The impact of imitation on Chinese social commerce buyers’ purchase behavior: The moderating role of uncertainty

The purpose of this study is to explore how buyers’ imitation of others’ online behavior is positively associated with purchase behavior. In addition, we consider the moderating role that product uncertainty, seller uncertainty and product fit uncertainty play in the relationship between imitation and purchase behavior. Users in China who have purchase experience on Xiaohongshu were chosen to test the hypotheses. Finally, longitudinal data from 282 respondents was collected. The findings show that imitation has a positive impact on purchase intention. Purchase intention positively affects actual purchase behavior. Product uncertainty and product fit uncertainty positively moderate the relationship between imitation and purchase intention. But seller uncertainty doesn’t moderate the relationship between imitation and purchase intention. Both theoretical and practical contributions are also considered.     

Exploring the effects of extrinsic motivation on consumer behaviors in social commerce: Revealing consumers’ perceptions of social commerce benefits

The rise of social media has created a new e-commerce platform called social commerce. In social commerce, e-vendors such as Amazon may integrate social media with their traditional e-commerce sites. Based on self-determination theory and social commerce literature, we develop a model illustrating how social commerce features may impact consumer behaviors and facilitate social commerce benefits from the extrinsic motivation perspective. We identify four types of extrinsic motivation including external motivation, introjected motivation, identified motivation, and integrated motivation; and we examine their influences on consumers’ intention to contribute social commerce information, which in turn leads to their subsequent behaviors and increases the perceived benefit of social commerce. We also consider the moderating effect of gender in the formulation of social commerce benefits. Based on longitudinal survey data from Amazon consumers, we find that 1) consumers’ external and identified motivation has a positive impact on intention to contribute social commerce information; 2) consumers’ intention is positively associated with their future behaviors, which in turn facilitate their perceptions of social commerce benefits; and 3) gender moderates the impact of behavior on social commerce benefits.     

The reflection of offline activities on users’ online social behavior: An observational study

The ever increasing presence of online social networks in users’ daily lives has led to the interplay between users’ online and offline activities. There have already been several works that have studied the impact of users’ online activities on their offline behavior, e.g., the impact of interaction with friends on an exercise social network on the number of daily steps. In this paper, we consider the inverse to what has already been studied and report on our extensive study that explores the potential causal effects of users’ offline activities on their online social behavior. The objective of our work is to understand whether the activities that users are involved with in their real daily life, which place them within or away from social situations, have any direct causal impact on their behavior in online social networks. Our work is motivated by the theory of normative social influence, which argues that individuals may show behaviors or express opinions that conform to those of the community for the sake of being accepted or from fear of rejection or isolation. We have collected data from two online social networks, namely Twitter and Foursquare, and systematically aligned user content on both social networks. On this basis, we have performed a natural experiment that took the form of an interrupted time series with a comparison group design to study whether users’ socially situated offline activities exhibited through their Foursquare check-ins impact their online behavior captured through the content they share on Twitter. Our main findings can be summarised as follows (1) a change in users’ offline behavior that affects the level of users’ exposure to social situations, e.g., starting to go to the gym or discontinuing frequenting bars, can have a causal impact on users’ online topical interests and sentiment; and (2) the causal relations between users’ socially situated offline activities and their online social behavior can be used to build effective predictive models of users’ online topical interests and sentiments.     

The interaction effects of online reviews and free samples on consumers’ downloads: An empirical analysis

Consumers’ software purchase decisions are influenced both by online reviews and by their experiences with free samples provided by firms. This paper empirically investigates the differential effects of online reviews (user and editor ratings) on consumers’ sample downloading behavior, using a dataset drawn from a large software free sampling website CNET.com. Our findings extend the previous research by suggesting that information disclosure levels of free samples (indicated by licenses) moderates the impacts of online reviews on consumers’ sample downloads. For samples that disclose a great level of information, higher user ratings can increase downloads; otherwise, higher user ratings fail to increase downloads. When both user and editor ratings are available to consumers, only user ratings can increase sample downloads. The findings can be explained by consumers’ two-stage information process whereby consumers first refer to online reviews and then determine whether to sample software. This study provides practical implications on the design of information disclosure channel and offers suggestions for firms regarding how to select and apply sample licenses.     

The power of talk: Exploring the effects of streamers’ linguistic styles on sales performance in B2B livestreaming commerce

B2B livestreaming has become increasingly popular, but few studies have investigated the role of streamers in these B2B livestreaming events. In contrast to the existing studies that explored the appearance and professionalism of streamers and focused on the B2C livestreaming commerce, this study analyzes how streamers’ linguistic characteristics relate to the livestreaming sales performance in online B2B marketplaces by conducting a streamer-level analysis. By combining deep learning and econometric analysis on a livestreaming dataset consisting of 915 livestreaming events across 14 industry categories from a B2B commerce platform, this study specifically examines the impact of three speech acts (i.e., assertive, expressive, and directive speech acts) on sales performance. We first extract three speech acts by combining Word2Vec and Bi-GRU network with Attention Mechanism (WBA), then use econometric models to examine the effect of the streamer's speech acts on sales performance, and finally explore the moderating roles of product-level factors (i.e., product novelty and product category). The results show that the assertive and directive acts have a positive effect on sales performance, but the expressive acts have a negative effect on the sales performance. In addition, this study also provides strong evidence that the effects of these speech acts on sales performance are highly dependent on the novelty of the live product. This moderating effect is particularly significant for sensory products.     

The relationships among consumers’ ethical ideology,risk aversion and ethically-based distrust of online retailers and the moderating role of consumers’ need for personal interaction

Consumer distrust is only recently beginning to be perceived as an important e-commerce issue and, unlike online trust, the nature and role of distrust is much less established. This study examines the influence of two important consumer characteristics (ethical ideology and risk aversion) on consumer’s ethically-based distrust of online retailers. Also, the moderating role of consumer’s need for personal contact with sales staff is tested. Results from 409 online consumers confirm that both relativist-based ethical ideology and risk aversion are strongly and positively related to consumers’ distrust. Interestingly, our findings show that positive effects of relativism and risk aversion on consumer’s distrust are moderated by consumers’ need for personal interaction, which is more pronounced for those consumers with a high need for personal interaction with retail salespeople.     

Promoting users’ intention to share online health articles on social media: The role of confirmation bias

Nowadays, it is a common practice for healthcare professionals to spread medical knowledge by posting health articles on social media. However, promoting users’ intention to share such articles is challenging because the extent of sharing intention varies in their eHealth literacy (high or low) and the content valence of the article that they are exposed to (positive or negative). This study investigates boundary conditions under which eHealth literacy and content valence help to increase users’ intention to share by introducing a moderating role of confirmation bias—a tendency to prefer information that conforms to their initial beliefs. A 2 (eHealth literacy: high vs. low) × 2 (content valence: positive vs. negative) between-subjects experiment was conducted in a sample of 80 participants. Levels of confirmation bias ranging from extreme negative bias to extreme positive bias among the participants were assessed during the experiment. Results suggested that: (1) users with a high level of eHealth literacy were more likely to share positive health articles when they had extreme confirmation bias; (2) users with a high level of eHealth literacy were more likely to share negative health articles when they had moderate confirmation bias or no confirmation bias; (3) users with a low level of eHealth literacy were more likely to share health articles regardless of positive or negative content valence when they had moderate positive confirmation bias. This study sheds new light on the role of confirmation bias in users’ health information sharing. Also, it offers implications for health information providers who want to increase the visibility of their online health articles: they need to consider readers’ eHealth literacy and confirmation bias when deciding the content valence of the articles.     

Customers’ purchase decision-making process in social commerce: A social learning perspective

The proliferation of social commerce has changed customers’ purchase decision-making process. However, few studies have investigated the roles of social commerce factors on customers’ purchase decision-making. Based on the social learning theory, we develop a research model to examine how customers’ learning behavior along three main social commerce components (SCCs) affects customers’ attitude in both cognitive and affective dimensions and how such attitude determines customers’ purchase intention. The results from a survey of 243 actual users of social commerce websites suggest that cognitive and affective appraisals are the main predictors of purchase intention, with cognitive appraisal having a higher predictive power than affective appraisal. In addition, learning from forums and communities and learning from ratings and reviews have significant influences on both cognitive and affective appraisals, while learning from forums and communities plays a more important role in formulating affective appraisal and learning from ratings and reviews plays a more important role in determining cognitive appraisal. Contrary to our expectation, learning from social recommendations has no significant influence on either cognitive or affective appraisal. In summary, these findings provide a comprehensive understanding about customers’ purchase decision-making process and extend the application scope of social learning theory. The findings also provide social commerce managers guidance in designing more effective websites and allocating resources and efforts reasonably on different SCCs.     

Marketing analysis of wineries using social collective behavior from users’ temporal activity on Twitter

Marketing professionals face challenges of increasing complexity to adapt classic marketing strategies to the phenomenon of social networks. Companies are currently trying to take advantage of the useful collective knowledge available on social networks to support different types of marketing decisions. The appropriate analysis of this information can offer marketing professionals with important competitive advantages. This work proposes a new methodology to extract the social collective behavior of Twitter users concerning a group of brands based on the users’ temporal activity. Time series of mentions made by individual users to each company’s Twitter account are aggregated to obtain collective activity data for the companies, which is a consequence of both the company’s and other users’ actions. These data are processed using classical unsupervised machine learning techniques, such as temporal clustering and hidden Markov models, to extract collective temporal behavior patterns and models of the dynamics of customers over time for a single brand and groups of brands. The derived knowledge can be used for different tasks, such as identifying the impact of a marketing campaign on Twitter and comparatively assessing the social behaviors of different brands and groups of brands to assist in making marketing decisions. Our methodology is validated in a case study from the wine market. Twitter data were gathered from four regions of different countries around the world with important wineries (Italy: Veneto, Portugal: Porto and Douro Valley, Spain: La Rioja, and United States: Napa Valley), and comparative behavior analysis was carried out from the perspective of the use of Twitter as a communication channel for marketing campaigns.     

Investigating consumers’ online social shopping intention: An information processing perspective

Online social media is transforming the way customers communicate and exchange product information with others. Consumers increasingly rely on the opinions and recommendations from social media members when making purchasing decisions. However, information received from social media may have different meanings and social implications for consumers. Based on the theory of informational social influence and heuristic-systematic model (HSM), we develop a model to understand the relative importance of informational social influence, normative social influence, and perceived information quality on the consumer’s social shopping intention under different levels of product involvement. The results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) using a sample of 503 consumers in the Facebook brand fan pages indicate that social influences have a greater impact on the consumer’s social shopping intention than perceived information quality. Three social interactional factors (perceived similarity, familiarity, and expertise) have a positive effect on social shopping intention via the mediation of informational, normative social influence and perceive information quality. The multiple-group analysis suggests that high product-involved consumers are motivated to exert more cognitive effort to evaluate the product information. In contrast, low product-involved consumers are more susceptible to informational social influence. We draw on these findings to offer implications for researchers and practitioners.     

How does social support promote consumers' engagement in the social commerce community? The mediating effect of consumer involvement

This study aims to reveal the mechanism of how consumers’ engagement is established in social commerce communities. Building upon social support theory, we propose models and employ datasets obtained from Douban.com to empirically investigate the different effects of emotional and informational support on consumers’ engagement and how involvement mediates these relationships in the social commerce context. At the same time, the moderating role of product presentation is examined to help clarify the impact of social support and consumer involvement. Our analyses reveal that the two subdimensions of social supportive information are positively related to consumer involvement, together promoting consumers’ engagement in the community. In particular, involvement imposes a full mediating influence on emotional support but a partial mediating impact on informational support. Product presentation strengthens the effects in that the predictive effect of determinants on engagement is more pronounced for books with electronic versions in the social commerce community. For researchers and managers, these findings emphasize the benefits of the social commerce community, particularly with regard to Douban.com in China.     

THE OTHERS: The role of individual personality,cultural acculturation,and perceived value on towards firm’s social media and acculturation orientation

This paper systematically examines (i) how individual personality can influence on cultural acculturation which can impact on the higher level of perceived value in LGBTs, and (ii) how the higher level of perceived value towards social media can result in being more satisfied, (iii) consequently having a better working life at workplace and performance proficiency. The generated framework was validated through a survey from multinational corporations in multi-industries such as higher education (with more than two campuses around the world), global fashion, global retailing, tourism, hospitality, food, and electronics and information technology. Key results, implications for managers and researchers are highlighted.     

Decoding digital transformational outsourcing: The role of service providers’ capabilities

The business process outsourcing industry has got disrupted, first by the significant shift in value creation activities from the clients to the service providers, and second by pervasive digital penetration, resulting in the emergence of Digital Transformational Outsourcing (DTO). Service providers now play a more significant role, making their capabilities important. In the new context, service providers require a uniquely different set of dynamic capabilities to handle end-to-end business functions on behalf of their clients while delivering digital value propositions.We study 26 of the largest global business process outsourcing providers to conceptualise and identify six dynamic capabilities of service providers salient in the new context, i.e., consultative, orchestration, insights, network management, knowledge access, and standardisation. Interviews conducted with industry experts provided evidence in support of the identified dynamic capabilities. A novel firm capability dataset was created using secondary data, and using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we identify configurations for high and low performance and find them to vary by the firm's broad/narrow scope.     

Value co-destruction: Exploring the role of actors’ opportunism in the B2B context

This exploratory study investigates value co-destruction in the Business-to-Business (B2B) context and examines the impact of actors’ opportunistic behaviour on value co-creation. The research undertakes an in-depth case study based approach. It uses data triangulation, where multiple sources of evidence (interviews, conference audio recordings and documents) are collected from the case organisation (a vendor) and its service ecosystem partners in the ICT sector. The partners included in the study are distributors, channel partners, competitors, and customers. B2B alliances are driven by the motivations to maximise strategic value and minimise transaction cost. Thus, using the ecosystem lens, we find that actors’ capabilities (resources and perceived value), vendor's approach to achieving strategic benefit and the channel governance mechanism enable value co-creation. However, using the transaction cost theory lens, we report that actors’ opportunistic behaviour, technological disruptions and new business model challenges lead to value co-destruction (in the form of termination of relationship, conflict and business liquidation). Alliance partners need to evaluate the strategic benefits of collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning, trust building, market expansion and technology sharing, considering partners’ self-serving behaviour driven by transaction cost economies. All ecosystem actors are seeking to develop capabilities, exhibit knowledge differentiators, demonstrate technology leadership, reduce uncertainty and respond to new business model challenges thus causing value co-destruction. Thus, this research is more encompassing because it explores factors that lead to both value co-creation and co-destruction.     

The impact of consumers’ perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers and promotional strategy on their repurchase intention

Cause-related marketing (CRM) has become increasingly popular and widely adopted by large companies. However, not much attention has been paid to the effect of CRM on small or unknown online retailers. As ethical concerns about the Internet continue to rise, consumers' perceptions regarding the ethics of online retailers (CPEOR) become important when making a purchase decision. This research uses the self-signaling theory to examine how online retailers’ information management and promotional strategy (CRM vs. Price Discount) may emit signals and impact on the consumers’ repurchase intention. It was assumed that a high CPEOR would work better with a CRM-based strategy, which is fundamentally aligning in ethics. However, the experimental results surprisingly revealed that when CPEOR was high, the consumers’ repurchase intention increased in the case of a Price Discount-based promotion when compared to a CRM-based promotion; the effect was the opposite when consumers’ CPEOR was low. ANCOVA was used to analyze the data while setting certain variables as covariates. This research is a meaningful contribution to the literature and serves as an important reference for e-commerce practitioners to understand how they can wisely manage the information on the online storefront to signal their consumers and create an incremental value for the business.     

Does the involvement of charities matter? Exploring the impact of charities’ reputation and social capital on medical crowdfunding performance

In recent years, charities have become involved in many online medical crowdfunding projects as fundraising agents. To reveal whether and why the involvement of charities influences medical crowdfunding performance, this study conducts a sequential exploratory-explanatory research design with two main studies. By collecting 22,805 projects from the Chinese Tencent GongYi platform, the first study utilizes propensity score matching (PSM) to investigate which type of initiators (individuals vs. charities) have better crowdfunding performance. The results show that the initiator type is an essential predictor of medical crowdfunding, and projects launched by charities keep better performance than those by individuals. Upon the findings of the first study, the second study is performed to inspect why charities make more contributions than individual fundraisers. The impacts of charities’ reputations and social capital on medical crowdfunding performance are examined based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and social capital theory. The results suggest that charities’ reputations and multidimensional social capital play essential roles in endorsing crowdfunding fundraising (fundraising performance) and appealing to donors’ attention (participation performance). In addition, the disease type moderates the relationship between charities’ reputation or social capital and crowdfunding performance. Our research provides in-depth insight into the impact of charities’ involvement on medical crowdfunding and generates important implications for medical crowdfunding practices.     

Approach or avoid? The dualistic effects of envy on social media users’ behavioral intention

People express themselves through posts or selfies with brands and activities on social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Instagram. This user-generated content provides adequate social information that may elicit the emotions of users who are exposed to such content on these online platforms. Although academic researchers have focused on factors affecting users’ emotions on SNSs, how users reconcile both positive and negative emotions to their attitude and behavior in triadic interactions remains unclear. The current study attempted to answer this research question through the lens of social comparison theory by investigating the effects of tie strength and focus of attention as two forces eliciting online social comparisons on emotional consequences measured through pleasure and envy. Moreover, the dualistic effects of the two distinct types of envy, namely benign and malicious, and the effect of pleasure on users’ approach and avoidance behavior were explored and hypothesized. The results indicated that strong ties triggered more benign envy compared with malicious envy. Furthermore, benign envy positively affected brand attitude and SNS avoidance in terms of exhaustion, whereas malicious envy negatively influenced brand attitude and increased the likelihood of SNS avoidance in terms of both exhaustion and discontinuance.     

Exploring askers’ switching from free to paid social Q&A services: A perspective on the push-pull-mooring framework

The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that prompt askers to switch from free to paid social question-and-answer (SQA) services. Prior studies have investigated users’ motivations and participation in free and paid SQA services; however, little attention has been paid to askers’ switching behavior. We empirically analyzed the content of qualitative interviews from 64 askers on a well-known SQA platform in China. Based on the push-pull-mooring framework, we identified and classified factors that influenced askers’ to switch from free to paid Q&A services, using the critical incident technique, after which we calculated the entropy weights of the 16 subcategories before and after the switch, using the entropy weight method. The findings suggest that askers’ switching behavior was influenced by push factors (i.e., dissatisfaction with the free SQA service), pull factors (i.e., satisfaction with the paid SQA service), and mooring factors (i.e., social factors, personal factors, situational factors). Moreover, the findings show that the effects of these factors vary significantly before and after a switch. Dissatisfaction with the quality of information from the free SQA service would influence users before a switch, whereas satisfaction with the quality of information from the paid SQA service would influence them after a switch. In terms of mooring factors, the effects of social and personal factors on askers’ switching behavior, especially subjective norms and cognitive lock-in, turn out to be less significant after a switch, whereas the effect of trust is more significant. Besides, the effects of situational factors are more or less the same before and after a switch. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is one of the first attempts to explore factors that affect askers’ switching behavior and to shed light on the managerial strategies of paid SQA services.     

Is social networking a waste of time? The impact of social network and knowledge characteristics on job performance

People use social media to help them solve problems and enhance performance. Users may engage in diverse social interactions online, increasing their knowledge base through both weak and strong ties. In this study we investigate the impact of social networks on job performance, focusing on knowledge quality and diversity based on social network theory and the knowledge-based view. The empirical analysis reveals that the strength of social network ties is strongly associated with knowledge quality in offline interactions, while social network diversity is associated with knowledge quality in online interactions. Knowledge quality acquired from social network has a significant impact on both creativity and productivity of job performance in the workplace. However, knowledge diversity acquired from diverse social network interactions is strongly associated with creativity, but not with productivity. The results of this study increase our understanding of the knowledge sourcing behaviors of workers.