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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects that reference prices and associated information sources (websites that consumers use to explore and their friends who have similar perspectives on value) have on deal evaluation and intention to disseminate electronic word of mouth (eWOM).

A stratified survey is conducted to empirically test the relations between reference prices, associated information sources (the top five Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) websites and top five Facebook friends with similar perspectives and values on consumption), deal evaluation, and eWOM intention. The study uses a Facebook API to help participants pick five Facebook friends to act as their favorite sources for advice on shopping.

The results suggest that consumers’ deal evaluations (as shaped by the recency effects of previous exposure to prices and the influence of Facebook friends and C2C websites) have carry-over effects on their eWOM intentions. The influence of Facebook friends and C2C websites on deal evaluation is as powerful as that of reference price, especially concerning the mean and the lowest prices.

The findings encourage marketers to invest their resources in targeting online groups, and suggest that C2C website marketers should set their offer prices between the mean and the lowest prices.

This study extends prior research on the motives for eWOM dissemination and elaborates an approach to initiate eWOM intention through deal evaluation.

The study examines how the three dimensions of homophily (attitude, background, and value) influence the perceived usefulness, credibility, and enjoyability of travel content and follower behavior (i.e. willingness to search for more information and intention to visit the destination and purchase the tourism product). Likewise, the study investigates how content perception influences follower behavior.

A sample of 621 Instagram users from generations Y and Z who follow at least one travel influencer and intend to travel in the next twelve months was collected through an online survey. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was adopted to examine the data.

Attitudinal homophily influences follower behavior, value homophily impacts content perception, and background homophily has a counterproductive effect. Likewise, content perceived as useful and credible induces the intention to visit and purchase the tourism product.

The generalization of the results must be performed with care, as the context of analysis is limited to a social platform and only includes Portuguese individuals.

The findings help managers better understand which homophily cues influence content perception and maximize influencer persuasion. Based on the results, they can better decide which travel influencers should endorse their tourism products.

Research on homophily has neglected the multidimensionality of the concept and its analysis in the tourism context. By using a consolidated approach to homophily, content perception, and follower behavior, this study contributes to the tourism marketing literature and expands influencer marketing research.

This empirical study aims to analyse the talent spotters' perception of their tendency to be homophilic in the talent identification process and their stance on it. Besides, this article examines the type of homophily and the homophily attributes involved.

Based on a qualitative design, 37 middle and senior line managers, working for two Argentine conglomerates in six Latin American countries, participated in the study. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews.

Homophily was perceived by most of talent spotters, who judged it as natural, while it was not perceived by a small group of the interviewees. In addition, among those who recognized its presence, another group advocated the homophilic advantages, while a final one admitted the presence of homophily and its negative implications. In addition, a variety of homophily attributes were identified; most of them within the value category. We posit that if homophily attributes are, at the same time, components of high potential models, homophily will constitute a functional bias to the talent identification process.

This is the first study that explores the talent spotters' perception of their homophily bias as well as the diversity of homophily attributes present in the talent identification process. This research highlights the relevance of the homophily attributes' analysis, taking into account its alignment to the potential model in order to improve the talent identification process.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze patterns of client and professional interaction as reported by professionals in the apparel industry.

This qualitative research involved 23 professionals or individuals who worked for more than ten years in an executive position. The participants, who worked in a variety of positions, in the US apparel industry were interviewed extensively about their professional experiences. Data were analyzed by identifying themes in the interview transcripts using a grounded approach methodology.

The participants described their professional relationships with clients. Clients included individuals in the general public and other industry professionals who used the service or bought the product. The participants, all women, showed similarity or homophily with clients' values, fashion level, age, gender, economic level, and body size. All participants emphasized differences or heterophily with clients in expertise and level of innovation.

This information is helpful for new professionals in the apparel industry and other business professionals to understand how to succeed and what to emphasize when relating to clients.

This study demonstrates how a grounded approach to interview analysis can add to theory and provide useful information about succeeding in a business environment. Limited research exists about professionals' use of homophily and heterophily to relate to their clients. Homophily and heterophily dimensions (e.g. age, gender, and expertise) used by apparel industry professionals in relating with clients are identified. Also, strategies that these professionals used to create homophily and heterophily are discussed.

As a new communication paradigm, social networking sites (SNS) have boosted information diffusion and viral marketing. Prior researchers have identified various factors affecting information dissemination on SNS. However, they often focus on limited factors and there is a lack of an integrated theoretical framework that explains aspects of relevant factors. Besides, the research on the impacts of relationships on individual retweeting behavior is still controversial. The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework to systematically investigate the determinants of individual dissemination behavior on SNS based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). Moreover, the authors also examine the relative importance of those relevant factors.

The authors randomly selected 1,250 members of Twitter and crawled posts published by each member since he/she created the Twitter account using Twitter API. The authors processed the data to create panel data and tested hypotheses with the panel logit model.

Factors both on the central route and on the peripheral route of ELM have positive impacts on individual dissemination behavior. Among them, information receiver-related factor and relationships-related factors are the most influential. Contrastingly, source-related factors are the least influential. Furthermore, the authors find that social tie strength mediates almost 50 percent of the effect of value homophily on individual dissemination behavior.

The authors are the first to directly apply ELM to examine individual dissemination behavior on SNS. By integrating factors into the two information processing routes, They incorporate relevant factors into the model and systematically analyze their impacts on individual retweeting behavior on SNS. The research offers at least one explanation for the contradictory findings about the effect of homophily on individual sharing behavior in previous research. The authors propose new variables that gauge topical relevance and interpersonal value homophily on SNS.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of employee homogeneity on the financial performance of minority business enterprises (MBEs). It is widely postulated that MBEs tend to hire minorities that resemble the ethnicity of the founder(s) and that this is beneficial by helping to decrease minority unemployment rates as well as providing new opportunities to minorities that they might not otherwise receive at White-owned firms.

The study used hierarchical linear regression on archival data of 271 MBEs to determine if employee homogeneity will be a factor in understanding their financial performance. The authors also conducted exploratory interviews with a convenience sample of MBEs to gain insight into the concept of employee homophily.

The research uncovered that as homogeneity increases, MBE financial performance decreases, and this effect is more pronounced the longer the MBE is in business.

The data set is cross-sectional in nature and lack the perspective and clarity of time. The paper only contains a small set of exploratory interviews. The most significant implication from the study is that a lack of diversity decreases the long-term financial viability of MBEs which is to counter mainstream arguments that speak only to the positive aspects of MBEs hiring their own.

The research builds on the scant literature on the impact of diversity within MBEs. It also provides guidance to MBEs by suggesting they be strategic in diversifying their employee base in order to improve performance.

This study aims to not only develop measurements of preferential attachment and homophily mechanisms based on their definitions and network theory but also examine the associations among these network mechanisms, community commitment, knowledge sharing and community citizenship behavior.

In total, 250 valid questionnaires are collected to examine the hypothesized associations. These hypotheses are examined by using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal both mechanisms are beneficial to develop new entrants’ emotional attachment to a virtual community, thereby motivating knowledge sharing and community altruistic behavior. The results contribute some practical and theoretical implications that are very helpful for the conceptualization of network mechanisms, community development, relationship management and incentives for extra-role behavior.

The literature on the link between network selection mechanisms and knowledge sharing remains unknown. This study is the pioneer to disclose this unknown association and examine the impacts of preferential attachment and homophily network mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of user personality and vlaues on the number of connections users make, the number of requests for connections that users give out, and the number of connections invitations users receive.

This is a field study of 179 participants interacting in a novel virtual world. The world’s server logs are used to capture sociometrics about the users and their interaction.

Findings suggest that personality and values influence the number of friends users make and the number of friendship requests users give out, but not the number of friendship invitations users receive. Only one personality trait – conscientiousness – exhibits homophily.

Perosnality and social value orientation have rarely been studied together in information systems (IS) research, despite research showing the two have an impact on IS relevant constructs. The use of server logs for data capture is novel. Avatar friendship is an under-researched concept in IS.

The rise of social media has led to the emergence of influencers and influencer marketing (IM) domains, which have become important areas of academic inquiry. However, despite its prominence as an area for study, several significant challenges must be addressed. One significant challenge involves identifying, assessing and recommending social media influencers (SMIs). This study proposes a semantic network model capable of measuring an influencer's performance on specific topics or subjects to address this issue. This study can assist managers in identifying suitable SMIs based on their estimated reach.

Data from popular YouTube influencers and publicly available performance measures (views and likes) are extracted. Second, the titles of the past videos made by the influencer are used to develop a semantic network connecting all the videos to other videos based on similarity measures. Third, the nearest neighbor approach extracts the neighbors of the target title video. Finally, based on the set of neighbors, a range prediction is made for the views and likes of the target video with the influencer.

The results show that the model can predict an accurate range of views and likes based on the suggested video titles and the content creator, with 69–78% accuracy across different influencers on YouTube.

The current study introduces a novel and innovative approach that exploits the textual association between a SMI's previous content to forecast the outcome of their future content. Although the findings are encouraging, this research recognizes various constraints that upcoming researchers may tackle. Forecasting views of posts concerning novel subjects and precisely adjusting video view counts based on their age constitute two primary limitations of this study.

Managers interested in hiring influencers can employ the suggested approach to evaluate an influencer's potential performance on a specific topic. This research aids managers in making informed decisions regarding influencer selection, utilizing data-based metrics that are simple to comprehend and explain.

The study contributes to outreach evaluation and better estimating the impact of SMIs using a novel semantic network approach.

Previous studies have highlighted that communication barrier was one of the major safety problems faced by ethnic minority (EM) workers. This study aims to model the predominant safety communication networks of EM crews and explore the relationships among safety communication networks, individual attributes, safety climate, near misses and injuries of EM crews.

Case studies were conducted with EM crews in the Hong Kong construction industry. Demographic attribute, network, safety climate and accidents data were collected through questionnaires and analyzed by a combination of social network analysis (SNA), cross-case comparison and nonparametric tests.

The results revealed that language proficiency, network density and level of reciprocity were contributing factors of distinguishing high and low safety performing EM crews. EM management received more safety information from EM workers than local management. The centrality of EM workers was significantly related to their age, the perceived priority of safety and language ability.

The research findings regarding the impact of safety communication network characteristics on the safety performance of EM crews provides insights to employers on how to cultivate effective safety communication patterns within EM crews that can lead to better safety performance. The connections between personal attributes and their positions in safety communication networks could help the employers identify the EM workers who are positioned on edges of networks and need more attention.

This study contributes to knowledge by enriching the limited research on analyzing safety communication of small construction crews using SNA and expanding the research object to EM construction crews in the literature, who are more vulnerable to construction accidents. This research also extends the existing body of knowledge from studies mainly carried out in Western culture to Eastern culture. Although safety communication has been regarded as important for EM workers, there is a lack of quantitative analysis on this at a crew level. The present study provides empirical research to reveal authentic safety communication networks and their connections with safety performance and personal attributes.