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This study aims to investigate how Information & Communication Technology (ICT) development can contribute to a reduction in firms’ perceived corruption pressure. Based on survey data of 39,796 firms from 76 countries spanning 2007 to 2016, we demonstrate that ICT development can significantly curb the firm-level prevalence of illegal payments to regulatory officials. We also find that the relationship between ICT development and perceived corruption pressure is a function of various aspects of institutional and competitive environments: its impact is strengthened when institutional quality (i.e., checks and balances, and the protection of private property rights) is higher, whereas it is weakened when competitive conditions (i.e., liability of foreignness, and informal competition) are against firms. Implications for theory and policy are also discussed.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of China’s image as a country on consumers’ evaluations of brands. Drawing on the literature pertaining to country images and country-of-origin effect, a research model was developed to evaluate country image, corporate image and brand image. Design/methodology/approach To test the model and investigate the effects of country, corporate and brand image on brand attitude and purchase intention, a survey was conducted that examined Korean consumers’ attitudes toward well-known Chinese brands. Findings China’s country image was found to comprise four dimensions: political image, economic image, citizen image and country relationship image. Country image had a direct positive effect on brand attitude, and through brand attitude, country image had an indirect positive effect on purchase intention. Corporate image and brand image had a positive effect on brand attitude and a direct positive effect on purchase intention. In addition, country image had a positive effect on corporate image, while through corporate image, country image had an indirect positive effect on brand image. Originality/value These findings not only offer theoretical evidence for research on China’s country image, but also provide empirical evidence to support the “going global” strategies of Chinese enterprises.

PurposeThrough a literature review, we found four potential research topics that are rarely studied in the extant literature, i.e. the missing link between web site quality and flow, an integrative relationships between web site quality, flow, customer satisfaction, and relationship intention even though part of the integrative relationships have been investigated in the previous studies, those flow‐related consumer behaviors in C2C e‐marketplaces, and cross‐national studies on the flow‐related consumer behaviors in the East‐Asian domain. Thus, we attempted to explore the relationships between web site quality, flow, customer satisfaction, and relationship intention in Chinese and Korean C2C e‐marketplaces as well as their cross‐national similarities and differences.Design/methodology/approachIn all, 212 Chinese and 219 Korean online shoppers were surveyed to conduct the above research agenda by structural equation modeling.FindingsWeb site quality had some effect on flow and satisfaction in both countries, but different results between the countries were found for the dimensions of web site quality. Flow has a positive impact on satisfaction, but the effect in China was greater than that in Korea. Both flow and satisfaction had a positive effect on relationship intention in the two countries.Originality/valueThere has been little research that addressed the above four research topics respectively or in combination. This study investigates the integrative model between web site quality and flow‐related consumer behaviors in C2C e‐marketplaces. The paper provides empirical evidence of online consumer behaviors in China and Korea, which will help global e‐commerce managers/practitioners in their development of strategies and tactics for the East‐Asian markets.

The purpose of this study is to examine e-service quality, e-satisfaction and e-WOM performance as measures of e-marketing success and identify whether or not cultural differences influence e-marketing success between South Korea and the USA. Especially, our focus is on customers of portal sites, i.e., Naver and Google (the largest portals in the two countries). A cross-culture survey was conducted and 250 Koreans and 300 Americans responses were collected by two commercial research institutes in Korea and the USA, respectively. The four dimensions of e-service quality and e-WOM performance were suggested as antecedents and output, respectively, as e-marketing success by a few analyses. Noticeably, we found that there are differences in influences of credibility and responsiveness on e-satisfaction between the Korean and American portal site customers but there are no significant differences in influences of the other variables such as contents attractiveness and entertainment. This suggests that the differences lead to better understanding of cultural influences on e-marketing and provide practical implications to internet companies offering services internationally.