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This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of a digital medical library, including department-based electronic journal access, library training course participation and scholarly publications.

The data on full-text electronic journal access, participants of library training courses and scholarly publications were exported from a digital medical library database during 2017–2021. In addition, electronic journal access and library training courses were divided into high-level and low-level groups, while scholarly publications were divided into physician and non-physician groups.

The scholarly publications had a positive correlation to library training courses and electronic journal access. Furthermore, scholarly publications showed a significant difference between the high-level and low-level electronic journal access groups but not between the high-level and low-level library training course groups. Scholarly publications and electronic journal access had positive correlations for both the physician and non-physician groups. Scholarly publications and library training courses, and electronic journal access and library training courses had positive correlations only in the non-physician group.

The importance of electronic journal access for scholarly publications is suggested based on the findings of the present study. The training courses held by the medical library had a positive effect on scholarly publications for the non-physician group.

The current study provides insights relevant to the electronic journal access of library-supported scholarly publications among medical departments. These results can serve as a reference for medical library development planning and decision-making in the future.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of celebrity endorsers on consumer advocacy, customization and entertainment intentions based on the notion of the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework. In addition, this study aims to examine the mediating and moderating role of customization and entertainment intentions on the proposed relationships. The authors also intend to highlight the comparative effects between male and female young social media consumers on those proposed associations.

In the pursuit of comprehensive and rigorous data collection, this study adopted a quantitative methodology using a meticulously crafted questionnaire. The questionnaire survey was conducted in major cities of Malaysia using the convenience and snowball sampling techniques. A total of 576 responses were collected, even though 549 retorts were used for data analysis. In this investigation, the authors strategically used covariance-based structural equation modeling through the use of AMOS v. 24 as the primary data analysis tool. Augmenting the analytical depth, the authors also conducted a supplementary bootstrap analysis. The additional layers of examination were crucial for appraising the mediating and moderating effects inherent within the model, in which the PROCESS MACRO v.4.20 was used.

The results of this study revealed the significant direct positive effects of celebrity endorsers on consumer customization, entertainment and advocacy intentions. Consumer customization and entertainment intentions also found significant direct affirmative effects on consumer advocacy intention, along with the significant direct positive effects of consumer entertainment intention on consumer customization intention. The results further revealed that consumer customization and entertainment intentions cannot mediate the relationship between celebrity endorsers and advocacy intention. The entertainment intention also declined the mediating effects between celebrity endorsers and consumer customization intention. On the contrary, consumer customization intention significantly and positively, and entertainment intention also significantly but negatively, moderate the association between celebrity endorsers and consumer advocacy intention. This study also illustrates that the effects of those examined relationships differ between male and female young social media consumers.

This study investigates the impact of celebrity endorsers on consumer behavior, focusing on their customization, entertainment and advocacy intentions. It extends current SOR framework, enhances source credibility theory, fills gaps in the literature on social media brand engagement and underscores the significance of customization and entertainment intentions. The findings provide insights for managers aiming to harness consumer brand advocacy through celebrity endorsers effectively.

The authors of this study aim to investigate possible explanations of the prevalence of price clustering in the final offer prices of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

The authors use final offer price in M&A deals to investigate the price clustering phenomena. The authors used regressions and logistic regressions to examine potential factors that might affect pricing strategy by looking into one-time acquirers and experienced serial acquirers.

Price clustering increases with negotiation uncertainties characterized as competitive bidding, number of bidders, challenged deals and duration. Moreover, the authors find persistent price clustering in experienced serial acquirers that are more experienced and better equipped with handling uncertainties, suggesting a preference of using round numbers regardless of levels of uncertainties. The authors' evidence shows that price clustering results from a combination of Harris' (1991) costly negotiation hypothesis where round prices may be used to lower search costs and psychological bias and preference.

The authors appear to be the first to investigate alternative theories that support M&A offer price clustering behavior, finding that both the costly negotiation and psychological bias and preference theories apply to M&A final price formation. Thus, the authors' major contribution, specific to the M&A process, is a clarification of physical and psychological factors associated with bidding and negotiation behavior. The authors are confident that the authors' study impacts conventional knowledge regarding M&A deal negotiation strategies, including bidding behavior, contract negotiation, financial analysis, management practices and risk management.

The manufacturing investment shift from developed countries to emerging and developing regions creates further needs for identifying appropriate green certification strategies. This study proposes that alignments between green certification practices (GCRs) and process innovation (PIN) could help identify appropriate strategies that national economic development can influence.

Drawing on the diffusion of innovation theories, this study proposed a taxonomy to examine whether sustainable performance differs depending on the levels of alignment and the role of national economic development. The study uses an empirical survey approach to highlight alignments between GCRs and PIN among developed, developing and emerging economic nations, addressing resource allocation for the world's sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Manufacturers need to align PIN practices with the level of green certification to achieve sustainable performance. Manufacturers experiencing higher payoffs from various improvements successfully align in GCR and PIN. The alignment between these two concepts can derive different taxonomies, which highlight performance and managerial implications for manufacturers. The manufacturers followed three distinct typologies: minimalist, process active and proactive. Besides, building on the theory of performance frontiers, the findings indicated that manufacturers in developing and emerging economies placed the most substantial GCR effort compared to their counterparts in developed nations. Manufacturers in developed countries are increasingly reaching the “diminishing points” and investing limited resources in GCR just enough to keep their competitive positioning as order qualifiers rather than order winners. Developing economies are catching up very quickly in attaining GCRs and business performance.

This insight is essential for managers to adapt to nations' economic development conditions and appropriately and effectively align resources.

The findings offer a decision-making process and provide straightforward guidelines for supply chain managers' green certification adoption.

In including both PIN and green certification, this paper adds greater comprehensiveness and richness to the supply chain literature.

Marketing scholars have begun to look at negative emotions that young consumers could develop toward brands, such as brand hate. Brand hate has experienced exponential growth during the past decades in the cosmetic industry. In this frame, the purpose of this paper is to identify the weight of each of the five key drivers of brand hate and to analyze if these weights are the same (or not) for drugstore and luxury make-up brands regarding.

To carry on this paper, brand haters in the make-up industry were contacted with the help of cosmetic influencers. Participants of the online questionnaire (N = 162) were existing young makeup consumers. They were divided into drugstore and luxury makeup brand haters by classifying their identified hated brands into either group.

The authors’ results showed, first, that experiential, identity, moral, deficit-value and advertising avoidance all had a positive effect on brand hate, being identity avoidance the strongest one. Second, drugstore and luxury makeup brand haters do not differ, as far as no differences were identified in the strength of each avoidance type on brand hate.

There is a gap in the literature related to the absence of work investigating brand hate in the make-up industry; moreover, studies measure whether brand hate drivers are the same (or not) for luxury brands and drugstore brands that compete in the same arena. In this framework, this research will provide a specific industry context involving young consumer opinions. Research into consumer–brand relationships has been largely focused on the positive forms, while the negative forms are still a relatively newer area of academic interest. Even more, brand hate has been investigated from a multidimensional approach linking proposals from different authors has been tested.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a brand-new phenomenon in customer consumption patterns. This resulted from heightened health awareness brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic. There is a dearth of appropriate health psychology perspectives in the existing study examining the effect of COVID-19 on consumers’ use of crowdsourced logistics (CL) platforms. In order to provide unique and thorough insights into how consumer health concerns can affect consumers’ subjective views and their decisions to use CL, this study combines the health belief model and the technology acceptance model.

Five hundred valid responses from an online survey that was created and administered in Singapore were analysed using structural equation modelling.

The findings show that all of the suggested constructs have a favourable influence on consumers’ intentions to use CL. The suggested model also demonstrates high explanatory power, with perceived usefulness serving as the primary driver, followed by perceived ease of use and self-efficacy.

The study advances previous academic research on CL and offers guidance to CL companies and lawmakers for promoting sustainable and secured last-mile delivery.

The purpose of this study is to explore the comparative effects of mainstream celebrities and social media influencers on consumer advocacy and relationship intentions. The study also examines the direct and serial mediation effects on those relationships.

The survey questionnaire was used to collect data from 718 respondents throughout Malaysia, with convenience and snowball sampling techniques employed. The data were analyzed based on the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach through the AMOS version 24. The PROCESS MACRO v-4.20 was applied to evaluate mediating effects in the model.

The results reveal that celebrity endorsers' involvement in social media significantly influences the uses of social media, which also impacts the attitudes and, subsequently, consumer relationship and advocacy intentions. The study found that mainstream celebrities and social media influencers effectively promote brands, and it discovered insignificant differences in their effects on the analyzed relationships.

This study has been conducted on consumers in Malaysia; it may have different effects on consumers in other countries.

Brand managers and policymakers may benefit from following the study's guidelines for making consumer relationship and advocacy intentions by celebrity endorsers and uses of social media.

The brand community can benefit from tightening their social bondage by sharing and managing crucial information from celebrities and using social media.

The study explores the effects of mainstream celebrities on consumer relationship and advocacy intentions using social media networks and managing consumer attitudes.

This research discloses the effect of religiosity on purchasing intention through serial-mediation paths in a halal-certified food context. Borrowing from the identity theory while supplemented by the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and the knowledge–attitude–practice (KAP) theory, a 4-layered framework is developed to investigate such an issue.

264 questionnaires are collected in the field study conducted in Tunis, Tunisia. Quota sampling method is applied. Testing of the hypotheses is performed using partial least square analysis.

The findings reveal that religiosity affects the four mediators—awareness, trust, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control—which in turn affect attitude, and purchase intention towards halal-certified food is eventually aroused. These four serial-mediation paths are further proved to form the mechanisms.

The field study participants are limited to consumers in Tunis. Besides, a mechanism to collect the data from general public including lower educated consumers should be necessary.

This research is a pioneering work investigating the sequential intervening effect in the religiosity-intention relationship in halal-certified food. The authors provide unique and fruitful insights into this relatively untapped field for academia and firms.

This study investigated a new attributional phenomenon in a brand scandal setting in which consumers tend to blame the top management of a brand, even though it was the frontline parties that caused the scandal. The authors termed this phenomenon upward blame attribution (UBA), shedding light on whether consumers in a host country indicate a higher UBA for a multinational (vs domestic) brand scandal, which in turn reinforces their revenge and impairs their reconciliation reactions, and whether these effects are contingent on consumer animosity.

Two experimental studies were conducted with real and fictitious brand/product and country stimuli with 1,399 Chinese participants.

Both studies verified UBA and found that Chinese consumers' UBA is higher for multinational (vs domestic) brand scandals, which drives their stronger desire for revenge and weaker desire for reconciliation. Moreover, consumers with high (vs low) animosity toward a multinational brand's home country reported a higher UBA for the multinational (vs domestic) brand scandal, which in turn reinforces their desire for revenge and impairs their desire for reconciliation.

The study provides new insights into host-country consumers' more severe UBA and responses toward multinational versus domestic brand scandals and the amplifying role of consumer animosity in these processes. It also has implications for mitigating host-country consumers' UBA and negative responses to multinational brand scandals.

This study contributes to the blame attribution literature by verifying consumers' UBA and the country-of-origin (COO) literature by revealing host-country consumers' higher UBA, stronger revenge desire and weaker reconcile desire toward multinational (vs domestic) brand scandals. It extends the knowledge regarding consumers' blame attributions toward the top management of a multinational (vs domestic) brand in scandals and the impact of such attributions.

This study attempts to identify and explicate the unique segmentation of the increasingly growing virtual reality (VR) user market based on the user experience. Consequently, it collects five hundred forty-five online survey questionnaires through the Prolific platform and deploys cluster analysis to identify mutually exclusive groups of VR users. The research variable, user experience, contains 16 indicators explained by four dimensions. As a result, this study is able to unveil three mutually exclusive markets which are labeled as (1) beginner, (2) aficionado, and (3) utilitarian. The unique features of these three groups are further compared based on their VR tour behaviors. In the conclusion section, it offers managerial implications for devising novel marketing strategies.