The rising popularity of live video streaming (LVS) on social media platforms has opened up opportunities for numerous businesses. One of the primary benefits of LVS is the ability to generate interactions between streamers and viewers, as well as between viewers and viewers in real-time, which can significantly increase consumer engagement. This study aims to explore how customer engagement is established through interactivity on LVS activities, with a focus on Facebook and Instagram Live. The study used a mixed-methods approach, consisting of in-depth interviews with experienced LVS viewers followed by an online survey. The qualitative findings revealed that two essential platform-related factors that drive interactions and engagement are aesthetic relevance and recommendation relevance, with the recommendation being more relevant for Facebook and aesthetic relevance being more typical for Instagram. The quantitative results support these findings and offer additional insights into the distinct mechanisms for generating engagement, while aesthetic relevance directly leads to interaction and engagement, recommendation relevance only generates engagement indirectly via interaction. Theoretically, this article contributes to the live streaming literature by exploring the platform-related influencers of interactivity and customer engagement and the mechanisms of how customer engagement is built via interactivity on different social media platforms.

Based on the stress coping theory, the present paper aims to investigate the influence of users’ networking ability and profile control ability in mitigating the negativity of social media overload. This paper argues that in the social media context, instead of discontinuance, users tend to develop comprehensive strategies and practices to manage their social media usage. Via an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) study, five practices were identified, including continuous usage, reduced usage, setting adjustment, support seeking, and information avoidance. The results show that social media overload leads to both the perception of emotional exhaustion and disturbance handling while networking and profile control ability make users focus on disturbance handling. Besides, networking ability is found to weaken the relationship between social media overload and emotional exhaustion while profile control ability exaggerates that relationship. Finally, emotional exhaustion and disturbance handling both predict users’ different social media management practices.

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.

This study builds on prior research that examines the IT-coordination costs and firm size relationships using the transaction cost economics perspective. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following research question: Does firm’s industry type—information product industries (IPI) versus physical product industries (PPI) moderately affects the relationships between IT spending, coordination costs, and firm size? To address this research question, this study uses firm-level data from the Information Week and Compustat dataset in the United States, from 2011 to 2013. Further, this study employs the PLS-multigroup analysis (MGA) for both IPI and PPI firms. The overall PLS-MGA path analysis results show that there is a significant difference on the IT impact between the IPI and PPI firms. Indeed, firms in IPI and PPI can utilize the presence of IT pertaining to different information and physical processing activities at large.

The purpose of this study is to explore the moderating effect of Big Five personality traits on the relationship between the predictors (need for affiliation, need for popularity, and self-esteem) and self-disclosure on Facebook. The sample of this study is 354 Facebook users from 5 different cultures in East Asia. A partial least square structural equation modeling data analysis technique was performed to analyze the moderator research framework. This study demonstrates that particular Big Five personality traits moderate each relationship. Specifically, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability negatively moderate the relationship between need for affiliation and self-disclosure. Agreeableness negatively moderates the relationship between self-esteem and self-disclosure. Openness to New Experience negatively moderates the relationship between need for popularity and self-disclosure. The study suggests the importance of the interaction of personality variables to better understand self-disclosure phenomenon on Facebook. The findings and implications of this study are discussed in the article.

Career anchors represent personal desires of employees that must be satisfied in order for organizations to attract and retain good workers. Career stages represent advancements along the paths of employment that an individual can take through an organization or chain of organizations that represent professional growth and increased value to an organization. Though research is prevalent on career anchors and career stage models, works that look at changes in one as the other changes are missing from the literature. Due to that lack, it is usually concluded that anchors reflect changes in careers as Information systems (IS) employees advance through their career stages. However, expectancy-value theory leads us to expect that the causality may be reversed, that career anchors change leading employees to value alternative positions more highly. Drawing on the career changes of 10 IS employees, we examine the changes in anchors through progressive career stages. While technical competence and security anchors are important at all stages of an IS career, managerial competence, geographic security, and autonomy become more important in the latter stages and are often adjusted prior to career movement. Management should account for these changes while designing jobs and incentives, while further research is required to confirm dominant patterns of change.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) dependency has been widely studied but research results suggest inconclusive antecedent causes. This study proposes and empirically tests three predictive models of MMOG dependency using a survey of online gaming participants. It finds multimedia realism for social interaction serves as an original antecedent factor affecting other mediating factors to cause MMOG dependency. These mediating factors derive from Uses and Gratifications theory and include: (1) participation in a virtual community, (2) diversion from everyday life, and (3) a pleasant aesthetic experience. Of these, participation in a virtual community has a strong positive relationship with MMOG dependency, and aesthetics has a modest negative relationship. Moderator analyses suggest neither gender nor “frequency of game playing” are significant but experience playing online games is a significant moderating factor of MMOG dependency.