Search results

In the global migration crisis COVID 19 had devastating consequences. Workers were confined to their locations due to travel restrictions and working from home became “working away from home” for millions of migrant workers. Mobile financial services emerged as key to livelihood of the mobile remittance recipients. It is essential for service providers to gain insights of users' motives to use mobile remittance services.

This study proposed the model by extending unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model and integrating by perceived cost (PC) and perceived security (PS). Based on the survey data (n = 344) the proposed model was tested using analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis.

The findings reveal that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, PC and PS affect the users' behavioral intention (BI) to use mobile remittance applications. Social influence nonsignificantly affects the BI and there is no significant influence of facilitating conditions on user behavior.

The volume of migrant workers preCOVID 19 reached 3.5% of the global population, the shear number of unprotected workers plunged into devastation by the COVID-19 impact is huge to cause an economic meltdown. Under the pandemic crisis conditions, the findings provide several practical implications on how service providers could improve their products and services to increase mobile remittance applications usage.

This research paper expects to discover the causal relationships between hedonic value and certain factors by using the concept of system dynamics, which is a process-oriented method that can deal with a large number of variables and a higher-order non-linear system. Thus, this research paper’s purposes are to explore the degree of customer delight on re-patronizing intention, investigate the importance of word-of-mouth (WOM) on re-patronizing intention of new customers and discover the gap between service recovery and customer expectation.

This research aims to propose a holistic framework to investigate the factors influencing patronizing and re-patronizing intention by utilizing system dynamics. System dynamics uses simulation to investigate the complex economic system in the society; furthermore, it deals with the decision-making problem. The features of system dynamics include non-linearity, information feedback, time delay and dynamic complexity.

The result showed that customer hedonic value is a major influence. The authors discovered that customer delight, WOM, service recovery and re-patronizing intention are interrelated. The analysis shows hedonic value indirectly influenced customer delight during service experiential process. The result also indicated that a high hedonic value influenced WOM efficiently.

This research aims to understand customer hedonic experience and the important factors that influence service experience. The authors used the concept of system dynamics to analyze the proposed model. A causal loop diagram was used to present the relationships among variables. The results reveal that hedonic value is the most critical factor that influences all the other factors. Customers who experience more hedonic value will accelerate the speed of delivery and amount of WOM. The service experience processes of customer delight, WOM and service recovery will affect the customers’ hedonic value and ultimately affect customers’ re-patronizing intention.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relative importance of the five types of sensory experience in restaurants and the differences between experts and customers.

Analytic network process was used to select the critical factors for the five types of sensory experiences. Expert and consumer questionnaires were compared to examine the differences between expert opinions and customer awareness.

Restaurants consider taste and smell to be important senses, whereas hearing was considered to be the least important.

Experts paid more attention to criteria and sub-criteria that resonated with consumers’ memories and emotions. Consumers paid more attention to intuitively obtaining emotional experiences during each purchase.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness from a psychological perspective, examining the relationship of physical attractiveness with the three dimensions of self-consciousness.

The research involved investigating the relationship between self-consciousness and physical attractiveness, focusing on how the three self-consciousness dimensions (i.e., private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness and social anxiety) affected physical attractiveness. Clustering techniques using self-organizing maps of data mining and decision trees were used in this study. The primal concept of clustering entails grouping unsorted and disorganized raw data and arranging data with similar properties into clusters. Classification primarily involves establishing classification models according to the category attributes of existing data. These models can be used to predict the classes of new data and determine interdata relationships and data characteristics.

Public self-consciousness was most strongly related to physical attractiveness, whereas the other two dimensions exhibited no obvious relationship to physical attractiveness. It may be concluded that people with higher physical attractiveness draw attention from others more easily and are more likely to be evaluated positively, and that they thus tend to be more confident in front of others and less likely to care about the opinions of others. Alternatively, perhaps people with lower public self-consciousness care less about how others view them and have the courage to express themselves, which signifies confidence and increases their physical attractiveness.

This research investigated the importance of self-consciousness that may apply to recruitment in practice. People with low public self-consciousness may have high confidence and efficiency. People have low social anxiety may not be nervous or anxious in public and easy to speak to strangers. This kind of employees are appropriate for the jobs involving team work and interaction such as public relations. Hence, companies can apply our findings to search appropriate employees except the first impression of appearance.

The results revealed that high physical attractiveness is related to low public self-consciousness, whereas low physical attractiveness is related to high public self-consciousness. Good-looking people tend to attract attention from others. The relationship between private self-consciousness and physical attractiveness is non-significant. The relationship between social anxiety and physical attractiveness is non-significant.

This research examined the social interactions of online game players based on the proposed motivation model in order to understand the transitions of motivation of online game. The authors also separated samples into four categories to compare the difference of different type of online game players.

This study proposed a motivation model for online game player based on existence–relatedness–growth theory. The authors also analyze the transitions of motivations via first-order and second-order Markov chain switching model to obtain the journey of online to offline socialization.

Teamwork–socialization players preferred to make friends in their online gaming network to socialize. Competition–socialization players were mostly students who played games to compete and socialize and may share experience in online or offline activities. Teamwork–mechanics players purely derived pleasure from gaming and were not motivated by other factors in their gaming activities. Competition–mechanics players may already have friends with other gamers in real life.

More samples can be added to generate more generalizable findings and the proposed motivation model can be extended by other motivations related to online gaming behavior. The authors proposed a motivation model for online to offline socialization and separated online game players into four categories: teamwork–socialization, competition–socialization, teamwork–mechanics and competition–mechanics. The category of teamwork–socialization may contribute to online to offline socialization area. The category of competition–mechanics may add value to the area of traditional offline socialization. The categories of competition–socialization and teamwork–mechanics may help extant literature understand critical stimulus for online gaming behavior.

The authors’ findings can help online gaming industry understand the motivation journey of players through transition. Different types of online games may have various online game player's journey that can assist companies in improving the quality of online games. Online game companies can also offer official community to players for further interaction and experience exchange or the platform for offline activities in the physical environment.

This research proposed a novel motivation model to examine online to offline socializing behavior for online game research. The motivations in model were interconnected via the support of literature. The authors also integrated motivations by Markov chain switching model to obtain the transitions of motivational status. It is also the first attempt to analyze first-order and second-order Markov chain switching model for analysis. The authors’ research examined the interconnected relationships among motivations in addition to the influential factors to online gaming behavior from previous research. The results may contribute to extend the understanding of online to offline socialization in online gaming literature.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss corporate co‐branding value and create the model of evaluating co‐branding value. The connotation of the model is to consider the compatibility of strategic partners such as strategic alliance compatibility and brand alliance compatibility; in addition, this research can estimate the corporate co‐branding value through this model to evaluate and discuss the effect of co‐branding effect for the future.

In the past, few researchers investigated the measurement of corporate co‐branding value in the marketing sector. The measurement of intangible assets, on the other hand, is well established in accounting finance. However, the concepts and methods of accounting finance cannot easily be applied to other areas. This paper provides a straightforward concept that uses a heuristic model to combine the notion of co‐branding synergy. According to the literature, the combination of strategic and brand alliances can affect the concept of co‐branding value. This research revises the concept of compatibility from Park and Lawson by replacing the concept of product attribute similarity with the ratio of sales growth, and the brand concept consistency with the ratio of market share after brand alliance.

This study verifies the proposed model synthetically with a real case (Sony‐Ericsson). Conversely, this research anticipates analyzing the model in different perspectives and observing the variation of different combinations to obtain potential managerial implications for corporate managers. This research concludes: brand alliance compatibility has limited effect on corporate co‐branding value; strategic alliance compatibility is the major power to drive the direction of corporate co‐branding value; and the trend of co‐branding value is the important indicator for business managers.

Insufficient information may generate incorrect or unclear trends if the year of co‐branding is too short. This is also a major limitation of the authors' research. Thus, more real‐world cases can be conducted (such as Miller and Coors) in the future to elaborate upon the model.

The proposed model helps enterprises estimate their current co‐branding value using existing financial statements and market share data and identify the degree of alliance influence to their revise brand strategies. The estimated co‐branding values in this study can help managers identify their market position and execute existing co‐brand strategies. Managers can utilize this information to revise their management direction or strategies. Based on these arguments, this research enhances existing co‐branding knowledge and offers significant contributions by presenting more real cases (e.g. Miller and Coors) in the future. In other words, this work is both an avenue and a blueprint for future co‐branding research.

The paper devises a novel concept for estimating corporate co‐branding value based on the synergies between strategic and brand alliances. To illustrate the proposed model, this study analyzes the Sony Ericsson example since it has survived for several years. Analytical results reveal that strategic alliance and brand alliance variations have significant influences on co‐branding value changes. Results also reveal that strategic alliances have a greater effect on co‐branding value than brand alliances, which indicates that a good alliance strategy may generate a superior co‐branding effect.

This paper seeks to propose a novel pricing system for co‐branding goods by utilizing perceived value, which employs prospect theory (PT) and mental accounting to acquire the consumer's perceived value and to estimate an appropriate price.

The approach taken is design science, an artifact of automatic pricing system for co‐branding goods.

The results reveal that PT is superior to expected utility theory in terms of adjusted perceived prices and decision weight probabilities.

This paper aims to provide clues for industries in terms of providing a customer‐centric pricing method, systematic and automatic approach, and pricing‐based strategic information system.

The proposed pricing method: applies value‐based method to estimate the co‐brand price, considers risk and real‐world decision making, provides an efficient and effective approach, and enhances the competitiveness of price through the system.

Companies have changed their focus from product oriented within marketing (1960s) to demand oriented within quality improvement (1980s) and, today, to an emphasis on customer service, customer loyalty, and customer profitability. Although the significance of customer‐centric services is well established, much of the research that has investigated the effect of customer lifetime value (CLV) has focused on the lifetime value of existing customers only. The purpose of this paper is to devise a novel customer value model (the CV model) to predict internet‐based customers' value by utilizing historical financial data to predict future value.

This research utilizes the concept of operation research, which deploys scientific methods to solve problems and assists in generating strategies in terms of model construction. The authors construct a prediction model for short‐term CV that is also a type of deterministic model and define e‐services as the coverage of free or charged services over the internet environment.

The simulated results reveal that, over the long‐term, CV decreases as the predictive time moves away from the present because of deviations in perception and expectation. The new CV model complements the existing CLV model by addressing CV from a different perspective and provides clues to CV for e‐service industries.

The proposed CV model and the CLV model both come from the customer perspective, but CLV measures CLV without prediction while the CV model provides an avenue by which to consider customer and enterprise perspective simultaneously. Thus, the CV model not only complements the CLV but also assists enterprises in identifying CV and generating superior benefits.

The proposed model makes three contributions: it constructs an equation to measure CV for internet‐based services; it considers the customer and enterprise perspectives simultaneously; and it observes changes in the CV of any specific internet user.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize the big five models of brand personality concept to explore potential co‐branding partners by employing the multi‐attribute utility theory (MAUT) to estimate and rank utilities for possible partners from the big five models.

Design science, an artifact of proof‐of‐concept system is used for deciding co‐branding partners.

The present study attempts to demonstrate the proof‐of‐concept of the proposed MAUT‐based decision model for a company in determining a beneficial and supportive co‐branding partner.

This paper aims to provide clues for industries in terms of providing a MAUT‐based decision‐making approach and a strategic information system. Examples from the telecommunication industry also demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.

The proposed decision‐making method: provides clues for ranking and selection of co‐branding partners; explores the brand personality of the potential partners primitively; utilizes the MAUT approach to estimate utilities of the partners; and furnishes a roadmap for brand alliance research.

Creative performance relies on the capability of developing and presenting an original concept or idea, and the collaborative production of creative content which enhances feeling of connection with others and formation of strong community. The purpose of this paper is to apply the theory of work performance containing four dimensions (capacity, opportunities, willingness, and performance) to investigate how the capabilities of social network sites enhance user creative performance through collective social capital and information capital (opportunities) for and individual habit of use (willingness) of the user to engage in social learning process.

Many measurement items are adapted from the literature, except those measuring the constructs of social media capabilities (i.e. transmission velocity (TV), parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability) and user creative performance. The study uses survey method to collect data from social media network (SMN) users in Taiwan. Facebook is chosen as the source because it is the most prevalent and sophisticated social media platform that provides a home for users to interact and communicate. Structural equation modeling with partial least square is used to analyze the usable data collected from 533 Facebook users.

The results show that the constructs are significantly and positively correlated, meaning that social media capabilities enable social capital, information capital, and habit of use to improve user creative performance in SMNs. Three out of five social media capabilities (i.e. TV, parallelism, and rehearsability) are identified as the key enablers.

Because of the sampled surveyed subjects and the single research method, there are some limitations in this study. The research results may lack generalizability that should be taken into account when they are interpreted. The authors encourage researchers to test the proposed theoretical model further with additional subjects, variables, and linkages.

The findings of this research shed light for managers of SMN platforms on how to manage the platforms more effectively. A healthy SMN platform must implement at least these three media capabilities: the functions of news feed (i.e. TV), chat (i.e. parallelism), edit (i.e. rehearsability), in order to sustain its service.

This study confirmed that user creative performance can be increased in various ways through social capital, information capital, and habit of use. Company management should use SMNs (e.g. Facebook or Twitter) to enable employees to interact and exchange ideas and promote “coopetition” among employees across the company. If the organizational culture supports free expression of ideas and sharing of opinions, the development and robustness of group creativity can be enhanced, leading to higher competitive advantage for a company against its competitors.

Past studies related to individual creativity have mostly discussed it as a personality trait or talent; yet, personality trait or talent is implicit until it is shown by one’s behavior. Thus, for the collective performance of user creativity on SMNs, the authors elicit individual creativity through the creative performance manifested by user behavior. Furthermore, the authors confirm that social capital, information capital, and habit of use are the critical antecedents of user creative performance, and that the five social media capabilities are the enablers of social capital, information capital, and habit of use on SMNs.