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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted numerous businesses and upended the lives and shopping habits of most consumers. This study aims to examine the price sensitivity and the efficacy of online reviews during a pandemic crisis.

This study borrowed from the regulatory focus theory and heuristic-systematic model and used a unique longitudinal sample of 320,000 product/day observations from the jeans category, collected before and during the pandemic, to investigate how consumers’ online shopping behavior changed during the pandemic.

The results of several hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that during the pandemic consumers were less price-sensitive and more willing to pay price premiums for jeans. Furthermore, consumers were more (less) likely to be influenced by online review volume than valence. Finally, the results of a post-hoc study highlighted the potential role of regulatory focus as the underlying psychological mechanism explaining the effect of the pandemic.

This research contributes to the digital marketing and regulatory-focus literatures by showing that the COVID-19 pandemic may have triggered a prevention-focus state of mind and prompted consumers to place a greater value on online review volume than valence when shopping online (for jeans). Furthermore, this paper contributes to the pricing literature by offering further evidence that the pandemic may have inclined consumers to be less price-sensitive.

This paper provides a framework of the indicators of the quality of text in online reviews and their influence on the perceived helpfulness of reviews. First, the authors assess the effects of concreteness, readability and credibility on review helpfulness. The authors then test whether these effects change, based on review valence and readers' personality traits (specifically, extraversion and neuroticism).

The authors conducted an online experiment in the context of hotel reviews and tested our model using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE).

The authors' findings indicate that consumers consider all three quality features – concreteness, readability and credibility when evaluating negative reviews. However, they assess positive reviews based only on how credible they seem to be. Consumers with the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion value different review characteristics and this difference is dependent on review valence.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the interactions between review valence and reader personality on review helpfulness. The authors' findings make important contributions to the literature on information diagnosticity and offer managerial implications related to customizing the presentation order of reviews based on their expected helpfulness for individuals with extraverted and neurotic personalities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of volume and valence of online movie ratings on consumers’ risk perceptions and purchase intentions, as well as the moderating impact of cultural values, in four emerging Asian markets.

Using a survey questionnaire, data was collected from 204 respondents for Study 1 and 376 respondents for Study 2 in four emerging markets (China, India, Chinese Macau, and the Philippines). The analysis was conducted using analysis of variance.

Results indicate that moviegoers express higher risk perceptions and lower purchase intentions when the volume of online ratings is smaller and when the valence (average rating) is lower. These effects are enhanced for more conservative consumers, but are not influenced by consumers’ self-transcendence. Indian consumers were found to be more conservative than the other Asian consumers in the study.

Taken together, the findings make significant contributions to the literature on services marketing, online ratings, cultural values, risk perceptions, and emerging markets. In contrast to correlational studies, the experimental design controls for potential confounding factors and provides evidence of causality between online ratings and consumer responses. In addition, by using cultural values, the authors avoid the problems associated with using national culture scores to characterize individuals or sub-groups within countries.

The study suggests that despite the geographical proximity of these emerging markets, key discernible differences exist due to the moderating impact of cultural values on consumer responses. When targeting consumers in relatively conservative markets (e.g. India), a large volume of positive online ratings may lower consumers’ risk perceptions and increase their purchase intentions.

This study is one of the pioneering studies examining the impacts of volume and valence of online movie ratings on consumers’ risk perceptions and purchase intentions in emerging Asian markets.

The purpose of study is to understand the motivation of academic library users by developing Vroom’s expectancy theory in the context of academic libraries using the grounded theory approach.

The grounded theory approach has been used for data collection, analysis and development of theory. The data were collected through the process of theoretical sampling. Interviews of faculty and students belonging to government and private universities in India were recorded and transcribed till theoretical saturation was achieved. The interviews were analysed in three stages, i.e. open coding, axial coding and selective coding, to identify concepts of Vroom’s theory and integrate them into a theoretical model.

The components of Vroom’s theory, i.e. motivation, expectancy, instrumentality and valence were generated from data. The motivation to visit an academic library can be classified as intrinsic motivation and force choice motivation. Expectancy in the context of academic libraries is related to ease or difficulty in accessing library and its resources which relates to ease of location access, timing access, remote access, access to siblings and discipline norms for access. Instrumentality is related to infrastructure, information, service and promotion. Valence is related to pleasure and satisfaction. The concepts were integrated into a theoretical model.

The study is limited to academic libraries under state universities and private universities in India. Hence, the study cannot be generalised across institutions enjoying autonomy by the Government of India. Users of academic libraries may be motivated by several factors other than those considered with respect to motivation, expectancy, instrumentality and valence. The findings are based on the grounded theory approach which is an inductive approach. Alternate research methodologies, both inductive and deductive, need to be used to strengthen the external validity.

The understanding of user motivation through Vroom’s theory will help academic libraries to increase user motivation, thereby increasing usage of library resources.

Vroom’s expectancy theory of motivation in the context of academic libraries was developed using the grounded theory approach.

This paper aims to present a cross‐national study that investigates changes in purchase intentions of UK versus Chinese consumers following exposure to successive e‐WOM comments in the form of positive and negative user reviews for experience versus search products.

A 2(e‐WOM valence and order: negative versus positive most recent)×2(product type: experience versus search)×3(purchase intentions at t₁, t₂, t₃) repeated‐measures factorial design is used to test a set of hypotheses developed from the literature.

Chinese consumers are susceptible to recent e‐WOM comments regardless of their valence, while UK consumers anchor on negative information regardless of the order in which it is acquired. This holds particularly for experience products.

This cross‐national study contributes to the scarce literature on the impact of e‐WOM on consumer purchase decisions by comparing UK and Chinese consumers. The authors suggest that culture moderates the development of product evaluations following exposure to e‐WOM.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of consumer characteristics and information in explaining their shopping intention regarding intelligent sensor-based services.

This study uses scenario-based experiments with the US consumers, in the context of retailers offering radio frequency identification (RFID)-based services. A post-hoc focus group interview was conducted to gain indepth insights into the study findings.

Consumers' optimistic attitude toward innovative technologies was highly influential to their shopping intention regardless of the information message valence. The role of discomfort toward innovative technologies is mixed. Contrary to the prediction, when consumers received negative information about RFID-based services, their prior knowledge of innovative technologies increased their shopping intention. Sub-dimensions of privacy concerns had differential impacts depending on the information content. Also, the negativity effect of information about RFID-based services was supported.

The results showed the important role of consumer characteristics and information together, in regard to consumers' intention to shop. The specific context, RFID-based services, has been rarely studied with consumer perspectives despite the prediction of increasing item-level adoption by retailers.

Companies should understand their target consumers particularly regarding optimistic attitude toward and knowledge of innovative technology for improved consumers' reactions to intelligent sensor-based services like RFID.

As one of the few empirical studies on intelligent sensor-based services, this study provides important insights into the roles of consumer traits and communication about intelligent sensor-based services with consumers, in order for companies to fully harness innovative service offerings.

Recent research on word-of-mouth (WOM) has presented consistent evidence on the importance of secondary WOM (sWOM) on online user-generated content (UGC) and on diffusion of positive and negative commercial information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what motivates consumers to spread, via electronic WOM communication, negative information about commercial entities adversity using malicious verbal narratives. Based on concepts related to the joy of pain (schadenfreude) and gloating behavior the authors propose a set of hypotheses designed to test two key moderators (perceived deservingness and entity’s status) as well as the process of spiteful dissemination like content assimilation, dissemination time and duration.

The research consists on a series of four studies using different research methods (surveys and experiments) and a mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Results show that actively communicating about others’ adversity (i.e. gloating behavior) provides an outlet to the passive observation of others’ adversity (i.e. schadenfreude feelings). Results indicate that schadenfreude and gloating are linked to the perceived deservingness of a commercial entity and entity status (the tall poppy syndrome). Results also show that malicious feelings and gloating behavior cause consumers to disseminate information more widely, more rapidly, for a longer period and frequently distort its content.

The findings contribute to literature on WOM by introducing an approach that highlights the potential negative effects of WOM on the dissemination of commercial information that might harm the relevant commercial entity’s reputation and goodwill.

This study illuminates the prevalence of negative rhetoric in WOM and supports the theory schadenfreude motives as a trigger for gloating behavior in the form of disseminating negative, malicious and intense WOM regarding commercial setbacks. This research is the first to examine and demonstrates that when it comes to WOM communication, schadenfreude feelings and gloating behavior might play a central role in the dissemination of negative information and the two constructs’ role in understanding infostorms, the sudden flow of large quantities of negative WOM using strong gleeful exultation. This study is the first to examine these phenomena in the business setting.

Nonfinancial information is becoming more readily available to investors, and thus, relative to annual financial reports, is having an increasing influence on investors' stock pricing decisions. Using Hogarth and Einhorn's (1992) belief-adjustment model, we examine how task familiarity (high, medium, and low) influences nonprofessional investor stock price decisions when these investors are presented with a stream of both positive and negative nonfinancial news. We find that task familiarity negatively correlates with reaction size for both positive and negative information, which creates arbitrage opportunities for those with more task familiarity. However, we find that assurance mitigates this effect, leveling the playing field for less task-familiar investors in most cases. These findings are important as the volume and variety of information types increase, and as more nonfinancial information enters the marketplace in discrete sound bites (e.g., social media, press releases, daily reports). Findings suggest that assurance is one way to lessen the biases exhibited by investors with less task familiarity. These results enhance our understanding of nonprofessional investor behavior through the lens of belief revision.

This paper aims to investigate the direct and interactive effects of regulatory focus (promotion versus prevention), attribute type (search versus experience) and word of mouth valence (positive versus negative) on consumption decision for a service and a product.

Three empirical studies (two laboratories and a field experiment) using “university” and “mobile phone” as the research setting were used to test the key hypotheses.

Promotion (prevention)-focused subjects preferred experience (search) attributes over their counterparts while making consumption decision. This preference was further reinforced for both promotion and prevention-focused people under positive word of mouth. Under negative word of mouth, in comparison to their counterparts, promotion-focused people still retained their preference for experience attributes, whereas prevention-focused subjects reversed their preference and maintained status quo.

Future research may validate and extend authors’ findings by looking into the underlying process or studying additional word of mouth variables that may moderate the current findings.

The findings will help managers devise a range of marketing strategies in the areas of advertising and product positioning, especially for products/services that are showcased in terms of experience and search attributes.

The current research is novel as no prior research has proposed and tested the two-way interaction between regulatory focus and search/experience attributes, or its further moderation by word of mouth valence.

The purpose of this research is to address an important gap in identity research – how does consumer identity affect satisfaction following an unambiguous product experience.

Two experiments were conducted involving a product experience scenario and a service recovery encounter.

Study results demonstrate that experience valence moderates the impact of identity on customer satisfaction. Specifically, we find that identity improves satisfaction with a positive (but does not increase dissatisfaction with a negative) experience, and this effect arises via enhanced performance perceptions under positive experience rather than expectations.

Our research investigates whether the prior research argument that identity is a powerful and “sticky” source of brand evaluation is robust to product experience. Specifically, we extend the disconfirmation paradigm of satisfaction by identifying identity as a driver of satisfaction and by testing whether identity effects emerge via biased perceptions of performance or altered expectations.

Our findings offer interesting managerial implications in terms of using identity marketing to enhance customer satisfaction with positive experiences and to increase the effectiveness of recovery from brand failures, but identity marketing cannot shield a brand from negative product experience.

To our knowledge, this research is first to demonstrate the joint effects of identity and experience information on satisfaction using two different identities and settings.