Face-swap models have increasingly gained popularity in recent years because of their improvement in generation quality and applications in privacy protection and entertainment. The study primarily examines underlying factors that influence individuals’ intention to purchase Face swap apps. A research framework drawing upon the social comparison theory was proposed to explain the relationship between four categories of social comparison (upward identification, upward contrast, downward identification, downward contrast) on self-esteem, appearance dissatisfaction, curiosity, perceived enjoyment, privacy concern, and purchase intention toward paid apps. The PLS-SEM technique was employed to analyze data from a survey of 315 respondents. The results indicated that upon the aforementioned variables, curiosity and privacy concerns were two key factors driving users a higher intention to purchase Face-swap apps. Meanwhile, perceived enjoyment had no significant impact on purchase intention. These exploratory findings contributed a number of theoretical and practical implications.

With the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) hardware devices and virtual technologies, VR applications in retailing are increasingly becoming an inevitable trend of future shopping, particularly essential to the “metaverses” in the digitalization 4.0 era. Thanks to its superiority over traditional e-commerce, virtual stores can provide highly interactive and immersive sensory shopping experiences to system users or end customers. Todays, both retailers and scholars, pay much attention to impulse buying behavior. Nevertheless, this domain remains unaddressed in the context of virtual commerce. Drawing upon the Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm, this article investigates the effectiveness of VR shopping platform factors, namely interactivity and vividness, that impacts consumers’ internal stages (telepresence, perceived diagnosticity, and playfulness) and lead to the urge to buy impulsively in virtual shopping stores. A full 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design experiment was conducted with 227 participants. The empirical results show that interactivity and vividness positively impact telepresence, perceived diagnosticity, and playfulness, which trigger consumers' urge to buy impulsively. Furthermore, the role of the impulsiveness trait in driving the urge to buy impulsively was further explicitly investigated in the VR environment. Detailed discussions and future research directions were also provided.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology has been increasingly utilised in mobile shopping apps to enhance consumers’ mobile shopping experiences, thereby affecting consumers’ impulse buying behaviour. Drawing upon the Spatial Presence Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, the current study aims to empirically investigate AR-related factors (vividness, spatial accuracy, local presence) and their impacts on impulse buying behaviour related factors (arousal, perceived diagnosticity, and urge to buy impulsively) in the context of AR mobile shopping apps. In this study, an experiment employing a full 2X2 factorial between-subject experimental design was carried out. There were a total of 137 participants actively involved in this experiment. The data analysis results and findings, along with the implications of this study, are provided in the paper.

Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, are increasingly being used to assist users with performing different tasks. However, their characteristics also raise user privacy concerns related to the provision of information to the IVA. Drawing upon the communication privacy management theory, two experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of information sensitivity, types of IVA (anthropomorphized versus objectified IVA), and the roles of IVA (servant versus partner) on privacy concerns and user willingness to disclose information to IVA. Study 1 showed that information sensitivity and anthropomorphism significantly impact user privacy concerns. Study 2 revealed that if highly sensitive information was required, a partner IVA would trigger greater privacy concerns, while in low sensitive information contexts, it would evoke a more secure feeling than a servant IVA. Subsequent theoretical and managerial implications of these studies are discussed accordingly.