐making process of these players involved in real estate investments.

The paper uses a controlled experiment to directly observe the decision‐making process of the two group of investors (novices and experts) used in this study.

The findings give us an insight on the type of data utilized by the two groups. Expert's frequency of cue utilization was greater in all cues except two. In four cues in particular, underwriter's analysis of stabilized cash flow, loan summary, Phase I and environmental reports and current rent roll the expert's frequency was twice that of novices. This suggests that experience may sensitize experts to the importance of some attributes of real estate overlooked by novices. This study also finds evidence of order of presentation of cues influencing the sequence of cue access by the subjects suggesting the possibility of recency behavior and its impact on real estate investment decision‐making. However, the findings are not conclusive and have to be tested further in future research.

The paper gives an insight into the area of real estate decision‐making, which is a critical aspect of any company involved in real estate investments. The findings from this study can help in inputs for building a normative model of real estate investments that may help streamline the real estate decision‐making process across the industry.

Augmented reality (AR), an innovative interactive technology that can realize the synchronization and integration of virtual and reality, has been widely used in commodity displays and museum exhibitions. However, few studies have examined the effectiveness of AR-based product display in the context of historically cultural and creative product (HCCP) marketing. This study aims to focus on whether and how the application of AR technology to the HCCP display will influence consumers’ product evaluation.

This study uses three experiments to examine the impact of an AR-based product display on consumers’ evaluation of HCCPs. In experiments 1 and 2, the researchers compared the consumer’s evaluation of HCCPs under the AR-based product display condition and two other display conditions (i.e. 3D model display and photographic display) and examined the mediating role of perceived authenticity in the evaluation process. Experiment 3 tested the moderating effect of the availability of artistic detail information on weakening the negative impact of AR-based product display on the evaluation of HCCPs.

This study found that using AR-based displays harms consumers’ evaluation of HCCPs by impairing perceived authenticity. The spatial-temporal cues of real-time circumstances impede consumers’ processing of the historical attributes of the product. The dynamic AR-based display makes it hard for consumers to build the product’s connection with historical prototypes. Thus, consumers’ perception of the authenticity of HCCP is reduced. Providing artistic details during the presentation makes artistic attributes more prominent than historical attributes, allowing consumers to pay more attention to the sensory experience caused by the artistic design instead of the spatial-temporal cues of the product. At this point, the negative impact of AR-based product display on the evaluation of HCCPs will be attenuated.

First, this study shows the adverse effects of AR-based product displays in the field of HCCP marketing. AR-based product display degrades product evaluations when the displayed product has historical attributes. Second, this study extends the perceived authenticity theory to the technological experience context and establishes a theoretical connection with the AR literature. Third, this study explores the multiple characteristics of HCCPs. The historical attributes are the central attribute of HCCPs, leading consumers to perceive lower sense of authenticity due to the conflict with real-time spatiotemporal cues risen from the AR-based display. However, the artistic attributes, which are beyond the limitation of time and space, will attenuate this conflict when they become prominent.