The original third places concept conveyed the offering of much-needed settings for social comfort, thereby complementing the absence of equal opportunities at home (1st place) or in the workplace (2nd place). 3rd place is a crucial term to connect customers’ social needs, perception of service encounters, and the service provider’s managerial operation. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, various distancing forces have impeded previously intense social interactions featuring human-human contact. The increased use of contactless services and social distancing measures has impacted these. Such measurements refer to mandatory actions to maintain a fixed physical distance from others (i.e., two meters or six feet) via seating arrangements or suggested signage. While such compliance practices successfully limited the spread of Covid-19, they were also a signal of regulated behaviors and acceptable personal boundaries. The current study addressed this question by conducting experiments in three scenarios: a café, restaurant, and sports stadium. Following Pine and Gilmore’s experience typology, the three represent a passive absorptive experience, an active absorptive experience, and an immersive experience.

This study examines the impact of influencer-audience and audience-audience interactions in Livestream e-commerce by extending halo of the influencer to the brand and snowballing the opinions that empower other watchers. It finds that halo effect generates from influencer physical attraction and bandwagon effect from audience live comments significantly influenced product preference and purchase intentions.

Webpage cookies collect and authorize access to users’ online footprints and regulate the data authorization for access, sharing, and usage. Data authorization, which is built based on, but exceeding cookies protocol, enables personalized recommendations under the framework of data-driven content-user matching in a way against customer privacy invasiveness and data breaches. However, gaps exist in how users’ desire for a personalized experience and the site’s perceived ethics contribute to the site-trust and cookies acceptance of categories at each type of site and how businesses’ reward incentives and cookie-based controls may intensify the willingness to contribute to the user data donation continuously.

Theoretical Background Online tribalism is an unofficial network in virtual community due to common interests and affiliation to a topic, a belief, a figure, a ritual, or a culture (A. Taute and Sierra 2014, Badrinarayanan, Sierra and Taute 2014, Hamilton and Hewer 2010). In an interconnected world, consumers influence each other by initiating, spreading, appraising, receiving and internalising beliefs via social network and shape self - attitude and information status (Hilder 2004). These widely-existing phenomena suggest more efforts to be completed to address the gaps in knowledge in the following aspects: First, the information dissemination process should be understood with a stronger support of quantifying approaches to bring forward a systematic understanding to accommodate a wide range of drives for the complex social learning and assimilating procedure (Feliciani, Flache and Tolsma 2017, Macy et al. 2003, Huet, Deffuant and Jager 2008). For example, many qualitative research such as digital anthropology and netnography abound to explain the motivations, process, and outcomes of disseminating messages in the texture of social group (Flache and Macy 2011, Granovetter 1977). As the consequence, many tentative explanations have attempted to focus on the utilities of information circulation (Dupor, Kitamura and Tsuruga 2010, Gruhl et al. 2004, Kim and Baek 2014) and social influences (Gupta and Kim 2004, Kim and Baek 2014) but ended up with only incapability of modelling and quantifying the process. Within this trend, notably, two factors underpinning the changes in virtual community, i.e., individual’s information utility, motivation of seeking for conformity, remains a secret. In addition, it’s unclear that why and how active customers behave different from inactive ones from a perspective of information flow and social learning. Second, there is a lack of knowledge of how the intrinsic connections and dialectical dynamic between self-solicited individuals take place and adapt in the growth and evolution. With the tool of digitals, paradoxically, the essential ambiguity of digital openness and closure (Phelps et al. 2004), viability and tribalism (A. Taute and Sierra 2014, Badrinarayanan et al. 2014, Hamilton, Schlosser and Chen 2017), enculturation and acculturation, devastatingly remains under-investigated. Among these various perspectives to explain and model the dynamics of online community and social learning, there should exist a general framework that combines decisive bases of recipients and senders with various motives and constraints, with both subjectivity and objectivity. Opinion dissemination can therefore be understood not only as an objective procedure, but also with subjective intervention of participants where cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural factors intertwine to influence the collective learning pattern. Thirdly, some contextual findings are to be tested how the conditional relations may be established under different social settings. For example, theories show that engaged consumers usually exhibit enhanced consumer loyalty, satisfaction, empowerment, connection, emotional bonding, trust and commitment. However, literature rarely provide an answer that within a social group, how are traditions, patterns, communications, rewards, and punishments formed and evolved to lead to either conformity or dispute. To address the above gaps, this research adopts an interactive approach to deconstruct information into inputs (motivation, potential), action (interpersonal connection), and output (utility and identity). This research delivers several simulated experiments to identify how the evolution of customer opinions evolves out various patterns of self-efficacy and social recognition. The author assembles four aspects of input variables, including information utility, accordance utility, self-efficacy, and social status of consumers, and test the overall information prosperity and propensity of the social earning with different activeness levels. Findings The analytical firstly results show that active individuals exist in social group as the information hubs to dismiss the information and share a higher level of delight of owning knowledge and over time, become similar in knowledge standard. Consequently, a wider connection with and influence on mass audience of active members usually lead to a higher psychographic gain of attitudinal accordance compared with inactive and isolated ones in group. Secondly, at the individual level, the author found that the activeness in tribal group obviously result in a higher level of both self-recognition and social recognition on average. This pattern is consistent with vast literature in ethnography. And the relation between the activeness level and the self- and social-recognition level is positive. While at the aggregate level, it’s investigated that active individuals of online tribes have a stronger inclination, evidenced by a stronger propensity of spreading message, to further generate messages to impact other more profoundly when compared with inactive ones. The simulation experiment also indicated that a few contextual relations between variables, e.g., information-based and accordance -based delights, self-recognition and social recognition, information prosperity and transmission propensity, etc., moderated by the member activeness. It’s also found that extreme active individuals have a much higher marginal increase in accordance originated from the growing information volume owned in the process of influencing the society. Not coincidentally, their overall social recognition and attitudinal accordance from the group are significantly higher by the growth of personal knowledge. Conclusions This research contributes to the literature on the drives of tribal dynamics and its’ consequences on the changes of information valence and attitudinal changes and further to this, how the engagement level of individuals will influence these micro and macro outcomes. Notably, by adopting a self-reasoning method, the motives and outcomes are incorporated in a simulated method to develop not only the individual and the aggregate level of outcomes. This study also bears methodological significance by examining a series of hypotheses under the setting of a simulated online community. These findings suggest a series of contextual causality moderated between the characteristics, intentions and actions.