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In the following, we show how to develop a probability-density risk-map of COVID-19 contagion for London. London was chosen as it is one of the main global destinations before the pandemic, with approximately 16.38 million overseas tourists in 2019 alone (Statista 2020). We map the main tourist attractions scattered across the city and each area's risk level, square-foot by square-foot. Then, we provide examples of how prospective tourists react to the map.

The present study investigates what drives thriving at work for remote workers in coworking spaces. Coworking spaces are flexible work environments involving individuals from various occupational backgrounds that work in shared, collaborative workspaces that are usually deemed as vibrant and supportive. Coworking spaces reflect significant changes in economic activity due to the increase in digital and location-independent knowledge work. These changes have been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many companies relying on coworking spaces to host their employees who work remotely. These trends make coworking spaces an ever-more relevant and complex phenomenon. Within this scenario, acknowledging the complexity and importance of coworking spaces, recent literature calls for a more fine-grained understanding of how coworking spaces help achieve positive psychological outcomes such as thriving at work (e.g., represented by a joint sense of vitality and learning at work). A greater understanding of the drivers of remote workers’ thriving in coworking spaces can help coworking providers and employing companies define work arrangements that suit the different – and sometimes conflicting – needs, motives, and psychological experiences of remote workers. Acknowledging the complex set of interrelationships that can underlie thriving at work, this study leverages complexity theory and a qualitative comparative analysis research approach to uncover six different, yet equifinal, configurations of antecedents that drive remote workers’ thriving in coworking spaces.

New technologies have been developed to support retailers in providing safer shopping experiences. The use of a few of them might well become a habit in the “new normal” post-pandemic scenario. Adopting the theoretical lenses of Terror Management Theory, this study focuses on a crowd-checking technology to understand the extent to which it could influence consumers’ shopping experience in terms of anxiety management, store attachment, and visit planning. To this end, we develop a moderated moderation model and test it on 150 consumers. Our results reveal that crowd-checking technology adoption has a direct influence on store attachment, intention to plan a visit to the store, and anxiety, as moderated by technology trust. In turn, anxiety has a ripple effect on store attachment and intention to plan. Implications for scholars and practitioners are further discussed.

This paper tests a moderated sequential mediation model based on hypothesized relationships in extreme sporting events, addressing what drives participants’ destination loyalty. Drawing from edgework theory and sensation-seeking theory, the model accounts for sensation-seeking, event authenticity, self-enhancement, place attachment, and revisit intention. Two opposite paths emerge: a direct, negative relationship between sensation-seeking and destination loyalty, and a positive indirect path mediated by self-enhancement and place attachment. The relationships are explored in two studies: first, Study 1 on 300 individuals attending FISE, the largest freestyle sports event in the world. Then, Study 2, meant to extend the ecological validity of Study 1, based on a panel of 300 attendees of various extreme sporting events in several disciplines. Implications for theory and practice are addressed.

This book investigates the effects of utilitarian and hedonic shopping behavior, drawing on original empirical research. Consumers have been shown to shop in one of two ways: they are either mainly driven by fun, escapism, and variety, or by need and efficiency. While previous literature has focused on the drivers of hedonic or utilitarian shopping, this book explores the consequences of these styles of shopping and addresses their impact on perceived value, money spent, and willingness to return to the store in future. The author synthesizes theories from previous studies, applying them to two key retailing contexts – intensive distribution and selective distribution. Ultimately, this book highlights the need for retailers to adopt a more consumer-based perspective to improve shopping experiences. It will prove useful for academics who want to gain a better understanding of hedonic and utilitarian behavior, and also offers practitioners with useful insights on how to target different customer segments.

Digital technologies have transformed every aspect of marketing and have brought consumer privacy front and center of research and discourse over the last two decades. Whereas companies and consumers have arguably benefited through the availability and use of data made possible by digitalization, consumer privacy-related concerns raise compelling questions that researchers, companies, and policymakers are addressing. In this Review Paper, we review privacy related to digital technologies in marketing, highlighting the constantly evolving nature of the field. We provide an overview of the rich contributions made by the articles in the special issue on digital technologies and privacy, and the original insights they provide for researchers and practitioners in four domains – communication, retailing, pricing, and product personalization. We identify and outline future research directions in each of these four domains to expand our understanding of privacy at the intersection of psychology and marketing by motivating new scholarly research and providing actionable insights to managers and policymakers.

Advances in artificial intelligence provide new tools of digital assistance that retailers can use to support consumers while shopping. The aim of this research is to examine how consumers react as a function of assistants’ appearance (human- vs. not human-like) and activation (automatic vs. human-initiated). We advance a model of sequential mediation whose empirical validation on 400 participants in two studies shows that non-anthropomorphic digital assistants lead to higher psychological reactance. In turn, reactance affects perceived choice difficulty, which positively reflects on choice certainty, perceived performance and—ultimately—satisfaction. Thus, although reactance might appear as a negative outcome, it eventually leads to higher satisfaction. Furthermore, initiation (system vs. user initiation) does not activate the chain of effects, but significantly interacts with anthropomorphism so that individuals exhibit lower reactance when confronted with human-like digital assistants activated by the consumer. Overall, reactance is highest for non-human like digital assistants that are computer-initiated.

Applying Norm Activation Theory to tourism, this study develops a conceptual model for both tourists and residents starting from their awareness of the negative environmental consequences of tourism, addressing ascription of responsibility, environmental sensitivity, place attachment, and environmentally responsible behavior. This research shows that ascription of responsibility mediates the relationship between awareness of negative consequences and that environmentally responsible behavior and environmental sensitivity and place attachment moderate the mediation. Consequently, developing awareness of the consequences of tourism is important to developing strong responsibility ascription and environmentally responsible behavior. The model is split to compare residents and tourists, and systematic differences in the path estimates emerge for the two groups. Furthermore, different types of tourists are compared, revealing that awareness of the negative environmental consequences of tourism and ascription of responsibility are unvaried for new and experienced tourists, but that tourists’ visit length significantly affects both awareness and place attachment.

We investigate a negative outcome of the relationship continuum – a business customer’s intention to downgrade the relationship with a financial service provider. By adopting complexity theory and using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), we provide six combinations of causal conditions that can affect the customer’s intention to downgrade an industrial relationship. Based on a unique dataset of five-hundreds questionnaires, we provide combinations of trust, satisfaction, commitment, loyalty, and relationship age that lead a customer to downgrade its relationship with a seller. Complexity theory and QCA allow us to highlight more intricate relationships among the predictors of a relationship’s trajectory, challenging the notion that a business relationship must always concomitantly possess all virtuous characteristics as a shield from downgrading. Sub-group analyses support that the successful configurations of trust, satisfaction, commitment, loyalty, and relationship age may depend on the number and size of a firm’s partners.

Advertising can focus on concrete product attributes or on lifestyle expressions and abstract benefits. In the context of print advertising for luxury brands, the authors explored the relationship among advertising style (product-based versus lifestyle-building), advertising language (abstract versus concrete), and consumers9 willingness to pay through the lens of construal level theory, which analyzes the way consumers interpret the brand. The study found that lifestyle branding was related to high language abstractness; product-based branding was related to language concreteness; and construal level was a mediator, enhancing willingness to pay when low. The use of abstract language and lifestyle-based advertising therefore requires careful consideration.

Bioplastics represent an innovation for replacing materials obtained from fossil fuels and could provide significant benefits to the environment. A new generation of bioplastic from urban waste is now technically feasible. This paper is among the first to assume the perspective of the consumers rather than the manufacturers in addressing what could lead to the market acceptance of this particular type of bioplastic. A conceptual model is developed addressing psychological drivers that could encourage consumers’ transition from a linear to a circular economy, with the purpose of better understanding what drives consumers’ intentions to switch to and purchase products obtained from organic waste. Specifically, we find that green self-identity positively impacts perceived value, leading to higher behavioral intention. In addition, the relationship is moderated by selfcongruity but not by differences in product involvement.

Extreme sports are a solid international industry enjoyed by millions of people, and many brands use extreme sports as contexts for advertising in the US and EU. Interpreting extreme sports through different psychological theories, in two experiments the authors compare the effects on persuasiveness, product attraction and behavioural intention of challenge- and difficulty-focused messages in extreme and traditional sports contexts, for high- and low-involvement brands. They find those appeals to affect ad persuasiveness, product attractiveness, purchase intention and willingness-to-pay positively in extreme sports, but negatively in traditional sports. Qualitative interviews highlight that extreme and traditional sports are perceived as different worlds. Results hold regardless of consumers’ participation type or preferred sport type and are based on hundreds of respondents across the US and different EU countries.

Context-dependent choice is an important aspect of decision making. The paper examines context-dependent choice in cats (Felis catus), with particular reference to the effect of local context, on the basis of hypotheses developed in the field of human decision making. Cats were initially confronted with two different feeding options. This binary choice set was later manipulated incorporating a decoy that was better than the available options but ultimately unavailable (a phantom). By means of a within-subjects manipulation of phantom location in the attribute space, the author compared the effects of close and distant phantoms on the final choices. The main finding is that close phantom decoys affected choice behavior of cats by altering the overall share of the available options, leading some animals to reject even some of the available feeding options, and by causing the animals to favor the available option that was more similar to the phantom decoy. No significant effects emerged for phantoms that were far from the alternatives in the attribute space. The strengths of this paper lie in its novel approach and high originality. No other study has used dominating decoys with animals or decoys that are unattainable. This paper provides strong links to the human decision making literature, the presentation of the predictions of a range of different choice models, and the novelty of the application to animals. The use of a phantom decoy is particularly interesting because the phantom cannot actually be chosen, and thus the binary and trinary choice sets both have the very same choices available. Overall, the effect of phantoms is real, interesting and new. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.

We investigate how stock-outs influence decision satisfaction and repatronage intentions for online purchase situations and how these responses vary with disclosure time and justification wording. We manipulate the disclosure time of the products' unavailability (ex ante vs. ex post) and the justification given to consumers (firm-related vs. firm-unrelated). We find that, overall, stock-outs produce negative reactions, but that the main effects of timing and wording can sum up: ex ante, firm-related communication effectively offsets the damage caused by stock-outs. Retailers should employ real-time tracking to promptly inform consumers of product availability, and accept the responsibility for any outages. © 2013 New York University.

Exploitation of the biologic activity of neurotrophins is desirable for medical purposes, but their protein nature intrinsically bears adverse pharmacokinetic properties. Here, we report synthesis and biologic characterization of a novel class of low molecular weight, non-peptidic compounds with NGF (nerve growth factor)-mimetic properties. MT2, a representative compound, bound to Trk (tropomyosin kinase receptor)A chain on NGF-sensitive cells, as well as in cell-free assays, at nanomolar concentrations and induced TrkA autophosphorylation and receptor-mediated internalization. MT2 binding involved at least two amino-acid residues within TrkA molecule. Like NGF, MT2 increased phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinase1/2 and Akt proteins and production of MKP-1 phosphatase (dual specificity phosphatase 1), modulated p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase activation, sustained survival of serum-starved PC12 or RDG cells, and promoted their differentiation. However, the intensity of such responses was heterogenous, as the ability of maintaining survival was equally possessed by NGF and MT2, whereas the induction of differentiation was expressed at definitely lower levels by the mimetic. Analysis of TrkA autophosphorylation patterns induced by MT2 revealed a strong tyrosine (Tyr)490 and a limited Tyr785 and Tyr674/675 activation, findings coherent with the observed functional divarication. Consistently, in an NGF-deprived rat hippocampal neuronal model of Alzheimer Disease, MT2 could correct the biochemical abnormalities and sustain cell survival. Thus, NGF mimetics may reveal interesting investigational tools in neurobiology, as well as promising drug candidates.

Questo studio di propone di investigare le dinamiche di comunità di marca sviluppatesi in Internet (online brand communities), prendendo in esame la relazione tra: integrazione nella comunità di marca, fedeltà alla community, fedeltà alla marca e passaparola. Successivamente si distingue tra membri della community con rango/status alto e basso, per indagare il differente impatto che la centralità o marginalità nella community ha sul comportamento del consumatore e sulla community stessa.

THE IMPACT OF DECOYS AND BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON CONSUMERS PREFERENCES AND DECISION MAKING F. Buoncristiano1, D. Scarpi21Management, University of Bologna, 2Management, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy For students only: do you wish to submit your paper to the Student Competition: :YesPresentation Method:Oral PresentationKeyword 1:context effectsKeyword 2:decision makingKeyword 3:decoyKeyword 4:backgroundKeyword 5:attractionThe process through which consumers form their preferences resembles more a work of architecture and building, starting from certain base-values, rather than an archaeological work of digging for bringing to light pre-existent preferences (Gregory et al., 1993). It is precisely in this frame that context dependent effects can (and do) take place. That is to say, in a nutshell, the composition and the framing of the choice-set influence the final choice. A great deal of attention has been paid to the study of context effects, which in very recent times have got great momentum. Our study focuses on some of the most important, quoted and discussed effects, namely 1-attraction (Huber et al. 1982; Simonson-Tversky 1992) 2-background (Tversky-Simonson 1993) and 3-phantom options (Praktanis-Farquhar 1992; Carpenter et al., 1994; Janiszewiski 2002).Unfortunately, there are just a few empirical analyses for (some of) these effects considered separately, and no study analyses them simultaneously. Therefore, although the literature makes some interesting points, there is little way to say something about their relevance. Our study aims at filling this gap, empirically analysing their interplay and combination, thus answering the calls by the most recent literature (Novemsky et al. 2004, Sheng et al. 2005) for studying the interactions between different “irrational” phenomena, as in the real world context effects come together. This allows the advancement of quite new research hypotheses investigating the effects, the strength and the direction following the introduction of a decoy in the choice set, with different background information (e.g. background information is conflicting with the decoy). This contribution also aims at assessing to what extend the nature of the decoy is relevant, comparing the effects of a real and a phantom decoy. At the same time, we aim at providing useful suggestions to practitioners as the hypotheses are tested on a large dataset of 600 consumers, collected by means of a website for the sale of products, rather than using a small convenience sample of students with a paper-and-pencil questionnaire (see Lynch 1982, Calder-Tybout 1999 for a debate about student samples). Care has been put so to select a product (mp3 players) familiar to the sample, of frequent purchase, managerially relevant, and coherent with the setting for data collection (the Internet). Results show that at least some of the context effects are not independent, and should therefore be considered together to provide a better understanding of decision making. By manipulating the placement of a decoy option, the nature of the decoy and consumer’s backgrounds, one can in fact influence consumers’ preferences and amplify/reduce the magnitude of certain evaluative “abnormalities”. Although we acknowledge the limitations of our analysis, we believe it provides 1-a contribution towards a deeper and more systematic understanding of the interactions between context effects, and 2-useful results of clear managerial relevance.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the relation between hedonic/utilitarian shopping behaviour and a number of key variables, such as store loyalty, perceived value, purchase frequency, money spent, price consciousness, age and gender. The paper aims to provide useful managerial implications for managers of fashion specialty shops.Design/methodology/approachFactor analysis, analysis of variance and structural equation model, depending on the nature of the considered variables, their theoretical robustness, background and potential implications. Data collected by means of a questionnaire in a natural setting; sample size of 300 respondents.FindingsProvides information about the effects of hedonic and utilitarian behaviour, indicating which variable is affected and how, and suggesting that playfulness pays back, but is not predetermined by gender or age.Research limitations/implicationsFashion stores for apparel have been considered only: further research could consider also different retailing formats and product categories.Practical implicationsA useful source of information and advice for managers operating in fashion specialty shops. The paper suggests what retailers should focus on and why.Originality/valueThis paper conducts a detailed analysis of suggestions addressed in the relevant literature, providing empirical support and highlighting new findings and relations.

We present a structural equation model for assessing the effects of hedonic and utilitarian behaviour within the context of specialty shops. Some constructs of key relevance from a theoretical and managerial perspective are considered in the model, such as Perceived Value, Purchased Amount and Repatronage Intention. Results show that hedonic behaviour leads to a stronger intention to repatronage the shop, and to higher spending, both in terms of money and of the number of items purchased. The estimates also give empirical support to the theoretical proposition that Value has a twofold nature, hedonic and utilitarian. Managerial implications and issues for future research are addressed

Gran parte della ricerca relativa a Internet come canale distributivo si è concentrata sulla vendita online di prodotti fisici. L’acquisto online di servizi, troppo a lungo trascurato dalla letteratura, merita però grande considerazione, sia per le caratteristiche uniche dei servizi rispetto ai prodotti, sia per la rilevanza manageriale del fenomeno. Lo scopo di questa ricerca è un’indagine dei motivi che guidano i consumatori all’acquisto di servizi via Internet, considerando diversi scenari d’acquisto e diverse tipologie di servizi. I risultati empirici mostrano una preferenza sistematica per l’acquisto di servizi di un’agenzia nota, che prevale sulle differenze legate alla specifica natura del servizio, ed evidenziano il bisogno di un contatto fisico con l’erogatore del servizio prima di completare l’acquisto sul Web. Infine, la familiarità-esperienza con l’acquisto online emerge come una variabile-chiave, senza però stravolgere il pattern generale di preferenza d’acquisto.