Internet Research最新文献

Purpose

The global market for cloud gaming is growing rapidly. How gamers evaluate the service quality of this emerging form of cloud service has become a critical issue for both researchers and practitioners. Building on the literature on service quality and software as a service, this study develops and validates a gamer-centric measurement instrument for cloud gaming service quality.

Design/methodology/approach

A three-step measurement instrument development process, including item generation, scale development and instrument testing, was adopted to conceptualize and operationalize cloud gaming service quality.

Findings

Cloud gaming service quality consists of two second-order constructs of support service quality and technical service quality with seven first-order dimensions, namely rapport, responsiveness, reliability, compatibility, ubiquity, smoothness and comprehensiveness. The instrument exhibits desirable psychometric properties.

Practical implications

Practitioners can use this new measurement instrument to evaluate gamers' perceptions toward their service and to identify areas for improvement.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the service quality literature by utilizing qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop and validate a new measurement instrument of service quality in the context of cloud gaming and by identifying new dimensions (compatibility, ubiquity, smoothness and comprehensiveness) specific to it.

Purpose

In the online environment, consumers increasingly feel vulnerable due to firms’ expanding capabilities of collecting and using their data in an unsanctioned manner. Drawing from gossip theory, this research focuses on two key suppressors of consumer vulnerability: transparency and control. Previous studies conceptualize transparency and control from rationalistic approaches that overlook individual experiences and present a unidimensional conceptualization. This research aims to understand how individuals interpret transparency and control concerning privacy vulnerability in the online environment. Additionally, it explores strategic approaches to communicating the value of transparency and control.

Design/methodology/approach

An interpretivism paradigm and phenomenology were adopted in the research design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 41 participants, including consumers and experts, and analyzed through thematic analysis.

Findings

The findings identify key conceptual dimensions of transparency and control by adapting justice theory. They also reveal that firms can communicate assurance, functional, technical and social values of transparency and control to address consumer vulnerability.

Originality/value

This research makes the following contributions to the data privacy literature. The findings exhibit multidimensional and comprehensive conceptualizations of transparency and control, including user, firm and information perspectives. Additionally, the conceptual framework combines empirical insights from both experiencers and observers to offer an understanding of how transparency and control serve as justice mechanisms to effectively tackle the issue of unsanctioned transmission of personal information and subsequently address vulnerability. Lastly, the findings provide strategic approaches to communicating the value of transparency and control.

Purpose

Whenever social injustice tackled by social movements receives heightened media attention, charitable crowdfunding platforms offer an opportunity to proactively advocate for equality by donating money to affected people. This research examines how the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated social protest cycle after the death of George Floyd have influenced donation behavior for campaigns with a personal goal and those with a societal goal supporting the black community.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper follows a quantitative research approach by applying a quasi-experimental research design on a GoFundMe dataset. In total, 67,905 campaigns and 1,362,499 individual donations were analyzed.

Findings

We uncover a rise in donations for campaigns supporting the black community, which lasts substantially longer for campaigns with a societal than with a personal funding goal. Informed by construal level theory, we attribute this heterogeneity to changes in the level of abstractness of the problems that social movements aim to tackle.

Originality/value

This research advances the knowledge of individual donation behavior in charitable crowdfunding. Our results highlight the important role that charitable crowdfunding campaigns play in promoting social justice and anti-discrimination as part of social protest cycles.

Purpose

Social recommendation has been recognized as a kind of e-commerce with large potential, but how social recommendations influence consumer decisions is still unclear. This paper aims to investigate how recommendations from different social ties influence consumers’ purchase intentions through both behavior and brain activity.

Design/methodology/approach

Utilizing behavioral (N = 70) and electroencephalogram (EEG) (N = 49) experiments, this study explored participants’ behavior and brain responses after being recommended by different social ties. The data were analyzed using statistical inference and event-related potential (ERP) analysis.

Findings

Behavioral results show that social tie strength positively impacts purchase intention, which can be fitted by a logarithmic model. Moreover, recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect mediate the effect of tie strength on purchase intention serially. EEG findings show that recommendations from weak tie strength elicit larger N100, N200 and P300 amplitudes than those from strong tie strength. These results imply that weak tie strength may motivate individuals to recruit more mental resources in social recommendation, including unconscious processing of consumer attention and conscious processing of cognitive conflict and negative emotion.

Originality/value

This study considers the effects of continuous social ties on purchase intention and models them mathematically, exploring the intrinsic mechanisms by which strong and weak ties influence purchase intentions through recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect, contributing to the applications of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model in the field of social recommendation. Furthermore, our study adopting EEG techniques bridges the gap of relying solely on self-report by providing an avenue to obtain relatively objective findings about the consumers’ early-occurred (unconscious) attentional responses and late-occurred (conscious) cognitive and emotional responses in purchase decisions.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for the perceived intelligence of VAs and explore the mechanisms of different dimensions of the perceived intelligence of VAs on users’ exploration intention (UEI) and how these antecedents can collectively result in the highest level of UEI.

Design/methodology/approach

An online survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk is employed. The model is tested utilizing the structural equation modeling (SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach from the collected data of VA users (N = 244).

Findings

According to the SEM outcomes, perceptual, cognitive, emotional and social intelligence have different mechanisms on UEI. Findings from the fsQCA reinforce the SEM results and provide the configurations that enhanced UEI.

Originality/value

This study extends the conceptual framework of perceived intelligence and enriches the literature on anthropomorphism and users’ exploration. These findings also provide insightful suggestions for practitioners regarding the design of VA products.

Purpose

Employee voice is crucial for organizations to identify problems and make timely adjustments. However, promoting voice in organizations is challenging. This study aims to investigate how social media use (SMU) in the workplace affects employee voice by examining its intrinsic mechanisms and boundary conditions. Specifically, this study examines the mediating roles of social identifications and the moderating effects of job-social media fit on the relationship between SMU and social identifications.

Design/methodology/approach

This study conducted a survey of 348 employees in China.

Findings

First, SMU affects voice through social identifications. Second, distinct identifications have different effects on voice, such that organizational identification positively affects employee voice, while relational identification positively affects promotive voice and negatively affects prohibitive voice. Third, when social media is highly suitable for the job, the positive effect of work-related SMU on organizational identification is strengthened, while the positive effect of social-related SMU on organizational identification is weakened.

Originality/value

The results indicate that different identifications have distinct impacts on voice. Additionally, this study reveals a double-edged sword effect of SMU on voice through different social identifications. Further, job-social media fit moderates the relationship between SMU and social identifications. These findings have important implications for organizations adopting social media.

Purpose

The proliferation of non-fungible token (NFT)-based crypto-art platforms has transformed how creators manage, own and earn money through the creation, assets and identity of their digital works. Despite this, no studies have examined the drivers of continuous content contribution behavior (CCCB) toward NFTs. Hence, this study draws on the theory of relational bonds to examine how various relational bonds affect feelings of psychological ownership, which, in turn, affects CCCB on metaverse platforms.

Design/methodology/approach

Using structural equation modeling and importance-performance matrix analysis, an online survey of 434 content creators from prominent NFT platforms empirically validated the research hypotheses.

Findings

Financial, structural, and social bonds positively affect psychological ownership, which in turn encourages CCCBs. The results of the importance-performance matrix analysis reveal that male content creators prioritized virtual reputation and social enhancement, whereas female content creators prioritized personalization and monetary gains.

Originality/value

We examine Web 3.0 and the NFT creators’ network that characterizes the governance practices of the metaverse. Consequently, the findings facilitate a better understanding of creator economy and meta-verse commerce.

Purpose

This study longitudinally investigated the predictors and mediators of adolescent smartphone addiction by examining the impact of parental smartphone addiction at T1 on adolescent smartphone addiction at T3, as well as the separate and sequential role of adolescent self-esteem and depression at T2 as mediating factors.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used a hierarchical regression and the PROCESS macro (Model 6) to investigate research model by collecting 3,904 parent-adolescent pairs. Panel data were collected from three waves of the Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS).

Findings

First, the result showed that parental smartphone addiction at T1 significantly and positively predicted adolescent smartphone addiction at T3. Second, the serial mediation analysis revealed that the impact of parental smartphone addiction at T1 on adolescent smartphone addiction at T3 was mediated by adolescent self-esteem and depression at T2 independently and serially.

Originality/value

The findings enhance our comprehension of the impact of parental smartphone addiction, adolescent self-esteem and depression, on adolescent smartphone addiction.

Purpose

This research investigates the role of customer forgiveness as the result of online service recovery transparency in predicting customer engagement. It also examines the moderating roles of timeliness and personalization in this proposed model.

Design/methodology/approach

An online survey study using retrospective experience sampling and a scenario-based experimental study were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Findings

Customer forgiveness positively influences customer engagement and plays a mediating role in the relationship between service recovery transparency and customer engagement. Additionally, timeliness and personalization moderate the positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness. The positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness is more apparent when levels of timeliness and personalization decrease.

Practical implications

To retain focal customers' engagement after a service failure, firms must obtain their forgiveness. One of the firm's online complaint handling strategies to increase the forgiveness level of focal customers is to provide a high level of service recovery transparency (i.e. responding to their complaints in a public channel), especially when the firm is unable to respond to online complaints quickly or provide highly personalized responses.

Originality/value

This research provides new insights into the underlying mechanism of customer engagement by applying the concept of customer forgiveness. It also contributes to the social influence theory by applying the essence of the theory to explain how other customers' virtual presence during the online complaint handling influences the forgiveness of focal customers in order to gain their engagement. Additionally, it provides insight into the conditions under which the role of service recovery transparency can be very effective in dealing with online complaints.

Purpose

Digital innovation requires organizations to reconfigure their information technology infrastructure (ITI) to cultivate creativity and implement fast experimentation. This research inquiries into ITI generativity, an emerging concept demoting a critical ITI capability for organizational digital innovation. More specifically, it conceptualizes ITI generativity across two dimensions—namely, systems and applications infrastructure (SAI) generativity and data analytics infrastructure (DAI) generativity—and examines their respective social and technical antecedents and their impact on digital innovation.

Design/methodology/approach

This research formulates a theoretical model to investigate the social and technical antecedents along with innovation outcomes of ITI generativity. To test this model and its associated hypotheses, a survey was administered to IT professionals possessing knowledge of their organization's IT architecture and digital innovation performance. The dataset, comprising responses from 140 organizations, was analyzed using the partial least squares technique.

Findings

Results reveal that both dimensions of ITI generativity contribute to digital innovation performance, with the effect of DAI generativity being more pronounced. In addition, SAI and DAI generativities are driven by social and technical factors within an organization. More specifically, SAI generativity is positively associated with the usage of a digital application services platform and IT human resources, whereas DAI generativity is positively linked to the usage of a data analytics services platform, data analytics services usability and data analytics human resources.

Originality/value

This research contributes to the literature on digital innovation by introducing ITI generativity as a crucial ITI capability and deciphering its role in digital innovation. It also offers useful insights and guidance for practitioners on how to build ITIs to achieve better digital innovation performance.