In many situations, consumers have to make a sacrifice (e.g., price premium, loss of personal comfort and efficiency) when choosing a green product over its traditional alternative. Utilizing attribution theory, we offer a set of research propositions as an attempt to explain how consumers may rationalize their perceived sacrifice in making green purchases. First, we posit that consumers’ internal attribution (i.e., individual behaviors cause environmental degradation) enhances their green purchase behavior. Second, internal attribution would generate senses of self-efficacy and guilt, which lead to motivations to accept the perceived sacrifice in purchasing green products. Third, when green purchase indicates a significant sacrifice, consumers tend to develop a coping strategy by switching attribution of responsibility to others, and thus the influence of internal attribution on green purchase will be weakened.

The purpose of this research is to better understand what factors influence on households’ waste sorting behavior at source in Mongolia. To accomplish the goal, this study conducted online survey with self-report questionnaire method and the 353 participants’ data were collected through Facebook groups and pages related to house owners’ associations and waste recycling related non-profit organizations. The results show that the underlying factors determining the intention of waste sorting at source are (1) motivational bases such as prior beliefs and social norms; (2) and an ability/knowledge about the waste sorting at source. Furthermore, the intention is crucial predictor of the real behavior of waste sorting at source, but the most important one is an opportunity to do so. The conclusions and the recommendations are provided.

Today’s society has become increasingly sensitive to humanity’s impact on the environment. Corporations are now measured by their scores pertaining to the environment, sustainability, and governance, or benchmarked for their level of corporate social responsibility. Another dimension of individuals’ environmental practices is purchasing merchandise such as clothing in the secondhand market. Consumers’ intention to buy in the secondhand market is rarely just related to economic concerns regarding such purchases, but rather to a deliberate nod to utilizing products fully rather than wasting them, therefore helping to reduce the negative environmental impact caused by human activities.

Improvisation is an important firm competence in product innovation as firms increasingly face inherent uncertainty in new product development (NPD) process and frequent jolts in the external environment. While there is some empirical and conceptual work on the value of improvisation for several new product outcomes, there is lack of empirical research on the antecedents of improvisation in innovation studies. We attempt to address this gap by studying the role of team variation and team convergence traits in the occurrence of improvisation in a sample of 118 NPD teams from manufacturing firms.

Characterized by connectivity, recent digital technologies have a significant effect on relationships between consumers and firms. Consumers rely on SNS to learn product and/or service information to decide what to purchase. In dealing with this change, some firms struggle to leverage SNS because it fundamentally changes the way marketing communications are executed. Previously, marketing departments planned and executed marketing communications with their prospects and customers. However, owing to connectively through recent digital technologies, everyone in firms can send a message to consumers. Therefore, decentralization of marketing communication roles plays critical roles in recent digital environment.

This study aims to investigate online commerce repertoire-based clusters and their characteristics with shopping values and commerce attributes. This study analyzes Nielsen panel log data that recorded nearly 6,000 panelists’ use of 48 major commerce websites and mobile applications. In addition, a survey was conducted with a sample of the panelists, which supplemented the behavioral data and provided cognitive and attitudinal data. Six commerce clusters were identified: “Social commerce centric,” “Secondhand centric,” “PC centric,” “scattered,” “Home-shopping centric,” and “Fashion centric". Also, “Hedonic” was statistically significant and “Quick delivery,” “Membership” are perceived to be effective. Also, there were discrepancies between the log and survey on usage. As online marketing and advertising driving conversion becomes critical, the understanding of online commerce repertoires and related consumer perceptions and characteristics should offer significant implications.

Smart technologies are critical for businesses to develop these dynamic connections, as technologies enable them to network with others and exchange resources seamlessly. This fact makes it possible to modify the tasks performed by employees of tourism organizations that are in contact with consumers/tourists.

There is a growing trend towards consumption of meat alternatives. In response to rising demand, many brands add meat alternative options to their offerings (e.g., Impossible Whopper from Burger King, McPlant from McDonald’s). Consistent with this trend, a growing literature explores how to encourage consumers to reduce meat consumption and increase acceptance of meat alternatives. However, there are two major limitations in literature. First, most studies in this area do not employ real behavioral outcomes as the focal dependent variable. As a result, we cannot be certain that such findings can be extrapolated into real-world settings. Second, the majority of studies have focused on cognitive factors in investigating acceptance of meat alternatives. Hence, there is a need to attend more to affective factors when investigating how we can advertise meat alternatives. Against this backdrop, the present research investigates the interactive effect between regulatory mode (a motivational factor) and positive emotion (an affective factor) for driving social media engagement in advertising meat alternatives. Regulatory mode theory posits that consumers engage in goal pursuit by adopting locomotion (a motivation to “just do it”) and assessment orientations (a motivation to “do the right thing”). We propose that different, discrete positive emotions could interact with regulatory mode to create “fit” effects. Specifically, the fit between assessment orientation and the emotion of awe, and between locomotion orientation and the emotion of love will lead to increased social media engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how customer relationship termination (i.e., preparation and process), alone or in combination with customer involvement, contributes to the new product development outcome. While termination preparation has a synergistic effect with customer involvement, the termination process has a trade-off relationship with customer involvement.

The unbounded nature of digital innovation requires innovating firms to be agile in the way they manage the processes, governance and outcomes in order to sense and seize the market directly and timely. This study adopts an inter-organizational approach and asks to what extent and in what way does organizational agility impact on innovation performance? This perspective underscores the interdependencies between collaborating partners, which creates a relationship regulating system of workflow to drive value creation in the process of innovation. While the literature has offered a broad conceptual argument for organizational agility in the context of digital innovation, the mechanisms through which value is transformed in the innovation process is still unclear. We contend that an agile innovation process stands on four main cornerstones: (1) joint strategic planning, (2) joint problem solving, (3) joint improvisation and (4) community (market) sensing. The empirical research is set in the video game industry, which is in a largely digitalized and borderless business environment. The data was collected through an interviewer-administered questionnaire. The sampling frame is based on a Swedish trade association database. Usable sample is 113. We performed structural equation modelling to test the hypothesized model, including main and moderation effects, using Mplus. The findings show that while only improvisation has a significantly positive effect on innovation performance, the role of strategic planning and problem solving between two collaborating partners remains unclear. For example, strategic planning has shown to be a negative influence in our empirical research. Problem solving has no effect on innovation performance, but it interacts with community sensing and subsequently facilitates innovation outcome. This highlights the importance of community sensing, which could offer rich, crucial knowledge and resources for problem solving that proves to be effective. The results provide further theoretical arguments for understanding organizational agility and digital innovation, but also raise further questions for future research.

The social constructionist theory of art states that the value of art and luxury brand design is constructed by social interactions. It distinguishes between an independent "reality" and a socially constructed "reality," in which meanings can differ. However, research on luxury fashion brands mainly focuses on consumers' reality and rarely examines the topic through a social constructionist lens. This paper looks at the impact of worldwide luxury fashion "designers’ reality" on "consumers’ reality” when evaluating the brand. Three studies investigated how consumers and designers perceive premium and luxury brand design.

This research presents a conceptual framework for a comprehensive understanding of the causes of user migration from social media networking sites. The results of our survey show that users’ intentions to switch social media platforms are influenced by user satisfaction, alternative attractiveness, peer influence, and perceived switching costs.

In recent years, Metaverse has become one of the most popular buzzwords in digital transformation and marketing. The concept of the metaverse refers to a new paradigm for how we will use and interact with digital technologies within an immersive virtual environment (Dwivedi, et al., 2022).

The hospitality industry is widely using customer data to develop successful personalized marketing communication. However, in the event of information leakage, personalized advertising may escalate customers’ privacy distress. Building on Conservation of Resources theory, this study proposes three dimensions for privacy threats that impact the relationship between personalized hospitality advertising and consumer responses. Findings from six experiments across high and low involvement hospitality products demonstrate diverging effects of personalized advertising depending on the type of privacy threat communicated. Results further indicate that customers’ psychological comfort mediates the relationship between high-personalized advertising and the customer response to the advertising when privacy threat is high. Additionally, when the perceived severity and distance of the announced privacy threat are high and low respectively, rational appeals generate higher levels of psychological comfort, while the same happens for emotional appeals when the perceived scope of the threat is high. The study concludes with value-adding theoretical and managerial implications for the hospitality industry.

The economic recession and changes in purchasing habits of young adults (aged 18–25) has led to a decline in the sales of Japanese fashion apparel. This younger generation’s choice of fashion items is primarily based on price. They are not devoted to a favourite brand with a frequent purchase history. Thus, developing customer loyalty and strengthening brand value are essential for the fashion industry. This study explores the improvement in fashion companies’ financial performance (FP) through young generation’s behavioural brand loyalty (BBL) from two aspects: social media brand engagement (BE) and loyalty programmes (LPs). This study listed 14 popular Japanese fashion brands which belonged to 14 publicly traded companies in Japan. Further, we surveyed 183 consumers about their brand related behaviours. The findings reveal the positive and negative effects of the same variable (BE and LPs) on the outcome (short- and long-term FP), indicating that not all activities related to BE and LPs boost FP. FP is influenced by various combinations of these causal factors and complex situations, such as consumers’ demographics and shopping characteristics. The results deepen our understanding of brand loyalty formation and the linkage among BE, LPs, and FP in a realistic marketplace, and offer multiple practical solutions to achieve high levels of short- and long-term FP by targeting the right consumers based on their specific characteristics.

Existing studies report that social media influencers’ number of followers is a determinant of their influence. However, not every consumer follows an influencer with a high number of followers. Therefore, differences in individual characteristics should be considered in the effectiveness of influencer marketing. This study draws on the cultural dimensional theory to examine the moderating role of consumers’ cultural values at the individual level in the effects of social media influencers with many followers. The results show that the relationship between social media influencer follower count and brand reputation depends on the cultural values of individual consumers. This study makes certain contributtions to the advancement of research on influencer marketing and cultural values by identifying the different impact of follower account of social media influencers with many influencers.

We investigated an emerging magnetic loop dynamically formed on the Sun, which has the effective footpoint heating source that may play a key role in heating a solar atmosphere with free magnetic energy in it. It is suggested that the heating source could be related to local compression of a plasma in the emerging loop by means of Lorentz force, which converts the magnetic energy to the internal energy of the plasma that is used to reaccelerate a decelerated downflow along the loop, eventually generating the source when the kinetic energy of the downflow is thermalized. By analyzing very high-cadense data obtained from a magnetohydrodynamic simulation, we demonstrate how the local compression is activated to trigger the generation of the heating source. This reveals a characteristic of the emerging loop that experiences a dynamic loop-loop interaction, which causes the local compression and makes the plasma gain the internal energy converted from the magnetic energy in the atmosphere. What determines the characteristic that could distinguish an illuminated emerging loop from a nonilluminated one is discussed.

The GMT-Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF) is the first instrument for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). G-CLEF is a fiber feed, optical band echelle spectrograph that is capable of extremely precise radial velocity measurement. G-CLEF Flexure Control Camera (FCC) is included as a part in G-CLEF Front End Assembly (GCFEA), which monitors the field images focused on a fiber mirror to control the flexure and the focus errors within GCFEA. FCC consists of an optical bench on which five optical components are installed. The order of the optical train is: a collimator, neutral density filters, a focus analyzer, a reimager and a detector (Andor iKon-L 936 CCD camera). The collimator consists of a triplet lens and receives the beam reflected by a fiber mirror. The neutral density filters make it possible a broad range star brightness as a target or a guide. The focus analyzer is used to measure a focus offset. The reimager focuses the beam from the collimator onto the CCD detector focal plane. The detector module includes a linear translator and a field de-rotator. We performed thermoelastic stress analysis for lenses and their mounts to confirm the physical safety of the lens materials. We also conducted the global structure analysis for various gravitational orientations to verify the image stability requirement during the operation of the telescope and the instrument. In this article, we present the opto-mechanical detailed design of G-CLEF FCC and describe the consequence of the numerical finite element analyses for the design.

Selective doping of pyridinic nitrogen in carbon materials has attracted attention due to its significant properties for various applications such as catalysts and electrodes. However, selective doping of pyridinic nitrogen together with controlling skeletal structure is challenging in the absence of catalysts. In this work, four precursors including four fused aromatic rings and pyridinic nitrogen were simply carbonized in the absence of catalysts in order to attain mass synthesis at low cost and a high percentage of pyridinic nitrogen in carbon materials with controlled edges. Among four precursors, dibenzo[f,h] quinoline (DQ) showed an extremely high percentage of pyridinic nitrogen (96 and 86%) after heat treatment at 923 and 973 K, respectively. Experimental spectroscopic analyses combined with calculated spectroscopic analyses using density functional theory calculations unveiled that the C-H next to the pyridinic nitrogen in DQ generated gulf edge structures with controlled pyridinic nitrogen after carbonization. By comparing the reactivities among the four precursors, three main factors required for maintaining the pyridinic nitrogen in carbon materials with controlled edges, such as (1) high thermal stability of the pyridinic nitrogen, (2) the presence of one pyridinic nitrogen in one ring, and (3) the formation of gulf edges including pyridinic nitrogen to protect the pyridinic nitrogen by the C-H groups on the gulf edges, were revealed.

In this study, hybrid aerogels containing carbon nanoparticles (CNP) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) were synthesized via sol–gel method using resorcinol/formaldehyde precursors through a hydrolysis-condensation reaction mechanism. Porous carbonaceous structures were achieved by freeze-drying of the organic gels followed by controlled carbonization under an inert gas. The samples were characterized by various techniques such as FTIR, BJH, FESEM, CV, and EIS. The specific surface area and total pore volume of the aerogel sample were measured to be as high as 452 m2/ g and 0.782 cm3/ g, respectively, thus enhancing the electric double-layer formation. Electrochemical tests on the samples showed a large specific capacitance (212 F/g) and an excellent cyclic stability over 3000 cycles. Performance of the synthesized structures was subsequently assessed as electrodes in a capacitive deionization (CDI) process. At the operating conditions of 1.6 V voltage, flow rate of 20 mL/min, and NaCl concentration of 1000 mg/L a promising adsorption capacity around 42.08 mg/g was achieved.