PURPOSES : A model for minimizing cutting loss and determining the optimum layout of blocks in pavements was developed in this study. METHODS : Based on literature review, a model which included constraints such as the amount, volume, overlap, and pattern, was developed to minimize the cutting loss in an irregular pavement shape. The Stach bond, stretcher bond, and herringbone patterns were used in this model. The harmony search and particle swarm algorithms were then used to solve this model. RESULTS : Based on the results of the model and algorithms, the harmony search algorithm yielded better results because of its fast computation time. Moreover, compared to the sample pavement area, it reduced the cutting loss by 20.91%. CONCLUSIONS : The model and algorithms successfully optimized the layout of the pavement and they have potential applications in industries, such as tiling, panels, and textiles.

This study supplements the literature by determining how restaurant innovativeness is linked to customer advocacy as well as considering self-image congruity as mediator of this relationship. A questionnaire survey of 385 restaurant customers was conducted in Taiwan. The results indicated that restaurant innovativeness is positively related to customers’ self-image congruity and customer advocacy. Customers’ self-image congruity is positively associated with customer advocacy. In addition, self-image congruity mediates the relationship between restaurant innovativeness and customer advocacy. The research contributes to literature by extend the relationships between restaurant innovativeness, self-image congruity, and customer advocacy. Restaurant managers should adopt approaches (e.g. innovativeness-related activities) for enhancing self-image congruity in customers.

The integration of Live streaming and E-commerce, also known as Live commerce, has been widely used in Asia. The live commerce market in China, which leads the live commerce business, reached 2.36 trillion yuan (about 340 billion dollars) at the end of 2021. While revenue is an important indicator for a company, customer engagement in live commerce, which can acquire potential customers through brand loyalty formation, community building, and information sharing, is also a crucial indicator in consideration of long-term development.

With the evolution of Artificial intelligence (AI), emotional artificial intelligence service agents (AISA) have become common in service industry. However, how artificial empathy of AISA contributes to customer acceptance remains an open question. This study draws on Anthropomorphism Theory and Customer AI Experience Theory to examine whether and how artificial empathy has influence on customer acceptance of AISA. Evidence from three experiments (N=1057) designed by the Experimental vignette method (EVM) shows that: (1) artificial empathy including perspective-taking, empathic concern and emotional contagion has a positive impact on customer acceptance of AISA (study 1); (2) customer AI experience (emotional experience quality, social experience activation and social experience quality) mediates the relationship between artificial empathy and customer acceptance of AISA (study 2); (3) artificial empathy for hedonic (vs. utilitarian) services leads to a stronger effect on customer acceptance of AISA (study 3). This paper enriches our understanding of artificial empathy and provides practical guidance for practitioners strategically managing AISA services in AI-enabled marketing interactions.

The popularity of live streaming is driving the emergence of a new business model, known as live-streaming commerce (LSC). While there are more and more broadcasters in LSC, their behaviors and performance of them are significantly different. To have a better understanding of broadcasters, we employ different machine learning models to identify different portraits in both static and dynamic dimensions. We collect a rich live-streaming dataset from one leading platform in China. Our dataset features information for both broadcasters and viewers, including viewers’ purchasing behaviors, viewers’ records of posting words, broadcasters’ gender, the number of followers for broadcasters, and the live streaming show information, including the start and end time, and the viewers in each live streaming show. The rich textual information in broadcasters’ profile induction provides us a good opportunity to uncover different static portraits and the records in live streaming shows give us a chance to identify different dynamic behavioral portraits for broadcasters.

The popularity of live streaming is driving the emergence of a new business model, known as live-streaming commerce (LSC). Consumers spend more and more time on smartphones, and the emerging business model of live-streaming commerce (LSC) is flourishing in the retail industry. With highly interactive features, LSC social interactions influence viewer purchase behaviors. To examine the interactions between influencers and viewers, we collected a rich dataset from a leading LSC service platform and integrated research models from the natural language process (NLP) field and econometric models.

Given the conundrum of moral washing in CSR communication, this research examines the effectiveness of narrative richness using storytelling in marketing. In the process, the moderating role of moral imagination is further explored. An online experiment with a 2 (Narrative Richness: High vs. Low) x 2 (Moral Imagination: High vs. Low) between-subjects factorial design was conducted with two well-known companies (Shell vs. Facebook) suffered from a reputation crisis as the target brands. The results (N = 287) showed that the effects of narrative richness on consumer responses, including positive emotion, negative emotion, and behavioral intention, were significant for Facebook whereas its effect on positive emotion was significant for Shell. Most importantly, the two-way interaction between narrative richness and moral imagination on attitude toward the brand was significant for Shell, indicating that the effect of narrative richness on attitude toward the brand was augmented by moral imagination. In other words, consumers with high moral imagination view narrative-rich messages with virtuous thoughts to figure out the conundrum of CSR communication for the company, and vice versa. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

The development and application of NFTs has gained great attentions. Especially, with the eyes on the potential of Metaverse and Web 3.0, NFTs are regarded as one of the foundational parts of the future internet. The main contribution of NFTs is the innovative solution for creating digital uniqueness through its property of non-fungibility. With this property, the ubiquity caused by replicable data on the current internet can be advanced with NFT-backed uniqueness, which can assist in certifying authenticity, authorship, and possessions of contents, products, and assets online. This has tremendous meaning for the luxury brand industry, which has been struggling with the ubiquity of the internet for years. The emergence of NFTs, however, represents hope and a potential mean to represent scarcity in a digital context. By the use of NFTs, luxury brands’ conservative digital marketing strategies and their ways of production design, marketing, consumer management could be fundamentally changed. This study aims to discuss the NFT marketing strategy from the perspective of luxury brands. Particularly, the study will investigate the desirability strategies in these luxury NFT cases. To do so, the study uses a socio-technical perspective to understand how luxury brands embody the desirability strategy through NFTs, by considering the technical factors of NFTs (i.e., design, issuance, and ecosystem functioning) and social factors of desirability (i.e., exclusivity, rarity, prestige, and creative leadership). The study explores applicable strategy of how to realize luxury desirability through NFT technics. As a result, this study investigates 39 luxury NFT cases from 2021 to 2022, including the NFTs launched by famous luxury brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and KARL LAGERFELD. The study showcases three within-case analyses to exhibit vivid examples of NFT innovations. Besides, the study generates a common framework by a complete cross-case analysis. The framework contains three domains and seven dimensions to guide further luxury NFT innovations and contributes to theory development in the field of NFT marketing and branding.

How to shifting consumer behavior to be more sustainable has been a hot research topic. The COVID-19 Pandemic has ignited this since consumers pay more attention to sustainability issues. Sustainability application (app) has been a promising way to connect individuals and provide information to promote a habit of sustainable consumption. The use of these apps to facilitate sustainable consumption has been a recent research focus. The strategy to encouraging app adoption is a research priority identified in a synthesized literature review of prior studies on mobile app marketing. As such, it is imperative to understand how to design sustainability apps to motivate consumers to facilitate app use intention. Attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction (ARCS) model is one commonly used motivational design model, which has been applied to mobile learning systems to examine gamification design. The four factors of ARCS correspond to different strategies to increase users’ motivation to use the app. Thus, the aim of this research is to develop an ARCS motivational model for sustainability apps. A simulated gamified sustainability app was utilized with the aim of reducing carbon footprint. A market research firm was contracted to collect data by using an online questionnaire. Respondents were shown the pictures and functions of the app including the interface of the app, carbon footprint status, the leaderboard of carbon emissions in the community, shop, personal profile and then answered questions. 346 usable questionnaires were obtained. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Livestreaming commerce is a form of e-commerce that embedded real-time video presentation and social interaction. It provides immersive shopping experience reinforced by high levels of interactivity and instant bidirectional communication. China, as one of the biggest livestreaming markets, has reached 2.3 trillion (CNY) livestreaming commerce market value in 2022. In a 2020 survey, two-thirds of Chinese consumers experienced livestreaming shopping in the previous year. Accordingly, luxury brands, such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton have started to implement livestreaming commerce in China. However, for years, luxury brands have struggled with online commerce as it may impact upon perceptions of exclusivity and dilute brand value. Research on the efficacy of live commerce emerged in recent years and mostly focused on non-luxury brands. However, luxury brands cannot simply copy digital marketing strategies that proved to be effective for non-luxury brands. To date, limited academic attention has been devoted to the luxury commerce in a livestreaming context.

The attitude-behavior gap and intention-behavior gap has not been research extensively. The purpose of this study is to provide a review of moderating or mediating factors on the relationship between intention or attitude and behavior of sustainable tourism. Intention was defined as the degree of a human being’s resolve to perform a certain action. The construct ‘Intention” has been used widely in some theories like the Theory of Planned Behavior. Researchers usually include the intention construct into their research framework to explain the theoretical mechanism. Sustainable or ecological tourism education has been implemented for years and empirical evidence provides us that almost all tourists are alerted to the importance of sustainability. There is a great challenge that tourists’ behavior might not concur with their intention. Policymakers and marketers really want to know the real factors affecting the association between the intention and behavior of sustainable tourism. Tourists’ purchase intention is a rational process and is affected by safety. Tourist behavior is associated with price and service environment which is a mixture of rational and emotional considerations.

People spent around 90% of smartphone usage time on mobile applications (apps). In response to these opportunities, companies have developed branded apps to interact with consumers and facilitate loyalty. However, companies have hard time retaining consumers to their own brand due to the fierce competition in the app market. As such, it is imperative to unveil factors driving continuance intention of branded apps. This is one of a key research themes in a recent literature review of marketing research on mobile apps. Most of prior studies have adopted the utilitarian perspective where perceived usefulness and ease of use are identified as the key drivers. However, the fit perspective has received limited attention. It has gained increasing importance as recent studies have emphasized the role of person-app fit and person-brand fit in driving consumers’ purchase decision performance and as consumers’ lives are highly embedded into branded apps. This study aims to investigate continuance intention of branded apps from the fit perspective. This research selected the target branded apps in Taiwan based on prior studies. A market research firm was contracted to collect data randomly on various social media sites, and its membership database by using online questionnaires. 198 usable questionnaires were obtained. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

This study constructs a model to predict ad attitude when AI influencers act as ad endorsers. In the results, search products and rational ad appeal have more positive ad attitude, perceived empathy and perceived expertise as mediator. These three variables can be reinforced by the consistency of ad appeals and product categories.

This study supplements the literature by determining how restaurant innovativeness is linked to customer advocacy as well as considering self-image congruity as mediator of this relationship. A questionnaire survey of 385 restaurant customers was conducted in Taiwan. The results indicated that restaurant innovativeness is positively related to customers’ self-image congruity and customer advocacy. Customers’ self-image congruity is positively associated with customer advocacy. In addition, self-image congruity mediates the relationship between restaurant innovativeness and customer advocacy. The research contributes to literature by extend the relationships between restaurant innovativeness, self-image congruity, and customer advocacy. Restaurant managers should adopt approaches (e.g. innovativeness-related activities) for enhancing self-image congruity in customers.

Marine industry generates tons of waste, which is usually discarded or used for production of fish feed and low-value silage. However, marine residual raw materials (e.g., skins, heads, liver, and roe after fish gutting and processing) contain lipids rich in omega-3 fatty acid, which has several beneficial physiological effects such as maintenance of normal cardiac function, normal brain function, and normal vision. Food fortification with omega-3 fatty acid derived from marine residual raw materials can therefore provide health benefits and contribute to a circular food system. The current research explores consumer acceptance of the food fortified with microencapsulated fish oil derived from marine residual raw materials. Consumers may be hesitant to try these products due to food neophobia associated with tendency to eat foods with familiar ingredients. The idea of ingredients from normally discarded food parts may seem disturbing. However, there is a growing concern about low utilization of bioresources. Thus, conflicting goals may be in place and there is a need for research on motivations and barriers for consumption of this type of food. To address this, focus group interviews were conducted with 42 Norwegian consumers (7 groups, 4-7 participants each). The sample represented different age groups (20-55 years), genders, educational backgrounds, and income levels. Each participant received a compensation of ca. USD 30. The focus groups discussed food habits, attitude towards the fortified food and utilizing residual raw materials, and reasons for intake/no intake of such food. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using the constant comparative method. The results indicate that the informants have limited experience with fortified food. However, they demonstrate positive attitude towards the foods fortified with microencapsulated fish oil and appreciate the utilization of residual raw materials. Health benefits are one of the important motivations. Still, the informants are concerned about the fishy taste, as the flavor is also quite crucial. Another barrier is an expected high price for such food. Adding fish oil may also be a problem for vegetarians and consumers with allergies. Thus, transparent information about the food ingredients is essential. The results also highlight the importance of food’s sensory characteristics. The current study advances understanding of the consumer acceptance of the food with residual raw materials (so far under investigated in the literature), and thus provides a basis for finding an efficient strategy for communicating its benefits to consumers. It also provides societal health benefits and positive environmental effects due to the increased intake of omega-3 and better utilization of unused bioresources.

An important segment, tourism e-commerce live streaming (TEcLS) has emerged as a new marketing channel actively embraced by destination marketing organizations (DMO) and tourist firms due to the COVID-19 pandemic. China, Japan, Australia, and many other nations have been selling such tourism products on various platforms. Live e-commerce generates a real-time interactive virtual environment that can be called a livescape. However, many tourism destinations or companies are unaware of the marketing science implications of live streaming and are unsure of their effectiveness or the intricacies of marketing live streaming. Previous research has explored the factors influencing consumer purchase behavior from the product, technology, and live-streamer perspectives, arguing that the advantages of breaking through time and space constraints, strong interactivity, the experience of reality, technological ease of use and usefulness, and celebrity aura encourage online purchases. However, limited investigation has been carried out on the impact of customers’ value-co-creation in livescape when watching tourism live streaming on their purchase intentions considering the key role of engagement. This calls for specific investigation of the phenomenon to facilitate live streaming design and tourism marketing. This study aims to explores the factors influencing consumer purchase intentions in the livescape based on a value co-creation research framework. Compared to traditional e-commerce, livescapes provides the “many-to-many” social presence and an immersive value co-creation platform. Thus, we focus on why and how social presence inspires customer engagement, ultimately leading to purchase intentions. This study finds that, as a crucial marketing tool, the social presence of tourism livescapes can promotes customer engagement, which in turn results in intentions to purchase tourism live-streaming products. Additionally, the mediating role of inspiration (inspired-by and inspired-to) between social presence and customer engagement is examined to reveal the influence mechanism in the tourism context. Finally, this study examines how to create an effective tourism livescape to enhance tourists social presence experience and inspire their engagement, which in turn increases their purchase intention.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) refers to the customer's perception of being anxious for not engaging in an experience. FOMO is an anxiety feeling positively associated with social media usage that one cannot catch up on something important in life. Fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing appeals initiated from social media usage were found to significantly affect consumer purchase decisions including choice of destination. Consumers usually browse social media and social networking sites such as forums and reviews in online tourism agents (OTAs) when they make travel decisions. Although FOMO is expected to affect tourists' perception and urgency in making a tourism decision, the use of FOMO-laden message to promote travel destination through different types of influencers has not yet been widely studied. This study fills this research gap by examining the effect of using FOMO laden content to promote travel destination through different types of influencers. An online experiment was conducted with four experimental conditions in which different influencers share about a destination using the same FOMO-laden message: (1) travel KOL, (2) tourists who post user-generated-content (UGC), (3) personal friends, and (4) a control condition with the absence of influencer and FOMO message. The 984 respondents were randomly assigned into one of the four experimental conditions. Data collected was analysed using PLS-SEM and PLS-MGA. Results indicated that anticipated elation, anticipated envy, and social influence predicted 30.2% variance of FOMO and FOMO explained 31.6% of variance of intention to visit the destination promoted. Multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA) found that exposure to message shared by travel KOL and personal friends significantly strengthen the FOMO feeling of participants resulting in strong intention to visit the destination promoted. UGC posted by tourists showed similar effect as the non-FOMO laden control group and are less significant in driving the FOMO feeling that leads to visit intention. Findings of this study provide insights into how effectiveness of destination promotion can be enhanced by using FOMO-laden message on social media through influential influencers.

With the continuous development of science and technology, unmanned ship has gradually become a hot spot in the field of marine research. In practical applications, unmanned ships need to have long-range navigation and high efficiency, so that they can accurately perform tasks in the marine environment. As one of the key technologies of unmanned ship, path planning is of great significance to improve the endurance of unmanned ship. In order to meet the requirements, this paper proposes a path planning method for long distance unmanned ships based on reinforcement learning angle precedence ant colony improvement algorithm. Firstly, canny operator is used to automatically extract navigation environment information, and then MAKLINK graph theory is applied for environment modelling. Finally, the basic ant colony algorithm is improved and applied to the path planning of unmanned ship to generate an optimal path. The experimental results show that, compared with the traditional ant colony algorithm, the path planning method based on the improved ant colony algorithm can achieve a voyage duration of nearly 7 km for unmanned ships under the same sailing environment, which has certain practicability and popularization value.

The development of heteroatoms doped inorganic nanocrystal-carbon composites (INCCs) has attained a great focus for energy applications (energy production and energy storage). A precise approach to fabricate the INCCs with homogenous distribution of the heteroatoms with an appropriate distribution of metal atoms remains a challenge for material scientists. Herein, we proposed a facile two-step route to synthesize INCC with doping of metal (α-Fe2O3) and non-metals (N, P, O) using hydrogel formed by treating hexachlorocyclotriphosphazene (HCCP) and 3, 4, 5-trihydroxy benzoic acid (Gallic acid). Metal oxide was doped using an extrinsic doping approach by varying its content and non-metallic doping by an intrinsic doping approach. We have fabricated four different samples (INCC-0.5%, INCC-1.0%, INCC-1.5%, and INCC-2.0%), which exhibit the uniform distribution of the N, P, O, and α-Fe2O3 in the carbon architecture. These composite materials were applied as anode material in water oxidation catalysis (WOC); INCC-1.5% electro-catalyst confirmed by cyclic voltammetry (CV) with a noticeable catholic peak 0.85 V vs RHE and maximal current density 1.5 mA.cm−2. It also delivers better methanol tolerance and elongated stability than RuO2; this superior performance was attributed due to the homogenous distribution of the α-Fe2O3 causing in promotion of adsorption of O2 initially and a greater surface area of 1352.8 m2/ g with hierarchical pore size distribution resulting higher rate of ion transportation and mass-flux.