Product’s warranty is used strategically by firms to create differentiation and attract consumers. Hence, the effect of warranties on consumer decision making is of interest to both marketers and consumer researchers and his research has received much attention in the consumer behavior literature. Studies have shown that product warranty plays an important role for consumers. It influences the expectations and subjective assessments of product's efficacy and thus can signal quality, reduce risks and encourages purchases, based on the belief that offering a warranty for a product that has a high failure rate is not profitable for companies. However, this article documents a new phenomenon, extending the known capabilities of product warranty. Labeling products with a Long-term product warranty, versus products without warranty, improved consumers' objective performance, even when motivation to perform better was unlikely to explain the improvement. Results from three experiments indicate that the efficacy of products carrying “3 YEARS WARRANTY” labels were better than the efficacy of the same products without these labels. Specifically, we compared performance of participants utilizing a product (sunglasses, earmuffs, or chamomile tea) said to assist task performance (visual, auditory, or concentration, respectively) when it carried “3 YEARS WARRANTY” label versus no label. Participants facing a glaring light were asked to read printed words as accurately and as quickly as they could, receiving compensation proportional to their performance. Those wearing sunglasses carried “3 YEARS WARRANTY” label were able to read more quickly yet with fewer errors than those wearing sunglasses without label that were otherwise identical. Similarly, ear-muffs blocked noise more effectively, and chamomile tea improved mental focus more, when otherwise identical target products carried long-term product warranty.

The purpose of this study is to examine how similarities between product designs manifest themselves in various aspects and how these influences purchasing and usage behavior. Product design similarity evokes positive images, such as a sense of security and familiarity, as well as negative images, such as mimicry and copying. For example, if you have just transferred to another school and your uniform does not match everyone else's, you might feel alienated. On the other hand, in parks and on street corners, wearing the same clothes and belongings can lead to an awkward moment. In the realm of psychology, the former is called the bandwagon effect and the latter is the snob effect. In contrast to the snob effect, which emphasizes scarcity, the bandwagon effect can create fads and hits. People experience both of these emotions, and it is said that using them appropriately and combining them leads to an effective marketing strategy.

This study tests the influence of multi-visual dimensions and textual features of electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) on its perceived helpfulness on a sample from Saudi Arabia. This investigation is conducted in the context of Twitter through an online factorial experiment. The design incorporates a 3 (visual inclusion to text: with product-only photo, with product and face photo, without product photo) × 3 (EWOM valence: positive, positive and negative, and negative) between-subjects experiment (n = 540). It is concluded that when evaluating EWOM helpfulness, pictures do in fact contribute substantial value. For females, this effect is more pronounced when the EWOM is two-sided at the product-only photo level, and when EWOM is negative at the product with a face photo level. Thus, this study adds to the body of existing theories by arguing that EWOM helpfulness largely depends on how the textual and visual features of EWOM are communicated.

There has been almost 26 years since science of marketing has developed in Mongolia and there has been significant progress in acquiring and using its findings. Business companies’ leadership have become aware of the importance of this science and see marketing as business philosophy and understand that analyzing the market, business environment and conditions by consumers is the key to success. Today’s society demands from marketing professionals’ delicacy and taking into account consumers’ needs and creating new needs and new means of consumption. Main purpose of business entities is to be aware of consumer needs, to establish its position on the market and to be successful. In order to provide consumers with the best products and keep them at the center of their attention it is important to establish optimal ratio of marketing factors that would most efficiently influence consumers with different behaviors.

Green product experience has become an important marketing strategy for corporations to tap potential green consumers. Based on the theory of planned behavior, this article explores the influence of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control on consumers’ green purchasing intentions from the perspective of green product experience with consumers in China, Japan, and Korea as the research objects. Our findings suggest that green product experience of consumers in the three countries can directly affect consumers' green purchasing intentions. Green product experience has an indirect influence on consumers’ green purchasing intention through the mediating effect of attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control. The multiple group comparison shows the external validity of TPB through an examination of green purchasing behavior in different cultural settings, which will help enterprises implement effective experience marketing strategies.

Visually superior design provides a competitive edge in the marketplace by attracting consumers and increasing the perceived value of product quality and functionality. Although the positive influences of visual product design on market performance are well documented in the literature, little is investigated on how visual design plays a role in a negative situation such as product failure. The positive halo effect of visual design on product evaluation is called ‘beauty premium’, while little is investigated on how beauty premium changes when consumers face product failure. For example, would the beauty premium continue or fire back when a product with superior design, called a ‘beauty’ in this study, has functional harm? To answer this inquiry, we focus on the following research questions 1) Would the beauty effect protect or damage consumer purchase intention and product sales after product failure, and 2) Under what conditions can beauty effects be positive or negative after product failure?

To promote the diffusion of environmentally friendly equipment, appropriate measures need to be taken for each target group. This study evaluated changes in the influence of mass media on PV installation intentions by generation, based on over 10 years of consumer awareness survey data and the number of newspaper reports.

As part of an effort to promote the circular economy, an effective marketing communication is needed to convince consumers to choose the environmentally-friendly products. How a marketer frames a communication message, together with a consumer characteristic which shapes how a consumer thinks and feels, should influence consumer perception, as well as their decision regarding the green purchase. There remains a literature gap in this area in which the current research seeks to add its contribution. This paper investigated how message framing and self-construal influences consumer perception in supporting the environment. A 2 (holistic versus analytical message frame) x 2 (independent versus interdependent) self-construal between-subject experiment was designed. The research context is an apparel industry. It was found that independent (vs interdependent) self-construal respondents have higher environmental perception of the product. This surprising result is actually not in line with the hypothesis, yet yields insightful finding that opens up discussion and new avenue for the future research in this area.

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.

In this paper, we propose a new neural network architecture for item recommendation with structural information. Our model, structural neural recommender (SNR) is based on neural networks and operates on a hierarchy paradigm, aiming to explore the effectiveness of incorporating different structural information for recommendation. Many recent state-of-the-art neural network based recommendation models exploit the nonlinear transformations for modeling the complex user-item interaction patterns and user historical behaviors, ignoring the item-item structural relationship. This structural information, however, is uncomplicated to derive and useful for inferring item characteristics. To utilize this information, SNR simultaneously learns representation from user-item interactions and item-item relationships. Empirical studies on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such structural information, by outperforming classic and recent baselines. We also conduct detail ablation studies and hyper-parameter analysis to provide further understanding towards the behaviors of our model. Following the model development, we conduct a field experiment to demonstrate that the effectiveness of algorithmic recommender systems can further increase by using different types of message framing when communicating recommendations to consumers. Our results suggest that recommendations framed with a relevance appeal (e.g. “Top 5 brands for you”) are more effective in general, yet recommendations that are framed with a popularity appeal (“Top 5 most popular brands”) are more effective for customers who were acquired via social media (versus non-social media) advertising or for those who have stronger (versus weaker) social orientation.

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.

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.

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.

With the popularity of live streaming commerce, the characteristics of streamers and products subtly influence consumer behavior through visual live streaming form. Based on dual-process theory, this paper develops a comprehensive theoretical model to examine how consumer perceived streamer characteristics and product characteristics influence streamer attractiveness and product attractiveness, and explore how consumer behavior inertia is affected by streamer attractiveness and product attractiveness. An online survey consisting of 300 participants was recruited to empirically examine the proposed research model. The results indicated that consumer perceived streamer characteristics and product characteristics are important factors affecting the streamer attractiveness and product attractiveness, which in turn positively affect consumer’s shopping experience memory, which further influence consumer behavior inertia. In addition, the moderating effects of mindfulness are also examined.

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.

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 E-commerce market continues to grow in recent years, many companies have generated customer satisfaction by improving the quality of fulfilment, but the effects needed further investigation. Customer satisfaction research in e-commerce is one of the major areas of e-commerce research. Previous studies have investigated customer satisfaction factors in e-commerce from the perspective of e-SERVQUAL (e-service quality). Zeithaml et al. (2000) investigated that fulfilment has a significant impact on customer satisfaction in e-commerce. China's e-commerce market is the largest in the world at $2,879 billion and accounts for the largest share of the total retail market worldwide at 50.4%. This research focused on China’s e-commerce market.

This paper studied the problem of determining the optimal inventory level to meet the customer service target level in a situation where the customer demand for each branch of a nationwide retailer is uncertain. To this end, ISR (In-Stock Ratio) was defined as a key management indicator (KPI) that can be used from the perspective of a nationwide retailer such as Samsung, LG, or Apple that sells goods at branches nationwide. An optimization model was established to allow the retailer to minimize the total amount of inventory held at each branch while meeting the customer service target level defined as the average ISR. This paper proves that there is always an optimal solution in the model and expresses the optimal solution in a generalized form using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker condition regardless of the shape of the probability distribution of customer demand. In addition, this paper studied the case where customer demand follows a specific probability distribution such as a normal distribution, and an expression representing the optimal inventory level for this case was derived.

커피 부산물을 이용하여 대체실험동물 모델인 제브라피쉬 배아 독성 및 미백 효능에 대한 실험 을 진행하였다. 커피 부산물 추출물을 처리한 배아 독성 실험의 결과 24, 48, 72hpf에서 125ppm 농도에서 는 각각 3, 3, 5%로 응고율을 나타냈다. 배아의 부화율은 최고 농도인 125ppm에서 73%를 나타냈다. 제브 라피쉬 치어의 심장 박동수 실험에서 72hpf 후 심박수가 125ppm 농도에서 153회/60s’로 확인되었다. 음 성대조군은 148회/60s’으로 대조군의 비해 심박수의 변화가 크지 않았으며, 낮은 독성을 나타냈다. 또한 미백효능을 평가한 결과 커피 부산물 추출물의 농도가 증가할수록 멜라닌 형성이 저해되는 것으로 나타났 다. 본 연구 결과를 통해 천연 유래 부산물 소재가 화장품 원료로 활용할 수 있다는 가능성을 제안하며, 천 연 부산물의 부가가치를 높이는 연구 예시로서 화장품 산업에 활용되기를 기대한다.

Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) is one of Generation-IV nuclear reactors that uses molten salts as a fuel and coolant in liquid forms at high temperatures. The advantages of MSR, such as safety, economic feasibility, and scalability, are attributed from the fact that the molten salt fuel in a liquid state is chemically stable and has excellent thermo-physical properties. MSR combines the fuel and coolant by dissolving the actinides (U, Th, TRU, etc.) in the molten salt coolant, eliminating the possibility of a core meltdown accident due to loss of coolant (LOCA). Even if the molten salt fuel leaks, the radioactive fission products dissolved in the molten salt will solidify with the fuel salt at room temperature, preventing potential leakage to the outside. MSR was first demonstrated at ORNL starting with the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (ARE) in 1954 and was extended to the 7.4 MWth MSRE developed in 1964 and operated for 5 years. Recently, various start-ups, including TerraPower, Terrestrial Energy, Moltex Energy, and Seaborg, have been conducting research and development on various types of MSR, particularly focusing on its inherent safety and simplicity. While in the past, fluoride-based molten salt fuels were used for thermal neutron reactors, recently, a chlorine-based molten salt fuel with a relatively high solubility for actinides and advantageous for the transmutation of spent nuclear fuel and online reprocessing has been developing for fast neutron spectrum MSRs. This paper describes the development status of the process and equipment for producing highpurity UCl3, a fuel material for the chlorine-based molten salt fuel, and the development status of the gas fission product capturing technologies to remove the gaseous fission products generated during MSR operation. In addition, the results of the corrosion property evaluation of structural materials using a natural circulation molten salt loop will also be included.