Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) is key to the protection and preservation of our environment. Our study investigates how the use of immersive technologies can be leveraged to effectively elicit such behaviors. We examined two design factors that can be incorporated in environmental messages delivered by immersive technologies, namely, 360° control and informational prompts; and how these can lead to individuals behaving pro-environmentally. Specifically, we investigate how these two factors evoke awe and empathy with nature, which we conceptualize as two self-transcendent responses – and how these subsequently drive PEB. Our study considers the attitude-behavior gap that has received much attention in prior literature, and therefore also examines the role of perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE, i.e., the belief that an individual’s action makes a difference) in the aforementioned relationships. A lab experiment approach was adopted using an immersive simulation of a degraded mountain environment, where we manipulated the two design factors to test our hypotheses. The findings of our study indicate that informational prompts can elicit empathy with nature, while 360° control elicits both awe and empathic responses. Awe was found to have directly influenced individuals’ PEB, whereas empathy with nature had a positive effect on PEB mediated by PCE. This research provides insights into the mechanisms of awe and empathy in relation to PEB, as well as the importance of PCE. Our findings also provide practical, design implications in the use of immersive technologies to encourage pro-environmental actions.

Twitter is an emerging form of news media with a wide spectrum of participants involving in news dissemination. Owing to their open and interactive nature, individuals, non-media, and non-commercial participants may play a greater role on this platform; thus, it is deemed to disrupt conventional media structures and introduce new ways of information flow. While this may be true in certain aspects in news dissemination such as allowing a broader range of participants, the authors' analysis of the involvement and influence of the different participant types, based on a large tweets dataset collected during the Ukraine's conflict event (2013-2014), portrays a different picture. Specifically, the results unveil that while non-commercial participants were the most “involved” in generating tweets about the news event, the retweets they attracted, a common measure of influence, were among the lowest. In contrast, mass media and sources related to journalists, professional associations and commercial organizations garnered the highest retweets.

Business-to-business (B2B) e-marketplaces serve local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by assisting them in connecting with potential overseas buyers. They leverage multiple channels to connect with and bring potential leads to SMEs. The authors' understanding of such an intermediary has been either largely impaired by limited studies on the services that e-marketplaces should offer or implicitly deduced from business-to-consumer studies. In this work, the authors attempt to unveil whether the efforts that an e-marketplace has made are associated with the continuance of its SME clients. To answer this research question, a set of data from a B2B e-marketplace connecting qualified SMEs with overseas buyers was used for analysis, and they discovered three results. First, generating many online leads is negatively associated with SMEs' continuance with such an e-marketplace company. Second, organizing many online videoconferencing meetings between SMEs and buyers can promote this tendency, which is different from organizing many offline meetings. Third, onsite visits that e-marketplace salespersons make can attenuate the negative effect of the generation of online leads. Their follow-up interviews unveiled that SMEs only desire sufficient attention to obtain tangible results from a B2B e-marketplace.

This article describes how MOOCs, being a new global education and technology phenomenon, present both opportunities and challenges to educators and learners. The lack of face-to-face engagement introduces a sense of isolation in students, resulting in a high dropout rate. To this end, online forums are deemed to help overcome the problem by enabling interactions among the learners and facilitating their learning. Recent research further suggests that with an online forum provided in a MOOC, the presence of instructors may not be important. However, in this article, the authors provide two important insights: First, online forum indeed plays an important role in motivating learner continuance. Second, among the different types of forum activities, they find that interaction with instructors emerge as an important factor contributing to more assignment completions in addition to forum posting. The authors' post-hoc analysis also indicates that the importance of instructor presence may be particularly salient in the Eastern vis-à-vis Western culture, which points to future research opportunities.

There is significant interest among marketers and academics to understand how to segment online consumers to better fulfill their needs. Previous literature on brick-and-mortar shopping has advocated demographic variables as simple yet valuable indicators to understand consumers and segment them accordingly. However, research in the online shopping context has produced mixed findings about the effects of demographics, which limit their utility to online merchants. As an attempt to address the ambiguity, the study proposes a more comprehensive approach to investigate the effects of demographic variables in the online shopping context. This is done by considering the demographic variables in combinations and using clickstream data to more accurately derive online shoppers’ surfing behaviour for segmentation purposes. Following this approach, our study investigates the effects of the demographic variables of gender, age, income, and education, based on the theories of media naturalness and consumer trait and involvement. The results reveal various effects of age, income, and education on online consumers’ needs being reflected in their store visit strategies. Implications are suggested for e-commerce research and practice.