Search results

This paper aims to examine whether social comparison in a prior, nonconsumption circumstance (e.g. in an academic setting) affects consumers’ materialism and subsequent spending propensity, and explores the incidental feeling of envy as the underlying mechanism.

Four experiments have been conducted to test these hypotheses. Study 1 manipulated social comparison in an academic domain, and measured undergraduate students’ materialism after they compared themselves to a superior student or to an inferior student. Study 2 used a recall task to manipulate social comparison and examine the mediating role of envy. Study 3 examined which of the two types of envy (benign or malicious) affected materialism. Study 4 examined the downstream consequences on spending propensity in both public and private consumption contexts.

The results suggest that consumers place greater importance on material goods and are more likely to spend money on publicly visible products after making upward social comparisons than after making downward social comparisons or no comparisons. Furthermore, envy acts as the mediator for the observed effect of incidental social comparison on materialism.

First, this study improves our understanding of the consequences of social comparison and envy by demonstrating that incidental envy (both benign and malicious) experienced in a prior, unrelated social comparison can motivate materialistic pursuits. Second, the present research contributes to the compensatory consumption literature by revealing that, in a social comparison context, envy is the affective underpinning that gives rise to the motivation to engage in compensatory consumer behavior. Third, the findings also enrich materialism research by exploring an important situational antecedent in driving materialistic orientation.

This paper aims to examine the role of learning orientation in building brand equity for B2B firms. The present research proposes that learning orientation contributes to the development of innovation and marketing capabilities and, in turn, leads to enhanced industrial brand equity. Furthermore, the moderating effect of firm size in these processes is investigated.

The hypotheses are tested by administering a survey with a set of managers of manufacturing firms in China.

Innovation capability and marketing capability serve as the mediators between learning orientation and industrial brand equity. The mediating path through innovation capability is stronger for small firms than for large firms.

Learning orientation provides a cultural base for B2B firms to cultivate brand equity. Measurement of industrial brand equity and contingency of its effect requires further investigation.

To transform learning-oriented culture into brand equity, firms need to develop and manage innovation and marketing capabilities. The learning orientation–innovation capability route is more beneficial for small firms.

While a majority of prior literature ignores the impact of organizational culture in driving industrial brand equity, the present research explores learning orientation as a key cultural antecedent of industrial brand equity. A more refined industrial-brand-equity-building mechanism from learning orientation to corporate capabilities and then to brand equity is proposed and tested. The mechanism varies with firm size.

This study aims to identify and describe the relationships among different consumption values, anxiety and organic food purchase behaviour considering the moderating role of sustainable consumption attitude from the viewpoint of the theory of consumption values.

Data were collected using a structured questionnaire survey in first-tier cities in China. A total of 344 consumers of organic foods participated in the study. Structural equation modelling and hierarchical regression analysis were employed for data analysis.

The results indicated the significant association of functional value-price, emotional value, social value and epistemic value with purchase behaviour. Anxiety had a positively significant influence on functional (quality), functional (price), emotional, social, conditional and epistemic values. In addition, the results indicated that functional (price), emotional, social and epistemic values played mediating effects in the relationships between anxiety and purchase behaviour. Moreover, sustainable consumption attitude had a positive moderating effect on functional value-price and purchase behaviour.

The research not only provides novel and original insights for understanding organic consumption but also provides a reference for organic retailers to develop sales strategies and policymakers to formulate policies to guide organic consumption that are conducive to promoting sustainable consumption.

For the first time, this research attempts to explore the relationships among different consumption values, anxiety and purchase behaviour. It may improve the gap of inconsistency in attitude and behaviour in organic consumption, and provide a new perspective for the study of organic consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how experience in insurance contracts may influence participation in the Italian crop insurance market.

From Italian farm-level data, the author estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of participation to investigate the role of experience. The methodology, coupled with exploratory analysis of the data, allows one to compare the relevance of different sources of experience in the crop insurance decision-making process.

The author found that experience tends to be a catalyst for insurance participation. Policy implications are discussed, in particular, the author discusses on the importance of bolstering uptake to exploit the advantages of the inertia that emerge from experience, and the importance of initiatives to increase the knowledge of crop insurance instruments.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, the role of experience has been underinvestigated. The analysis has the specific contribution of modeling the potential role of experience (exploited after buying an insurance contract) on uptake in crop insurance programs.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a parallel partition of unity method to solve the time-dependent Stokes problems.

This paper solved the time-dependent Stokes equations using the finite element method and the partition of unity method.

The proposed method in this paper obtained the same accuracy as the standard Galerkin method, but it, in general, saves time.

Based on a combination of the partition of unity method and the finite element method, the authors, in this paper, propose a new parallel partition of unity method to solve the unsteady Stokes equations. The idea is that, at each time step, one need to only solve a series of independent local sub-problems in parallel instead of one global problem. Numerical tests show that the proposed method not only reaches the same convergence orders as the fully discrete standard Galerkin method but also saves ample computing time.

Considering the substantial benefits derived from the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in construction projects, governments and its related sectors have introduced mandatory policies requiring the use of BIM. However, little is known about the impact of mandatory policies on BIM-based project performance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide a systematical understanding on the impact of policy interventions on the implementation practice of innovative technologies.

This paper utilizes the propensity score matching and difference in differences (PSM-DID) method to investigate the impact of policy interventions on BIM-based project performance. Using the panel data collected from 2015 to 2021 in the Hong Kong construction industry, this paper explores the impact of the first mandatory BIM policy on the BIM-based project performance of three key stakeholders.

The subjective BIM performance and BIM return on investment (ROI) have significantly improved after implementing the mandatory BIM policy. The promotion effect of mandatory BIM policy on BIM-based project performance gradually increases over time. Moreover, the promotion effect of mandatory BIM policy on BIM performance shows significant heterogeneity for different stakeholders and organizations of different sizes.

This study examined the impact of policy interventions on BIM-based project performance. The research findings can provide a holistic understanding of the potential implications of innovative mandatory policy in performance improvement and offer some constructive suggestions to policymakers and industry practitioners to promote the penetration of BIM in the construction industry.

This chapter presents an analysis illustrating the evolution of information systems’ development based on three interdependent phases. In the first period, information systems were mainly considered as a strictly technical discipline. Information technology (IT) was used to automate manual processes; each application was treated as a separate entity with the overall objective of leveraging IT to increase productivity and efficiency, primarily in an organizational context. Secondly, the introduction of networking capabilities and personal computers (instead of fictitious terminals) has laid the foundations for a new and broader use of information technologies while paving the way for a transition from technology to its actual use. During the second phase, typical applications were intended to support professional work, while many systems became highly integrated. The most significant change introduced during the third era was the World Wide Web, which transcended the boundaries of the Internet and the conventional limits of IT use. Since then, applications have become an integral part of business strategies while creating new opportunities for alliances and collaborations. Across organizational and national boundaries, this step saw a transformation of IT in the background. These new ready-to-use applications are designed to help end-users in their daily activities. The end-user experience has become an essential design factor.

Product variant design can only be achieved after all its constituent parts have been implemented by variant design. It is necessary to plan the sequence of part variant design reasonably. The product variant design process involves a large amount of information transfer events at the dimensional level. A reasonable product variant design process needs to make full use of the information transfer characters of parts to decrease the uncertainty of product variant design process. The existing methods of researching the product variant design process mainly focus on resource constraint and activity logic. They are deficient, however, in information transfer resolution and uncertainty management. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper identifies the number of dimension transfer paths and the position of dimension locating within a transfer path as being the key factors affecting the information transfer role of dimension. Information transfer utility is proposed to measure the information transfer capability of dimensions and parts. Based on these, a two-stage approach of generating the sequence of part variant design based on information transfer utility is proposed.

The uncertainty of dimension constraint network is minimal during the product variant design process when parts are implemented by variant design under the sequence generated through a two-stage method based on the information transfer utilities of parts, as does the times of parameter transferring and iteration in dimension constraint network.

Part variant design under the sequence of descending information transferring utilities can decrease the difficulty of implementing product variant design validly and also increase the efficiency. This suggests an innovative method to planning the product variant design process reasonably from the perspective of informatics.