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Building on the theory of brand psychological ownership, this paper aims to explore the mediating role of brand psychological ownership in the relationship between brand personality (innocence/coolness) and consumers’ preferences, as well as identify the boundary conditions of this relationship.

To test the hypotheses, a series of four experiments were conducted in Wuhan, a city in southern China, using questionnaires administered at two universities and two supermarkets. Hypotheses were tested using PLS-SEM in SmartPLS 4.

The results indicate that brand personality, specifically the dimensions of innocence and coolness, has a significant impact on consumers’ brand preferences. Brands with a cool personality are preferred over those with an innocent personality. Moreover, the relationship between brand personality and consumers’ brand preferences is moderated by power motivation and identity centrality.

This study contributes to the literature by differentiating between brand personality of innocence and coolness as two separate constructs and proposing brand psychological ownership as a mechanism through which brand personality affects brand preferences. The study’s samples were drawn from universities and supermarkets in southern China, providing evidence for the significant moderating effects of power motivation and identity centrality on consumers’ brand preferences.

This study aims to investigate the impact of cross-border charitable activities on host- and home-country consumers based on the social identity theory.

Through an extensive literature review and two experimental designs, this study establishes the research framework and hypothesises the relationships between the constructs.

National power moderates the impact of cross-border charitable activities on host- and home-country consumers. In particular, compared to countries with high national power, countries with low national power undertaking cross-border charitable activities will receive more positive reactions from the host-country consumers, and, conversely, more negative reactions from the home-country consumers.

From the consumer perspective, this study finds that brand cross-border charitable activities have different influences on consumers in different countries because of an identity transformation mechanism that exists between the “insiders” and the “outsiders”, which is different from the assumptions of western theories.

The findings provide insights for undertaking brand cross-border charitable activities.

Previous studies, which are based on social identity categorisation, assume that cross-border charitable activities have a more positive impact on home-country consumers than host-country consumers. However, this study adopts the research paradigm of social identity relationisation and draws an opposite conclusion, which not only expands the theory of local intergroup interaction, but also clarifies how brand cross-border charitable activities influence Chinese consumers.

The purpose of this research is to explore how experienced scarcity affects home country consumers' attitudes toward the firm engaging in cross-border philanthropy by analyzing perceived distributive justice as a mediating variable. This research also investigates the moderating factor of this effect to identify practical strategies for managers.

This research conducted one survey (Study 1) and three experiments (Studies 2–4) by manipulating scarcity to provide robust evidence for the influence of experienced scarcity on consumer perception of the company conducting cross-border philanthropy.

This paper provides empirical insights about the significant negative effect of experienced scarcity on consumer attitudes toward the firm engaging in cross-border philanthropy. It proposes that home country consumers with high versus low experienced scarcity show lower perceived distributive justice for cross-border philanthropy, which generates less favorable attitudes toward the firm. To alleviate the negative impact of experienced scarcity on consumers' perceptions of corporate reputation, providing donation amount comparisons between home and foreign countries has a significant moderating effect.

This paper provides several suggestions for marketers seeking cross-border philanthropy to improve consumers' attitudes toward the firm.

This paper enriches the literature on corporate social responsibility in the domain of cross-border philanthropy and explains contradictory findings on consumers' attitudes toward corporate cross-border philanthropy. Moreover, this study makes meaningful contributions to the scarcity and justice literature.

Companies work hard to reduce queue lengths due to the common belief that queues in general are undesirable. Extant literature mainly has focused on the negative consequences of queues and overlooked the potential positive effects. The purpose of this paper is to address the benefits of queues by examining how consumers of different segments may read into the lines (queues) as well as why and when positive effects occur.

Applying and integrating psychology and marketing theories, the study develops a model with several propositions to identify and explain the mechanism and conditions under which queues have positive effects.

Contrary to conventional belief, queues may serve as positive signs. In certain segments, consumers can perceive a queue as a reflection of superior service/product quality, an opportunity to fulfill the need(s) for self-uniqueness or social inclusion or an avenue to avoid social exclusion. In addition, the benefits of long queues may come from consumers’ joining a line to seek desirable outcomes/gains based on their attribution of the queue, and consumers’ prefactual thinking that regards “not joining” the queue as potential losses. Furthermore, the magnitude of such effects depends on queue distinctiveness, choice heterogeneity, consumption hedonism and performance uncertainty.

This paper explains how, why and when a long queue can be read as positive cues and benefits both the firms and target/potential consumers. The authors demonstrate the psychological mechanisms of joining a queue based on attribution and prefactual thinking, and identify conditions under which positive queue effects are most likely to occur.

Extreme online reviews can have great impacts on consumers’ purchase decisions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate when users are more likely to provide extreme ratings. The study draws inference from attitude certainty theory and proposes that review extremity is influenced by the interaction of evaluation duration and product/service types: for hedonic products/services, shorter evaluation duration can foster attitude certainty, leading to higher review extremity; in contrast, for utilitarian products/services, longer evaluation duration can increase attitude certainty, resulting in more extreme reviews.

Three studies were conducted to test the hypotheses: Study 1 is an empirical analysis of 3,000 reviews from an online retailing website; Studies 2 and 3 are two between-subject experiments.

Results from three studies confirm the hypotheses. Study 1 provides preliminary evidence on how review extremity varies in evaluations of different durations and product/service types. Results from Studies 2 and 3 show that for hedonic products/services, the shorter the evaluation duration, the more likely users are to give extreme ratings; however, for utilitarian products/service, the longer the evaluation duration, the more likely users are to give extreme reviews; and attitude certainty plays a mediating role between evaluation duration and review extremity.

Findings from this study provide understandings on when a fast rather than a slow evaluation can lead to more extreme reviews. The results also highlight the role of users’ attitude certainty in the underlying mechanism.

Based on the study of overall situation of the tagging function in the provincial public libraries and library of major colleges and universities, this paper aims to examine the difference of tagging behaviour of its users in library and social community sites. The authors also want to understand the causes of a variety of annotation behavior in social community sites and libraries.

The authors collected all system log data of tags, comments and ratings users added in Wuhan University library, and then found the tags, comments and rating of corresponding books in Douban. Then, the authors did questionnaire survey to the Wuhan University students.

The authors found that the annotation service in the library is not perfect as that in social community site. Enthusiasm of users annotating books in the library is far less high than that on the social community sites. Lack of understanding of the annotation service is the main reason why users are not concerned or do not use the tagging service. But users have the needs of the organization of personal information in the library using tags.

This paper investigated the library users’ behavior in the using library OPAC course and compared the difference of annotation behavior between library and social community site.