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The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused a slowdown of economic activity across the globe, which has resulted in high levels of disruption to labour markets. This study seeks to examine how the outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted the search strategies of students seeking for an internship, and whether these have changed since the start of the pandemic. The study utilises the strength of weak ties hypothesis, social capital theory and status attainment theory to explore the changes in securing a position since the outbreak of COVID-19.

This study draws on data from two cohorts of MBA students seeking to secure internships: one before the outbreak and one during. A multinomial regression is employed to examine how students have used network ties to secure internships and how this has changed since the outbreak of COVID-19.

The multinomial regression results indicate that there was little difference in the strategies employed by students before the crisis compared to those that secured them during, potentially indicating that students are unwilling to deviate from typical job search strategies, especially in times of uncertainty.

This study provides insights into how network ties are used by job seekers during a period of economic and environmental uncertainty.

Social recommendation has been recognized as a kind of e-commerce with large potential, but how social recommendations influence consumer decisions is still unclear. This paper aims to investigate how recommendations from different social ties influence consumers’ purchase intentions through both behavior and brain activity.

Utilizing behavioral (N = 70) and electroencephalogram (EEG) (N = 49) experiments, this study explored participants’ behavior and brain responses after being recommended by different social ties. The data were analyzed using statistical inference and event-related potential (ERP) analysis.

Behavioral results show that social tie strength positively impacts purchase intention, which can be fitted by a logarithmic model. Moreover, recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect mediate the effect of tie strength on purchase intention serially. EEG findings show that recommendations from weak tie strength elicit larger N100, N200 and P300 amplitudes than those from strong tie strength. These results imply that weak tie strength may motivate individuals to recruit more mental resources in social recommendation, including unconscious processing of consumer attention and conscious processing of cognitive conflict and negative emotion.

This study considers the effects of continuous social ties on purchase intention and models them mathematically, exploring the intrinsic mechanisms by which strong and weak ties influence purchase intentions through recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect, contributing to the applications of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model in the field of social recommendation. Furthermore, our study adopting EEG techniques bridges the gap of relying solely on self-report by providing an avenue to obtain relatively objective findings about the consumers’ early-occurred (unconscious) attentional responses and late-occurred (conscious) cognitive and emotional responses in purchase decisions.

The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model explicating the development of expatriate social capital and its influence on expatriate effectiveness in terms of knowledge transfer and adjustment. Drawing upon social capital theory and weak tie theory, we elucidate the process through which expatriate social capital facilitates expatriate knowledge transfer and adjustment via greater access of role information and social support.

This study reviews and distills research on expatriate social capital development and proposes a conceptual model of expatriate effectiveness and suggests potential research avenues for global mobility scholars.

This study contributes to the understanding of the development of expatriate social capital in the host country and its impacts on expatriate effectiveness as a process. With regard to expatriates’ social capital accumulation, this study also highlights the important but less-known role of accompanying spouse/family members as expatriates’ weak tie enablers. We articulate a framework that outlines the sources of social capital for expatriates and the processes through which social capital transmits (via expatriates’ access to role information and social support) and then enhances expatriate effectiveness. This conceptual model aims to establish a basic “roadmap” for use by practitioners and researchers.

Before the proposed conceptual model can be theoretically refined or extended by future research, its veracity needs to be tested empirically. Although we do not incorporate “time,” “personal characteristics” and “context” in our model, we recognize their potential importance and urge future researchers to incorporate them in studying the role of social capital on expatriate effectiveness.

A conceptual model is presented that enables multinational corporations (MNCs) to map their current (and future) strategies to enhance expatriate effectiveness by further strengthening the expatriate social capital.

Drawing upon social capital theory and weak tie theory, this paper links various sources of expatriate social capital to expatriates’ access to role information and social support in supporting expatriate effectiveness. From this, several avenues of future research are drawn.

This study aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion of how consumers approach shopping directly via social media by explicating decisions related to trust on social media and how various types of electronic word of mouth (eWOM; ratings and reviews, recommendations and referrals and social media communities) contribute to these decisions.

A total of 198 respondents with experience shopping directly via social media were instructed to select the platform on which they had the most shopping experience (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.) to answer relevant survey questions. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for analyzing the results.

Findings reveal that eWOM provided by strong ties (recommendations and referrals; social media communities) is superior to weak ties (ratings and reviews). Surprisingly, ratings and reviews do not significantly relate to trust in the retailer, suggesting that this information may be necessary but not sufficient for trusting retailers on social media.

This research distinguishes trust decisions related to shopping on social media and clarifies how each type of eWOM uniquely influences trust in the retailer by using tie strength theory.

This study aims to integrate reviewers’ and readers’ discrepant perspectives on extremely negative reviews. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between negative emotion intensity levels and reviews helpfulness on two platforms: integrated websites and social networking sites (SNS) to emphasize the role of platform types on customers’ purchase decisions.

This research adopts a mixed-method approach of business intelligence approach and quasi-experimental design. Study 1 performed text mining and Welch’s t-test to compare reviewers’ negative emotion intensity levels on two platforms. Study 2 adopted a 2*2 factorial quasi-experimental design to examine how intense negative emotions impact the perceived reviews helpfulness on two platforms. A 3*2 factorial design in Study 3 also tested social tie strength’s moderating effect between the intensity of negative emotions and review helpfulness.

The current study reveals that integrated website reviewers tend to express more extreme negative emotions than SNS reviewers. SNS and integrated website readers deem reviews that embed severe negative emotions as less helpful. The moderating role of social tie strength between extremely negative emotions on review helpfulness was insignificant in the study.

This study enriches the online review literature by comparing writers’ and readers’ perspectives on online reviews with extremely negative emotions across two online platform types: integrated websites and SNS. From the writers’ perspective, this study highlights anonymity and the presence of an audience as essential factors that reviewers consider in selecting an online review platform to express themselves. This research also sheds light on how readers’ perspectives on extremely negative reviews conflict with the presumptions of writers of extremely negative reviews on integrated websites by demonstrating that content embedding extremely negative emotions is less helpful regardless of platform type.

This research provides online negative review management strategies to platform and hotel managers. The findings suggest hotel and review platform managers should consider adopting review alignment or monitoring systems based on negative emotions intensity levels since readers on both platforms perceive reviews embedding extremely negative emotions as less helpful. Additionally, hotel managers can progress promotions to guests who share online reviews on SNS since SNS reviewers are more likely to attenuate their extremely negative emotions when writing reviews.

This research innovatively provides a comprehensive overview of negative reviews’ production and consumption process from reviewers’ and readers’ perspectives. This research also provides practitioners insight into the nature of two different platform types and the management of negative reviews on these platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the notion of thin crossing points from a social network perspective and to outline the concrete networking strategies that enable salespeople to foster mutually valuable resource exchange (i.e. to thin crossing points) across a selling ecosystem.

The authors integrate extant theoretical perspectives to advance a conceptual framework of sales-related networking across three key actors in a selling ecosystem: intraorganizational selling actors and actors in customers and external partner organizations.

Thin crossing points are defined as figurative transaction points at the boundary between organizations or organizational subunits at which actors engage in mutually valuable resource exchange in the process of value cocreation. To thin crossing points with key ecosystem actors, salespeople must adapt networking strategies considering the time and trust constraints inherent in a network relationship. Such constraints inform the most advantageous network centralities (degree, eigenvector and betweenness) and actions to impact key network properties (tie strength, contact diversity) that enable salespeople to efficiently develop social capital and thus to optimally thin crossing points across a selling ecosystem.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first social network-based exploration of salespeople’s role in thinning crossing points with key ecosystem actors. It advances a novel conceptual framework of sales-related networking strategies that foster social capital development and optimally thin crossing points across a selling ecosystem.

In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

Online gaming has emerged as a popular activity providing a social outlet for millions. However, implications of online game networks for mental health remain disputed. Concepts of bridging social capital and bonding social capital may help characterize protective factors within social networks. This study aims to examine the associations between social capital derived from online versus in-person networks and mental health indicators among gamers.

Online gamers (n = 301) completed an online survey assessing their social networks (both in-person and through online gaming) and mental health indicators (depressive symptoms, anxiety, social isolation, perceived social support). Social network analysis was used to analyze bridging (network size, effective size, heterogeneity, weak ties) and bonding (closeness, frequent contact, confiding, connection quality) social capital. Separate linear regression models evaluated associations between bridging and bonding social capital for both online and in-person networks and depressive symptoms, anxiety, social support and social isolation.

In-person network characteristics showed the strongest associations with mental health outcomes. Greater average closeness and frequent confiding in the in-person network predicted lower isolation and fewer depressive symptoms. More diverse relationship types also correlated with lower depression. For online networks, closeness and confiding ties associated only with less isolation and greater support, not depressive symptoms, or anxiety.

While online gaming networks provide some degree of social support, in-person social capital exhibited stronger associations with mental health. This reinforces the importance of face-to-face relationships for emotional well-being. Findings suggest helping gamers cultivate close bonds offline. However, online connections still matter and should not be discounted.

This study aims to investigate how indigenous socio-cultural (ISC) practices within informal networks, such as guanxi and wasta, provide benefits beyond mere access. Specifically, the authors explore their global impact on B2B relationships, focusing on reciprocity. A multiregional sample extends research on ISC practices in B2B relationships by examining contingency effects of informal network ties.

The authors surveyed 404 buyers in two developed (Hong Kong and Portugal) and two emerging economies (Kuwait and Colombia), and also categorized by strong and weak informal network ties. Using structural equation modeling, the authors examined a relationship marketing (RM) model from a typology (Clubs, Sociocracies, Clans and Compadres) for assessing contingency effects.

The study reveals that in developed economies with strong formal institutions, negative aspects of favor reciprocity norms intensify unless informal networks are driven by strict sociomoral obligations. This supports research indicating that contractual governance competes rather than complements relational governance. Moreover, trust-building processes are crucial in regions with low uncertainty tolerance to mitigate adverse effects.

Suppliers from developed nations need more than cultural communication insights when engaging in business in emerging markets. We acknowledge changes buyers may expect adherence to reciprocity rules embedded in the ISC practices of their informal networks.

This study pioneers a typology of social structures to analyze ISC practices across buyers with varying formal institutional strength and informal network ties. It sheds light on institutional dynamics, trust-building processes, and nuances surrounding both positive and negative aspects of reciprocity practices. Furthermore, it broadens the scope of RM to Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

The incentive cost of enterprises increases significantly with the rapid growth of the social commerce (SC) market. In this context, enterprises need to develop the optimal strategy to improve incentive effectiveness and reduce cost. Different types of consumers’ responses to incentives bring different values to enterprises. Hence, this paper proposes the social commerce value network (SCVN) to help enterprises study the contributions of different types of consumers to the network.

Based on the graphical evaluation and review technique (GERT), the authors construct the social commerce value GERT (i.e. SCV-GERT) network and design three progressive experiments for estimating the value contributions of “network stage”, “consumer type”, and “resource type” to the SCVN under the same incentives. The authors initialize the SCV-GERT model with consumer data in SC and distinguish the most valuable consumers by adjusting the incentive parameters.

The results show that the SCV-GERT model can well describe the value flow of SCVN. The incentive on forwarding consumers brings the greatest value gain to the SCVN, and social trust contributes the most to forwarding consumers.

Under the guidance of the results, platforms and enterprises in SC can select the optimal type of consumers who bring the maximum network value so as to improve the effectiveness of incentive strategy and reduce marketing costs. A four-level incentive system should be established according to the ranking of the corresponding value gains: forwarding consumers > agent consumers > commenting consumers > potential consumers. Enterprises also need to find ways to improve the social resource investments of consumers participating in SC.

This paper investigates the incentive problem in SC grounded in the SCVN and uses the GERT method to construct the SCV-GERT model, which is the first attempt to introduce GERT into the SC context. This study also makes up for the lack of comparative research on different types of consumers in SC and can provide support for enterprises’ customer relationship management and marketing decisions.