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Online games are popular applications of Internet technology, with over 2.8 billion users worldwide. Many players engage in team gameplay, indicating that online games are suitable media through which players connect with their friends. However, past studies have not examined the ability of games to assist players in connecting with their friends, indicating a gap. To fill this gap, the authors propose a new concept, the friend-connecting affordance, which is the ability of an online game to enable players to contact friends within the game.

The authors built a model to explain how games' friend-connecting affordances influence game loyalty. The authors gathered responses from 1,347 online players and used structural equation modeling to test the model.

The authors found that friend-connecting affordances and team participation influence game loyalty. Gaming intensity and gaming history can moderate the impact of friend-connecting affordances.

This new affordance can be realized through various game elements, offering unique and actionable insights to game makers. The authors also compared the friend-connecting affordances among a number of popular online games, providing insights specific to each game and increasing the practical value of the findings.

Customers can participate in new product development (NPD) in many ways. Drawing on the knowledge-based view (KBV) and innovation literature, this study aims to contrast two main product development activity types, i.e. problem-solving and decision-making. It proposes customers play distinct roles if they get involved in these activities, which influence NPD outcomes differently. It also explores customer need specificity as a boundary condition for the above-mentioned relationships.

The authors collected survey data from 308 managers in the innovation domain.

Customer involvement in problem-solving and decision-making distinctively influences new product innovativeness and development speed. Customer need specificity interacts with the two co-development types differently to impact these NPD outcomes further.

This research extends the KBV and addresses the inconsistent findings in the literature regarding customer involvement as co-developers in innovation. It also provides novel insights into how knowledge characteristics like customer need specificity can direct co-developing activities to generate distinct NPD results.

This paper offers practical implications for firms on how to involve customers in developing innovative new products while managing development speed.

Prior research has yet to distinguish customer responsibilities related to co-development activities. This research fills this gap and offers novel insights that problem-solving and decision-making have opposite impacts on different NPD outcomes. This research demonstrates that finer knowledge about customer involvement responsibilities is needed for critical NPD outcomes.

The current study aims to investigate the mediating role of executive stock options in the nonlinear relationship between financial constraints and research and development (R&D) investment through two measures of financial constraints.

This study is based on a sample of 90 French firms for the period extending from 2008 to 2020. The authors employ a panel threshold method to analyze whether the impact of financial constraints on R&D investment depends on the level of financial constraints or not.

Using SA index (Hadlock and Pierce, 2010) and FCP index (Schauer et al., 2019) as measures of financial constraints, the authors demonstrate that the relationship between financial constraints and R&D investment is nonlinear. Moreover, the authors find that executive stock options mediate partially the relationship between financial constraints and R&D investment. More specifically, the authors show that stock options could play two roles depending on the level of the financial constraints; inconsistent mediation for firms with low/medium level of financial constraints and partial mediation for highly constrained firms.

This paper is the first to the best of the authors' knowledge to investigate the nonlinear relationship between financial constraints and R&D investment as well as the mediating role of executive stock option using dynamic panel threshold models.

Compared to traditional (domestic) e-commerce consumers, cross-border electronic commerce (CBEC) consumers may face greater information asymmetry in the CBEC purchase process. Given this background, however, the literature has paid limited attention to the informational antecedents that influence consumers' perceptions of transaction costs and their CBEC purchase intentions. To fill this gap, this study integrates the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and transaction cost theory (TCT) to develop a model for exploring how product (website informativeness, product diagnosticity and website interactivity as the central route) and external (country brand, website policy and vendor reputation as the peripheral route) informational antecedents affect consumers’ evaluations of transaction costs in terms of uncertainty and asset specificity and their CBEC purchase intentions.

This study employs a survey approach to validate the model with 766 Generation Z CBEC consumers based on judgment sampling. The partial least squares (PLS) technique is adopted for data analysis.

The results show that all the proposed central and peripheral informational antecedents reduce consumers’ perceptions of uncertainty and asset specificity, which in turn negatively influences their CBEC purchase intentions.

Through this investigation, this study increases our understanding of how product and external informational antecedents affect consumers’ evaluations of transaction costs, which subsequently determine their CBEC purchase decisions. This study offers theoretical contributions to existing CBEC research and has practical implications for CBEC organizations and managers.

The purpose of this study is to optimize and improve conventional welding using EMF assisted technology. Current industrial production has put forward higher requirements for welding technology, so the optimization and improvement of traditional welding methods become urgent needs.

External magnetic field assisted welding is an emerging technology in recent years, acting in a non-contact manner on the welding. The action of electromagnetic forces on the arc plasma leads to significant changes in the arc behavior, which affects the droplet transfer and molten pool formation and ultimately improve the weld seam formation and joint quality.

In this paper, different types of external magnetic fields are analyzed and summarized, which mainly include external transverse magnetic field, external longitudinal magnetic field and external cusp magnetic field. The research progress of welding behavior under the effect of external magnetic field is described, including the effect of external magnetic field on arc morphology, droplet transfer and weld seam formation law.

However, due to the extremely complex physical processes under the action of the external magnetic field, the mechanism of physical fields such as heat, force and electromagnetism in the welding has not been thoroughly analyzed, in-depth theoretical and numerical studies become urgent.

Social media fatigue (SMF) has been widely recognized; however, previous studies have included various concepts into a single fatigue construct. Fatigue has typically been explored from the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) or stimulus-organism-response (SOR) perspectives. To further investigate SMF, the authors split it into the two constructs of exhaustion and disinterest. Furthermore, the authors introduced the concept of emotional labor and identified rules that may affect surface and deep acting strategies.

The authors designed and conducted a survey to collect data from social networking platform users.

Results from 364 users of social networking platforms supported most of the authors' hypotheses. First, most of the display rules affect the choice of deep or surface acting. Second, both types of acting lead to exhaustion, but only surface acting leads to disinterest. Third, discontinuance intention is affected by both types of fatigue.

This study contributes to SMF research by adding more antecedents (deep and surface acting) based on the emotional labor perspective and showing the impacts of communication rules on emotional labor. In addition, this study also distinguishes disinterest-style fatigue from exhaustion.

This chapter critically evaluates whether football can attain recognition as a national sport in China. Article No. 11, released by the Chinese government in 2015, aimed to develop a new national strategy centralised on the sport of football to foster consumption and enhance national soft power. Consequently, this also means encouraging Chinese football fans to support the national football team. Comparing the significance of local football clubs and the national football team to Chinese football fans is deemed meaningless and unable to generate useful information to comprehend Chinese people's attitudes towards local and national communities. Through literature comparisons with established Chinese national sports such as Chinese martial arts, badminton and table tennis, the discussion reveals that football currently falls short of meeting the general criteria of invention and popularity to be considered a Chinese national sport. In the specific Chinese context, it also proves that football fails to meet the criterion of politics, hindering its identification as a national sport. Consequently, the chapter rebuts the assumption and advocates for the validity of comparing how fans assess their fandom for local and national football teams.

In this vein, this paper aims to provide empirical evidence on the following questions: Which expansion strategies offer better operational and economic performance? What effects does performance-related diversification have? How do other factors such as size, quality, service offered, location or seasonality interact with performance.

In this paper, the analysis of the effects of growth strategies and hotel attributes on performance is carried out with a sample of 255 hotels that operate internationally. Using panel data and quantile regression, this study evaluates the effect of expansion and diversification on the hotels’ performance.

From these findings, it appears that the equity strategy (own hotels) outperforms non-equity strategies (hotels under rental, franchise and management contract) at the operational level. However, the economic return of the property, both adjusted and unadjusted to risk, is lower under the property ownership strategy than under the franchise and management strategies because, in general, it requires a higher investment. Regarding diversification, the growth strategy based on related diversification in food and beverage services has a negative impact on performance, calling into question the synergies between the two businesses. However, an exception to this effect is seen among those hotels, mainly those in the Caribbean, that opt to provide all-inclusive services, since these hotels achieve better occupancy rates and more stable results.

This study has not taken into account the effect of hotel property revaluation on the performance of the ownership strategy, as there is no information on the historical average revaluation at the level of each individual hotel. This study has also been unable to include information regarding the level of competition and seasonality of sales.

This paper considers a wide number of factors that can influence the performance of hotels. Second, this is the only paper that studies the impact of growth strategies from the point of view of the hotel chain. Also, the sample considered uses data at the individual level on hotels and this research analyses not only operational performance but also economic performance.

Well-constructed transportation infrastructure may effectively decrease barriers to the flow of innovative human resources and inventive elements, accelerating enterprise innovation activities. This study will explore how HSR helps enterprises achieve ambidextrous innovation, including the mediating mechanism of absorbed slack resources, innovative talents, and the heterogeneous effects of management shareholding ratio and financing constraints.

Based on resource dependence theory and social network theory, this study employs a quasi-natural experiment of China’s high-speed railway and builds a multi-time point DID model to investigate its influence on enterprise ambidextrous innovation.

Results suggest that the HSR positively influences both exploitative and exploratory innovation, and the influence is more substantial on exploitative innovation. Further analysis finds two influencing channels through which HSR influences enterprise ambidextrous innovation: providing redundant resources and attracting innovative talents. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that HSR has a more significant positive effect on exploratory innovation for enterprises with high management shareholding. In the low financing constraint group, the HSR opening has a more significant impact on ambidextrous innovation.

In ambidextrous innovation, enterprises should rationalize the allocation of resources, attach importance to the innovative talent introduction, and choose differentiated paths based on intrinsic characteristics. Meanwhile, the government should actively improve the HSR routes and continuously improve the innovative environment.

This study enriches the theoretical research framework of HSR and ambidextrous innovation by identifying the channel mechanisms and boundary conditions through which HSR affects ambidextrous innovation and expands the consequences of HSR and the antecedents of ambidextrous.

Among different leadership styles, scant hospitality researchers have studied the link between authentic leadership and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). This article examined the associations among authentic leadership, job passion, and OCBs and examined the mediation effect of job passion.

Questionnaires were distributed to 314 Taiwan's hotel employees. Structural equation modeling was performed to examine the hypotheses of this study.

The results indicated that authentic leadership positively affects harmonious and obsessive passion and that harmonious passion positively affects OCBs directed to individuals (OCBI) and OCBs directed to the organization (OCBO), whereas obsessive passion positively affects OCBI. Furthermore, harmonious passion mediates the linkage between authentic leadership and OCBs (both OCBI and OCBO), whereas obsessive passion only mediates the linkage between authentic leadership and OCBI.

Training programs for hotel managers should incorporate courses on authentic leadership to strengthen managers' skills. Succession plans for managers should prioritize the promotion and retention of candidates with authentic leadership traits. Furthermore, managers should use authentic leadership to create a transparent employee incentive system and career development plans, thereby creating a workplace with fair rewards and opportunities for promotion.

The major contribution is that it expands the knowledge of hospitality leadership and determines the linkages among authentic leadership, job passion, and OCBs. Furthermore, job passion was revealed as a mediator in the authentic leadership–OCB association.