This paper aims to examine the effect of AI framing (i.e., Scientific AI vs Magic AI) on consumers' product evaluation. This study shows that magically framed AI technology may be more beneficial to appeal to product innovativeness when subjective product properties (e.g., personal taste) becomes important. On the contrary, when objective product properties (e.g., functionality) becomes important, scientifically framed AI technology is more likely to generate higher perceived product attractiveness and purchase intention.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of firms’ repeated use of crowdfunding on consumer responses and the funding success, focusing on compensatory crowdfunding that provides products and services when funding is successful. The result indicates that the number of crowdfunding round and achievement rates are related to parabolic forms. These results suggest that investors can recognize the number of crowdfunding round as a important signal for crowdfunding investment. In addition, this research aims to present practical implications for crowdfunding firms and platforms to attract ongoing investments.

This study addresses the problem caused by unhealthy = tasty intuition (UTI) when positioning innovative new categories of food products. Our research on Japanese consumers’ choice of soy meat hamburgers shows that UTI formed by the old category influences choices in the new product category.

Consumers may not be fully aware of the level of personalization used in brand placements in digital advertising. Personalized brand placements use customer data to select and insert preferred brands into digital media content, such as having Coke appear in a YouTube video for someone who favors Coca-Cola. This personalization can enhance the consumer experience (Trifts & Aghakhani, 2018) but may also backfire if placements don't account for changes in brand preference or when personalized placements are co-consumed with a person whose preferences strongly diverge from one’s own (e.g., one’s romantic partner; Brick, Fitzsimons, Chartrand, & Fitzsimons, 2018). Brands have a significant impact on how people perceive each other. Brands convey social information and symbolic meaning (Keller, 1993; Levy, 1959) and can influence behavior (e.g., Fitzsimons, Chartrand, & Fitzsimons 2008) and provide a source of affiliation (Escalas & Bettman, 2003). However, less is known about how brands affect basic social connections like empathy. This notable gap is relevant to the evaluation of the impact of brand placements in digital advertising as brand logos are quite visible in brand placements and can be the first piece of information someone observes when forming an attitude towards another person. For example, imagine an Instagram post of a person wearing a Harley Davidson baseball cap. What kind of person did you imagine? Does your impression change if, instead, the brand was People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or the Trump Organization? Moreover, how likely would you be to engage with media showcasing a person supporting this brand. In the current research, we propose that personally disliked brands create a negative bias in person perception and consumer judgment, a phenomenon we coin “brand negativity bias.” Our results show that disliking a brand can reduce empathy for others and substantially bias attitudes toward a digital product associated with but not created by the brand. Specifically, we show process evidence that suggests disliked brand placements reduce (1) empathy toward others through reductions in perceived similarity and (2) attitudes toward a digital product through perceived similarity and empathy, as serial processes. In addition, although we do not empirically test an overall mechanism that explains the negativity bias in its entirety, we speculate several reasons that underlie the broad influence of personally disliked brands (e.g., symbolic, ideological, or moral). From a societal point of view, our findings inform the public to be mindful of how simple consumption cues can bias people’s decision making, which holds implications beyond consumer judgment in domains involving first impressions.

Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected online advertising market. The pandemic has changed customers’ shopping behavior by decreasing customer traffic in offline businesses but increasing customers’ online activities that has led to growth of online shopping and advertising. While the outbreak of Covid-19 has sparked growth of online advertising in general, its impact on various industries may not be the same, given the differences in product characteristics and consumer behavior across different products and services. This paper aims to address this question by empirically examining how Covid-19 has affected online search advertising market. First, we examine how Covid-19 has affected the behavior of online users and advertisers, the main stakeholders in the search advertising market, in terms of user traffic and clicks and advertiser bids and payments. Second, we examine if the impacts of Covid-19 on behavior of online users and advertisers would be different in various industries.

Sponsored product reviews have emerged as an important tool in influencer marketing. In particular, non-monetary sponsorships, where brands give influencers a product as a gift for a free trial, are widely used in influencer marketing. Yet, there is little understanding of i) the impact of non-monetary sponsorship on consumers’ downstream behaviors, such as social media engagement, ii) the moderating effect of influencer type, and iii) the underlying mechanisms through consumer perceptions of the brand (i.e., brand trust) and product (i.e., perceived product quality). To fill this gap, we first empirically examined the impact of non-monetary sponsorship on customer engagement using an Instagram dataset through regression analyses. In this analysis, the propensity score matching (PSM) method was employed to match non-monetary sponsored posts with other similar posts, which controls unobserved confounding variables and resolves the endogeneity problem. The empirical analysis shows that non-monetary sponsorship increases social media engagement, and the positive impact is stronger when a micro-influencer generates a non-monetary sponsored post. Next, using a lab experiment, we provide evidence for a causal link between non-monetary sponsorship and consumers’ downstream behavior (i.e., social media engagement, purchase intention, and brand attitude) and support the mediation through higher perceived product quality and brand trust. We contribute to the literature on influencer marketing by documenting the positive impact of non-monetary sponsorship on social media engagement, examining the moderating role of influencer type, and providing novel mechanisms underlying the effect of non-monetary sponsorship. The findings also highlight the changes in consumer perception of sponsorship and offer insights into the design of influencer marketing campaigns for marketing practitioners.

In this research, we investigate how sponsored listings on an online search engine influence the consumer’s final decision choices. In an era of digital transformation where companies very often opt for sponsored advertisements, we explore how an anchoring effect (exacerbated by other factors) impacts the evaluation process and final outcome. More specifically, using a mix of secondary data from a large hotel aggregator and experiments, this work empirically validates that sponsored results (i.e., the first paid result) on a search engine results page indeed acts as an anchor. In addition, we find evidence the anchoring effect increases as a) the results are more versus less homogeneous, and b) the screen size of the search device is larger. What’s more, the anchoring effect is largely stable and does not fluctuate based on the category or decision importance. The effect also remains intact whether or not search engine results are randomized through the history of the browser. We also find the anchor influences subsequent evaluations, and options similar to the anchor are more likely to be chosen irrespective of the anchor’s attractiveness despite industry convention that consumers ignore sponsored results (see Henderson 2019) and research indicating consumers routinely select organic over sponsored search results.

Social media influencers are becoming increasingly important to the advertising world. As individuals who use their extensive following to endorse products, create trends and ultimately drive purchase intentions, influencers are often seen as role models, especially as pertains to body image. As such, we conduct experimental research to examine how influencer size (0 vs. 14) affects attractiveness perceptions, perfectionist expectations, and purchase intentions. Drawing on self-determination theory we find that perfectionism toward others is the underlying mechanism for the effects of motivation and size. Societal and managerial implications are discussed.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has accelerated the promotion and application of service robot in the market. Although technology has provided service robot with increasingly autonomous functions, more research is needed on how service robot with different levels of autonomy affects customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry. Guided by affordance theory, the study examines whether service robot operational and decisional autonomy would have effects on customer satisfaction and explored explanatory mechanism. Adopting an experimental vignette method (EVM), the study reveals that direct effect of service robot operational autonomy and indirect effect of decisional autonomy on customer satisfaction, and functional affordance played a positive mediating role in the impact of service robot autonomy on customer satisfaction. This research extends and enriches the relevant literature on human-machine interaction and customer satisfaction research. Further, the study also provides marketing insights for enterprises to improve autonomous robot design and enhance customer relationships.

Social media has emerged as a prevalent tool for businesses in recent years through which brands actively engage in promotions. This development has resulted in several social media trends aimed at garnering increased consumer engagement on various social media platforms that brands utilize routinely. We investigate one such prevalent social media trend: brands sharing memes. Several popular brands, such as Netflix, regularly post memes on social media platforms. Therefore, it is important to study the brands’ use of memes and their resultant impact on consumer behavior.

Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular fundraising tool where project creators solicit capital from potential backers in return for monetary rewards or presales of products/services. Potential backers in crowdfunding are looking for potential cues to reduce uncertainty and predict new venture success when making their capital contributions. To increase their funding success, project creators strategically use project descriptions as a marketing tool to attract potential backers and funding.

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).

This research intends to examine whether these types of data – behavioral versus social networking data – affect consumer response to personalized ads. With the advancement in technology, marketers have access to various types of personal data, including their online/offline behaviors and social networking activities, and use those data to retarget consumers. Moreover, this research examines the moderating role of SNS privacy concerns on consumer response to different types of retargeted ads. The findings of this research may offer theoretical and practical implications to understand consumers' responses to retargeted ads that use social networking information.

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.

This study proposes a conceptual model to investigate consumers' behavioral intention to use m-payment based on social cognitive theory and the value-based adoption model. The model compares the behaviors of two consumer cohorts in Thailand, generation X and Z.

Solar cells based on p-conjugated donor-acceptor (D-A) organic molecular systems are a promising alternative to conventional electrical energy generation. D-A molecular systems, which have a triphenylamine (TPA) moiety linked with a benzothiadiazole (BTD) moiety, open the potential development of new small molecule donors for bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells. Here, a series of donor-acceptor-π-acceptor (D-A-π-A) small molecule donors (SMD) derived from triphenylamine (TPA) donor and benzothiadiazole (BTD) acceptor building blocks, were designed for BHJ organic solar cells. The small molecule donors SMD1-4 were studied using density functional theory (DFT) and time dependent-DFT (TDDFT) methods, to understand the effect of cyano and fluorine group functionalization on their properties. The effect of structure alteration by cyano and fluorine group functionalization on the optoelectronic properties, the calculated highest occupied molecular orbitals (HOMOs) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (LUMOs) and the HOMO-LUMO gaps were theoretically explored. The Voc (open-circuit photovoltage) and fill factor (FF) for SMD1-4 were obtained with a PC71BM acceptor, which showed that these organic small molecules are potential small molecule donors for organic bulk heterojunction solar cells.

Expanding exports of small and medium-sized companies is crucial for the continuous growth of the Korean economy. Therefore, the government operates various support systems to enhance the export capabilities of these companies. This study aims to analyze the impact of the Korean government's flagship export support system, known as the export initiation support system, on the performance of participating domestic companies. A fixed effect model using panel data was applied to examine the characteristics of 11,099 companies that participated in the export initiation support system from 2016 to 2019. The analysis revealed that the number of exporting countries, employees, and previous export volume had a significant impact on the export amount of participating companies. However, contrary to expectations, the number of overseas marketing participation and the GCL (global competence level) test did not show a significant impact. This study is significant as it provides implications for the development of support projects tailored to the specific needs of small and medium-sized companies, with the goal of improving the export support system.

This study investigated the effects of processing three types of texts, namely expository texts, narrative texts, and a combination of both known as twin texts, on incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention in L2 learners. College freshmen (N = 109), who were lower to upper intermediate learners of English, were assigned into a control group and three experimental groups representing different reading conditions. Over a period of seven weeks, the experimental groups engaged in two reading sessions to read their assigned texts accompanied by output tasks and input enhancement. The participants’ receptive and productive vocabulary gains were measured with an immediate posttest and a delayed posttest to assess retention. Results revealed significant impacts of text genres on L2 incidental vocabulary learning and retention. Processing twin texts and expository texts yielded significantly greater vocabulary gains than processing narrative texts alone. These effects might be due to different processing mechanisms required for texts structured in distinct ways. Expository texts are informative and explanatory in nature, providing explicit and contextually rich information for word comprehension and retention.

2020년 6월부터 8월까지 일본 도쿄 남쪽 940 km 해상에 위치한 니시노시마 화산이 분화하였다. 2020년 7월 말 발생한 분화로 인한 화산재와 화산가스 일부가 우리나라에 영향을 주었을 가능성이 있는 것으로 보도되었다. 본 연구에 서는 화산재 확산 수치모의 프로그램인 Ash3D를 이용하여 현지시각 2 02 0년 7월 2 8일 0시에 화산폭발지수 3의 분화가 발생한 것으로 설정하고 수치모의를 실시하였다. 수치모의 결과, 화산재가 니시노시마 인근에서 동풍을 타고 7월 30일 새벽 오키나와에 도달한 이후 남풍을 타고 북상하여 8월 1일 제주도에 상륙하고 시계방향으로 회전하듯이 이동하면서 8월 2일에는 남부지방에 영향을 주는 것으로 나타났다. 실제 측정된 PM10 미세먼지농도는 제주도 고산기상관측소에서 8월 1일부터, 부산 구덕산기상관측소에서는 8월 2일부터 상승한 것으로 나타나 니시노시마 화산 분화가 제주도 및 남 부지방의 미세먼지 수치에 영향을 준 것으로 보인다.

Prior studies focusing on safety behavior have not given sufficient consideration to the potential impact exerted by different leadership styles. Of these various styles, my attention is specifically drawn to the influence of ethical leadership on safety behavior. In this paper, I delve into the influence of ethical leadership on safety behavior, shedding light on both the underlying mechanisms(mediators) and a significant contextual factor(moderator). I probe into the successive mediating roles of employees' trust in the organization and their commitment to it, within the context of the relationship between ethical leadership and safety behavior. Further, I posit that authentic leadership positively adjusts the connection between ethical leadership and organizational trust. My findings underscore that ethical leadership enhances employee safety behavior, facilitated by the chain mediation of trust in the organization and organizational commitment. Moreover, I discover that authentic leadership, as a positive moderator, magnifies the favorable impact of ethical leadership on organizational trust. This paper will also articulate the theoretical implications, practical applications, and limitations of the study.