This research investigates the negative consequences of offering preferential treatment to consumers. We demonstrate that offering preferential treatment builds up consumers’ feelings of entitlement, which increases consumers’ intention to retaliate against the firm when such treatment is terminated. This effect, which generalizes across a variety of shopping contexts and types of preferential treatment, is shown to be moderated by some specific features of the offer: repetitiveness, regularity, and value. Finally, we explore the relationship between consumer entitlement and consumer gratitude. Specifically, we find that boosting feelings of gratitude by reminding consumers that other firms do not offer similar preferential treatment to their customers attenuates the effect of consumer entitlement on consumer retaliation intention. Taken together, our findings provide actionable insights on how to design preferential treatment that will not backfire.

In nowadays consumption-based society, products (e.g. food and electronic products) are often thrown away before they are sufficiently used. The aversive consequence of such a lifestyle is becoming more alarming. There is an urgent need for a change in people’s consumption style. How can we make people correct their existing wasteful consumption behaviors and act responsibly? In fact, feelings very often can influence people’s behavior and judgments (Schwarz, 1990), even though the feelings are aroused by irrelevant sources - incidental emotion (Garg, Inman, & Mittal, 2005; Lerner & Keltner, 2000; Schwarz & Clore, 1983). Feelings of guilt and shame are known as moral emotions which are the guidance to ethical behaviors (Tangney, 1991, 2003). Although there is a significant overlapping between these two emotions, they also differ in several important aspects. One critical difference lies in the way the transgressor makes attributions (Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski 1994). A transgressor who attributes the wrongdoing to a specific behavior (i.e. “I’ve done something bad”) is more likely to experience guilt while a transgressor who makes attribution to the global self (i.e. “I’m a terrible person”) is more likely to experience shame (Tracy & Robins, 2004). Given these fundamental differences, we speculate that a guilt-laden consumer is more likely to correct his or her wrongdoing (i.e. wastage) by taking reparative actions to minimize waste but a shame-laden consumer may possibly give up doing so. Findings from an experimental study (N=90) largely support this prediction. Undergraduate students who were made to feel shame were less likely to participate in a recycling campaign organized by the university than the students in the control condition. They reported a lower intention to use recycling facilities provided. On the other hand, participants who were made to feel guilt reported a marginally higher intention to participate in the campaign than the control participants. These preliminary findings suggest that emotional experience derived from other life domains might determine responsible consumption behaviors. Shame, which is commonly regarded as a moral emotion, may not necessarily make people more responsible consumers. The mechanism that underlies this effect may warrant further investigation.

Since the late 1980s, information communication and technology (ICT) have reshaped the landscape of the tourism industry (Buhalis & Law, 2008). Thanks to the Web 2.0 technology, tourism practitioners have never been this close to their customers over social media platforms. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), social media refers to “a group of Internet-based applications which build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (p. 61). In line with this definition, electronic social networks, user-generated content aggregators, as well as location-based applications are all typical social media platforms, across which enable customers to create, edit, and share content. The increasingly growing social media platforms have greatly facilitated implementations of customer engagement strategies for organizations. As a psychological state, customer engagement is featured by interactive customer experiences with an organization, which encourage psychological, emotional, and physical investment a customer has in the organization (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2017). In the tourism and hospitality context, customer engagement strategies are as critical in strengthening customer loyalty, trust, and brand evaluations (So, King, & Sparks, 2016). Useful insights have been gained relating to conceptualization and measurement scale of customer engagement, organizational and cultural obstacles to consumer engagement within hotel organizations (Chathoth et al., 2014), customer engagement in a social media context alongside the process of recognition (Cabiddu et al., 2014). Underlying the practical and theoretical significance of customer engagement lies the subjective nature of views on the social media platforms. Goh, Heng, and Lin (2014) recognized that engagement in social media brand communities positively lead to enhanced purchase expenditures through embedded information and persuasion. Quantitively, the persuasive effect of user generated information is at least 22 times more than that of marketer’s in terms of marginal effect. Although previous research has examined consequences of consumer engagement, there has been less attention paid to its causes. Meanwhile, as far as Brodie et al. (2011) were concerned, the persistency of consumer-brand engagement is contingent on an assessment of tangible and intangible costs against possible benefits such as product news and offers. Therefore, identification of these benefits can offer supplementary insights into current literature of consumer engagement. The current study utilizes the self-determination theory to uncover how engagement in social media activities is facilitated by consumers’ intrinsic motivators and what psychological benefits can consumer obtain from such engagement, as either psychological state or process (Brodie et al., 2011). Research subjects in this study are Chinese social media users. According to eMarketer’s (2017) estimated that more than 80 percent of Internet users in China (i.e., around 626 million people) accessed social networks regularly in 2017. The importance of tapping this massive market can never be overestimated.

Understanding why individuals behave unethically is an important topic for both theory and practice, especially in the current environment where people experience much more stressful events. The current research aims to examine the relationship between peoples’ experienced stress and their attitude towards unethical consumption behavior, as well as the underlying mechanism. Empirical findings from a survey of 451 participants suggest perceived stress serves as an important indicator of people’s tolerance of unethical activities, and that this relationship is mediated by chronic construal level and materialism value. Specifically, stressed individuals tend to develop low-construal mindsets and more materialism values, both of which further increase their tolerance of ethically questionable behaviors. The present research highlights the importance of stress on consumer ethics and contributes to prior literature in three ways. Firstly, the current study adds to the literature on consumer ethics by examining a new predictor of consumers’ ethical beliefs, which enriches the understanding of why some consumers act more ethically than others do. Secondly, to the best of our knowledge, little prior literature has examined the effect stress on ethical beliefs. The current research for the first time examines the effect and the mechanism and reveals the mediating roles of construal level and materialism value. Thirdly, the present research finds that stress increases low-level construal, leading to unethical beliefs. This finding broadens the scope in construal level theory by suggesting that chronic construal level predicts individual ethical judgments.

Introduction In order to solve the information asymmetry and make full use of resources (unused goods, spare capacity and so on), the sharing economy, which based on the application of mobile internet technology and focused on the consumption of the right to use, is developing rapidly. Lack of trust is considered to be one of the important problems hindering the development of sharing economy. Möhlmann (2015) said that trust is a fundamental determinant of sharing economy development and ensuring shared satisfaction. At present, sharing economy enterprises have established product evaluation system and docked a third party credit rating system (i.e. Zhima Credit) to promote consumers’ trust. However, with most enterprises are becoming more and more consistent in evaluation and credit rating system, there is a new problem emerged: how to further deepen consumers’ trust in order to promote consumers’ intention to participate continuously (Zucker, 1986; Lewis & Weigert, 1985). Granovetter (1985) mentioned that trust is the product of social relationships. Botsman and Rogers (2011) made it clear that social networks play an important role in building trust in sharing economy. And people are always more willing to accept the opinions of people who have social relations with them (Lu, Zhao, & Wang, 2010). Hence, with the feature of participant of everyone in sharing economy, it is necessary to further strengthen consumers’ trust through the social interaction among consumers and between consumers and sharing platforms. Theoretical Development Sharing economy is based on LBS and other new technologies to realize the matching of supply and demand information across time and space. And to a certain extent, it solves the problem of information asymmetry in the era of e-commerce. Yet consumer have new requirements for product information. For example, consumers are more concerned about whether the utility of products and services can meet their needs (i.e. some consumers are more concerned about when to reach their destination than the performance of the car). But it is difficult for company to understand each everyone of consumers’ utility preference and publish product utility information based on these preferences (Xie & Gerstner, 2007). Because this kind of utility preference has the characteristic of timeliness and personalization. Therefore, consumers’ perceived uncertainty about the utility of the product will also affect the consumers’ trust. In summary, we then address these research questions:(1) can the promotion of trust between consumers and sharing platforms be achieved through the socializing of sharing platforms and then affect consumers’ intention to participate continuously; (2) if so, which type of privacy protection method and social information can promote consumer trust; and (3) does the impact of sharing platform socialization on consumer trust vary according to consumers’ concerns about the perceived utility uncertainty of the product. Research Design We then address these issues using experiment data. The first experiment was a 2 (social media: have, not have) x 2 (individual trust propensity: trust, not trust) between-subject design on the intention to trust sharing platform and participant continuously. Perceived utility uncertainty was added to this design as a moderator. Moreover, the second experiment was a 2 (social information type: hedonic, utilitarian) x 2 (degree of privacy protection: week, strong) between-subject design on the intention to trust sharing platform. Our scales come from existing scales and optimize it according to the characteristics of sharing economy (Schneider, 1999; Dhar & Wertenbroch, 2000; McKnight, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002). Results and Conclusion The results of the first experiment show that whether or not the social platform has no significant impact on the consumer trust if the individual tends to trust others. And for individuals who tends to do not trust others, they are more likely to trust socialized sharing platforms. The higher the consumer perceived utility uncertainty is, the higher (lower) trust of the consumer platform in the socialized (not socialized) sharing platform. For the second experiment results, in the context of sharing economy, the utilitarian information has a greater positive impact on the consumer trust than the hedonic information. In addition, the stronger the privacy protection of sharing platforms, the higher the trust of consumes. This study makes several academic contributions. First, we extend the topic of socialization to sharing economy context. Second, we add the perceived utility uncertainty as a moderator, and supplement the role of perceived uncertainty. This research also provides several practical implications. First, sharing platform can promote their consumers’ trust by establishing their own social platform. This platform can be used as a differentiated competitive strategy for sharing platform. Second, sharing platform should guide consumers to share utilitarian information (i.e. weather for specific place or real time traffic) to improve consumer satisfaction. Third, sharing platform can access consumer preference information through this social platform for further product development and classification.

Introduction Online shopping has become an important part of people’s daily lives. The very nature of online shopping makes it unlikely for consumers to examine products with their senses (e.g., touch, smell) as they can do in offline stores. The consumer obtains information from a variety of online sources (sellers, other buyers, and third parties) to assess a product and make a purchase decision. This variety of online information (e.g., product description, reviews and ratings) informs and persuades consumers. While sellers’ decisions comprise most information displayed on their product’s website, other information is shown because consumers have a moral, ethical, and legal “right” to know (e.g., ingredients, weight, size) (Jacoby, Speller, & Berning, 1974). Regarding the latter information, some countries (e.g., the U.S., China, Canada, the EU and India) have regulations that require pre-packaged food manufacturers to provide a nutrition-fact label and claims displaying standardized information on product packaging (Health Canada, 2010). We ask the following question to public policy makers and marketers: Should online pre-packaged food shops also need to present nutrition facts? There are two perspectives one might adopt regarding the array of information confronting online shoppers. The first perspective deals with human information processing. This position maintains that humans’ ability to assimilate and process information has finite limits during any given unit of time, and that once these limits are surpassed, behavior tends to become confused and dysfunctional (Miller, 1956; Driver & Streufert, 1969). Conceivably, such information overload might also occur in online shopping. Online shoppers often make their selections from a range of products, each with an array of information. Moreover, they make such purchase decisions within a relatively short time period. An alternative perspective is that nutrition-fact information provides key cues for consumers to assess product quality in the online marketplace. Cues can be categorized as extrinsic or intrinsic to the product (Maheswaran & Chaiken, 1991; Anderson, 1981). Extrinsic cues are product-related attributes that can be altered whereas intrinsic cues are inherent to the product itself (e.g., ingredients) and cannot be easily altered (Rao & Monroe, 1988; Purohit & Srivastava, 2001). An online shopper's evaluation of a product is based upon both intrinsic and extrinsic cues. In the online shopping environment, few intrinsic cues are available to consumers and the disclosure of nutrition facts (an intrinsic product feature) can help to fill this gap. Theoretical Development The understanding of how nutrition information presentation influences online food sales is a substantial topic for both industry and academia. With the convenience of online shopping, the potential for food producers and retail stores to take their products online is enormous. eMarketer (2014) reports that online food and beverage purchases increased 15.2% in U.S. retail ecommerce sales, and that this trend will remain consistent. Online food shopping is extremely popular in China, with 92% of consumers purchasing food or beverages at least once a month (Weber Shandwick, 2014). Moreover, eMarketer (2016) reports that by 2020, one-fourth of China's online purchases will be made directly from foreign websites or from third-party platforms. Thus, it is important for other countries to learn about the Chinese market. Among these potential issues, whether nutrition-fact information affects consumer purchase decisions in the online shopping context remains unexplored. Nutrition-fact labels have proven to be useful cues for consumer purchasing decision in offline conditions (Shah, Bettman, Ubel, Keller, & Edell, 2014). However, researchers have been unable to determine the effects of nutrition information in online conditions with network virtualization (Mavlanova, Benbunan-Fich, & Koufaris, 2012) and information multiplicity. In addition, the nutrition information disclosed by online sellers may cue consumers to acquire healthy food. Previous research has found that when information pertaining to a food’s nutritional content is provided, less-healthy food tastes better (Raghunathan, Naylor, & Hoyer, 2006). This literature raises the issue of whether nutrition information is more effective for healthy or unhealthy products. In summary, we investigate the effect of nutrition-fact information on online food shopping. The research questions address: (1) whether and how nutrition-fact information influences food sales in online conditions; (2) how nutrition-fact information interacts with other online extrinsic cues (i.e., word of mouth and historical sales); and (3) whether nutrition-fact information is more effective for healthy or unhealthy products. Research Design We then address these issues using panel data collected from Taobao.com (the largest online shopping platform in China). We selected 45 days as our study period, and the sample comprised 273 sellers. In addition, we conduct an experiment using an eye-tracking system to test the necessity and helpfulness of nutrition-fact information. Results and Conclusion The results show that the nutrition-fact information has a significant impact on sales. More specifically, consumers are more likely to choose sellers with the nutrition-fact information, and the healthy (unhealthy) food with nutrition-fact information tends to attract more (fewer) purchase. In addition, our results reveal some interesting interactions between nutrition-fact information and other cues. Specifically, WOM and historical sales strengthen the sales impact of nutrition-fact information. Our eye-tracking experiment leads to several interesting results. First, consumers pay attention to nutrition-fact information and spend considerable time reading it. Second, a long fixation length on nutrition-fact information would reasonably increase sales. This study makes several academic contributions. First, we extend the topic of nutrition information to an e-commerce context. Second, this is one of the first studies to examine the role of nutrition-fact information from an experimental perspective. Third, we supplement the findings of previous studies on the role of food type. This study also provides several practical implications. First, governments could require online sellers to reveal nutrition information in a truthful and detailed manner at the point of sale. In addition, labeling policies not only increase nutrition awareness and protect consumers, but they can also offer a profitable path for marketers. Second, sellers should design nutrition information and other cues strategies jointly. Third, compared with unhealthy food, nutrition-fact information is more effective for the purchase of healthy food. Sellers might be encouraged by this trend and consider more strategies to display nutrition-fact information on healthy food.

To investigate the value co-creation process in wellness tourism, this study constructed a structural equation model of customer interactions with (1) the environment, (2) service employees, and (3) other customers relating to customer-perceived value and customer engagement. Empirical data were collected from 528 survey respondents who were at wellness tourism resorts. The results reveal that all three types of interaction have positive effects on customer-perceived value, and that perceived value positively affects customer engagement. Based on this finding, management recommendations for wellness tourism service enterprises are given.

Value creation is essential for successfully operating a firm and becomes a critical issue for realizing cross-firm competition and industrial performance distinctions. Tourism scholars have viewed tourism value-chain (TVC) as a useful tool to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of performance through controlling the impact factors in tourism products and services. However, few extant studies focus on the works of performance measurement in the tourism industry. This study applies Yilmaz and Bititci’s (2006 a, b) concept to develop novel performance measurement and value creation indicators for industrial tourism and customers through a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The QCA approach considers asymmetric relationships—reporting conditions that are sufficient or necessary to cause an outcome condition. QCA allows exploring the causal-effect relationship between the variables. In-depth interview with five senior managers and five customers were conducted. The QCA results showed that industrial tourism and customer performance indicators have complex links with value creation. The main theoretical contributions of this study extends through four stages of TVC on both manufacturing and industrial tourism, developing causal-effect connections of industrial tourism, and customer performance on value creation. The study describes how proprietors and service providers promoted brand identification and firm’s reputation for achieving industrial tourism value. The findings beneficially provide practical implications for proprietors and customers for applying performance indicators once aiming to develop an appropriate marketing strategy and create industrial tourism and customer values.

The near real-time speckle masking reconstruction technique has been developed to accelerate the processing of solar images to achieve high resolutions for ground-based solar telescopes. However, the reconstruction of solar subimages in such a speckle reconstruction is very time-consuming. We design and implement a new parallel speckle masking reconstruction algorithm based on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) on General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). Tests are performed to validate the correctness of our program on NVIDIA GPGPU. Details of several parallel reconstruction steps are presented, and the parallel implementation between various modules shows a significant speed increase compared to the previous serial implementations. In addition, we present a comparison of runtimes across serial programs, the OpenMP-based method, and the new parallel method. The new parallel method shows a clear advantage for large scale data processing, and a speedup of around 9 to 10 is achieved in reconstructing one solar subimage of 256×256 pixels. The speedup performance of the new parallel method exceeds that of OpenMP-based method overall. We conclude that the new parallel method would be of value, and contribute to real-time reconstruction of an entire solar image.

Insect growth regulators (IGRs) are insecticides that disrupt the normal development of target insects. Among the IGR insecticides, juvenile hormone (JH)-related IGRs are of particular interest because they stimulate or interfere with the formation of JH receptor complex. In the precious studies, novel JH-related IGRs with JH agonist (JHA) and antagonist (JHAN) activity were identified by using yeast two-hybrid system transformed with the Aedes aegypti JH receptor complex. In this study, the transcriptomic responses of Aedes albopictus were investigated upon JHA and JHAN, respectively. These results will provide important information about understanding of impact of JH-related IGRs in transcription level.

말라위는 농업생산성 향상을 위해 관개시설 설치를 적극적으로 확대하고 있는데. 주로 외국의 원조에 의존하고 있다. 따라서 말라위의 효율적인 관개시설 구축을 위해 우리나라의 영산강유역농업종합개발사업(이하 영산강사업) 사례를 검토한 후 정책적 시사점을 제시하였다. 우리나라의 영산강사업은 유관기관들의 체계적인 협업 시스템으로 장기간에 걸쳐 시행되었다. 따라서 말라위의 중장기적인 관개시설 구축을 통한 농업생산성 향상을 위해서는 정부의 강력한 의지와 해당 사업을 주도적으로 시행할 수 있는 기관의 역할을 분명히 할 필요가 있다. 이를 위해서는 법적으로 규정해야 할 것이다. 현재 말라위의 사회경제적 여건은 우리나라의 영산강사업 추진 시기와는 매우 상이하다. 또한 한국의 영산강사업은 중장기적으로 걸쳐 시행되면서 각 과정에서 시행착오를 통한 노하우(know-how) 및 기술이 축적되었다. 따라서 말라위도 영산강사업과 같은 대규모 국책사업을 일괄적으로 시행하기 보다는 테스트 베드를 거쳐 말라위 여건에 맞게 시행할 필요가 있다. 영산강사업은 시행 초기에 환경문제가 크게 부각되지 않았지만, 90년대 후반부터는 ‘환경’에 대한 경각심이 커져 현재 영산강사업 5단계 설치는 중단된 상태이다. 따라서 말라위에서도 이러한 환경문제 및 제반 정치경제적 여건에 대한 면밀한 검토가 필요하다. 다만, 영산강사업은 벼농사를 위한 관개시설 위주의 사업이므로, 밭작물 위주의 관개시설은 그 형태 및 시사점이 달라질 수 있다 . 그리고 우리나라 영산강사업은 장기간에 걸려 축적된 노하우와 기술이 단계적으로 적용된 것으로 , 각 토목기술별로 말라위에 적용 가능한지는 추후 검토가 필요할 것이다 . 이러한 정책적 한계점은 추후 연구과제로 남겨둔다.

With the rapid development of the global economy, transport safety and security have become the key issues in maritime transportation all over the world. In practical applications, the Automatic Identification System (AIS)-based measurement of similarities between different vessel trajectories plays an important role in improving maritime transportation, e.g., maritime navigation, maritime supervision and management. However, the received AIS datasets are usually composed of a large amount of redundant information which could significantly increase the computational complexity. To deal with this problem, a Douglas-Peucker (DP)-based calculation method is introduced in this paper to accurately compress the spatio-temporal AIS trajectories while preserving the main geometrical structures. Based on the compressed trajectories, it is able to accelerate the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm for the measurement of similarities between different vessel trajectories. In particular, the combination of DP and DTW has the capacity of significantly reducing the computational cost and guaranteeing the accuracy of similarity measures. The experimental results have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of computational cost and accuracy of similarity measures.

Graphite fibers are materials with a high specific modulus that have attracted much interest in the aerospace industry, but their high manufacturing cost and low yield are still problems that prevent their wide applications in practice. This paper presents a laser-based process for graphitization of carbon fiber (CF) and explores the effect of laser radiation on the microstructure of CF. The obtained Raman spectra indicate that the outer surface of CF evolves from turbostratic structures into a three-dimensional ordered state after being irradiated by a laser. The X-ray diffraction data revealed that the growth of crystallite was parallel to the fiber axis, and the interlayer spacing d002 decreased from 0.353 to 0.345 nm. The results of scanning electron microscopy revealed that the surface of irradiated CFs was rougher than that of the unirradiated ones and there were scale-like small fragments that had peeled off from the fibers. The tensile modulus increased by 17.51% and the Weibull average tensile strength decreased by 30.53% after being irradiated by a laser. These results demonstrate that the laser irradiation was able to increase the graphitization degree of the CFs, which showed some properties comparable to graphite fibers.

In the present study, we report the first complete mitochondrial DNA genome of the genus Callipogon based on C.relictus, a natural monument and endangered species in South Korea. The mitogenome is 15,742 base pairs with 13 proteincoding genes (PCGs), two rRNAs, 22 tRNAs, and a 1033 bp long AT-rich region. The overall base composition was67.3% AT and 32.7 GC. Among 13 PCGs, seven genes (Nad2, Atp8, Atp6, Nad4L, Nad6, Cob, Nad1) harbour the typicalstop codon TAA or TAG, whereas remaining five genes terminate with T. Interestingly, Cox3 employs AGA as the terminationcodon.