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The use of digital research services has brought a dramatic increase in efficiency and easiness in research for both authors and editors. The new frontier seems to be the use of Artificial Intelligence which could further improve the quality of the research process. This exploratory study employed a direct observation of academic and non-academic resources to orientate information and research to answer two simple but fundamental research questions. The first one is to provide a structured map of these research services; the second one is connected with the potential impacts on the academic community brought by these services, including AI, opening an agenda for further investigation. Therefore, after a first mapping of the current services available for authors and editors/publishers, we investigated both digital services currently used by researchers and potential AI applications still at the beginning of their development. Answering the two research questions, we aim to debate the effects, impacts, and consequences of using these digital services and AI for academic purposes.

Online retailers are increasingly adopting 3D digital twins instead of 2D pictures on their e-commerce webpages. This research compares the effect of 3D vs. 2D pictures on consumers’ perceptions and future intentions toward an e-tailer. We advance that 3D pictures increase consumers’ intentions to patronize the e-tailer as mediated by telepresence, perceived control and attitude change. Furthermore, we address the role of two potential moderators: shopping values (functional vs. experiential) and level of preference articulation (preference matching vs. building). Results provide indications for marketing scholars and to practitioners to design more effective e-commerce webpages.

This research focuses on retailers’ price personalization strategies and investigates if consumers display different levels of store patronage intention and expected amount of discount depending on the type of data they are asked to disclose to obtain a personalized price. Findings from two experimental studies manipulating the type of data and the levels of distributive justice (Study 1) and the level of effort (Study 2) reveal that consumers react more favorably when the retailer requests the customer to share behavioral rather than biometric data. The fairer the perceived outcome of the price personalization, the less customers will be concerned with their privacy, and the more entitled they will feel about receiving a benefit from the retailer. The impact of type of data on fairness changes as a function of the benefit provided to customers (Study 1) and the level of effort to display the personalized price (Study 2).

Both luxury and fast fashion retailers are introducing innovative technologies to enhance consumers shopping experience and gain competitive advantage. However, the huge availability of innovations and the involved risks make the decision to innovate a complex task. For this reason, retailers are adopting different innovation and technology management strategies. The aim of this research is to compare and contrast fast fashion and luxury retailers willingness to innovate, in order to understand how innovation and technology management result into benefits for retail management. It further provides suggestions to improve the innovation management process, from a both theoretical and practical point of view.

Datasets for studies 1, 2 & 4 and supporting material (Appendix A). Study 3 data is not publicly available as it includes disaggregated data.

Despite the many theories that support and explain the evolution of retailing, none is supporting the evolution of retailing due to the advent of digital technologies in store that reshape the store format and impact in consumer experience. This research aims to overlap this gap in the literature starting from the direct observation of what happened to the format of stores that has implemented digital technologies. Particularly, the purpose is to deeply analyze: How change the sales area with the introduction of digital technologies? How change the disposition of the spaces in the store after the introduction of digital technology? If there are effectively changes on the store format due to the introduction of digital technologies in store, how they impact also on the theories of retailing evolution?

The aim of this paper is to investigate the emerging phenomenon of big data and ethics in retail literature and identify the current issues and trends in order to propose some future research directions.

As perceptual focus on retailer's green marketing, this study explores how green store atmospherics can positively influence green trust and green purchase intention of consumers

The chapter contributes to recent debate on retailing and sustainability, addressing the role of atmospherics in affecting consumer perceptions. First, after reviewing the relevant literature about sustainable retailing, this research addresses some practices oriented towards sustainability that can be implemented by a retailer, and how they can be communicated to consumers. Then, using an experimental design, the authors test the impact of sustainability-oriented visual atmospherics on consumer perceptions and intentions. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of past and current sustainability research in retailing, with a particular emphasis on store atmospherics. Future research should try to integrate the findings by investigating other sensory stimuli, such as tactile or auditory ones.

The large usage of digital technologies has largely increased the amount of data that companies can collect, store and use about consumers. However, issues related to the ethical management of those data dramatically emerge. Indeed, consumers raised some doubts about the extent to which the big data analytics provide benefits not only for retailers, while their privacy loss might occur. This study aims at understanding the extent to which consumers believe that retailers' usage of big data analytics involves risks for their privacy, while identifying the main factors influencing consumers towards this belief. To this end, the research employs a qualitative approach with 26 in-depth interviews with young consumers (Generation Z), collected in London (UK) in July 2019. From the analysis, three main standpoints emerge: (1) the influence of social environment, (2) the information about retailers' usage of data and (3) the characteristics of the data collected. Implications for theory and practice are further discussed. Learning Outcomes Upon reading this chapter, the reader will understand How consumers perceive a privacy loss when exposed to retailers' big data analytics The role played by the social environment in terms of the opinions of relatives and friends largely influence how youth perceive the risk of privacy loss What makes the information about retailers' usage of data not entirely accessible by consumers Consumers perception of retailers' usage of their data

Price has always had a key role in the luxury fashion market, because high prices are linked to the prestige of luxury products. Because of this, scholars have neglected the possible existence of unintuitive and controversial pricing strategies followed by luxury firms. This article deals with this literature gap, analysing the odd even price strategy. With the direct observation of physical and digital store windows of 20 luxury brands, this research examines the relationship between odd even price strategy and the luxury level of fashion brands considering both offline and online channels.

Virtual Reality (VR) is largely associated with a positive potential in terms of both higher efficiency and higher escapism for the consumer. Whereas previous research demonstrated the importance of consumers' hedonic and utilitarian shopping orientations in traditional channels, this study examines the potential of a VR store to elicit hedonism and utilitarianism. Combining literature on VR, shopping orientation, and retailing, we develop a multiple moderated mediation model. Then, in a quasi-experimental between-subjects design, we measure levels of hedonism, utilitarianism, store satisfaction, and perceived assortment size. Participants were exposed to the same shelf in a VRbased and a physical store. We found that VR has a negative impact on satisfaction that is moderated by perceived assortment size, and that VR elicits both utilitarianism and hedonism, which mediate the impact of the channel on store satisfaction differently but equally. Overall, consumers reported high levels of all measured outcome variables after being exposed to the VR experience. In addition, behaviors in the VR-based and physical stores compare quite well.

Social media are increasingly becoming a fundamental channel for every marketing strategy, particularly in advertising. The pertinent literature stresses how Millennials - the digital born generation very inclined to web interaction - represent one of the most relevant segments of social media users. Hence, firms are more and more using social media channels to engage Millennials, especially thanks to the use of mobile apps. Although Millennials do not represent the traditional target of luxury firms, social media might represent a useful strategic tool to reach them and also transfer the luxury brands’ image and value. While scholars widely investigated the relationship between social media usage and purchase intention toward the luxury brand, scant attention has been given to the underlying mechanisms. Specifically, this study proposes and empirically tests a conceptual model investigating the role of both materialism and morality, which are hypothesized as mediating variables of the aforementioned relationship. On the one hand, Millennials represent one of the most materialist and narcissistic generations; on the other hand, they also pay a lot of attention to the ethical and moral side of purchase decision making. Moreover, the proposed model hypothesizes motivation to use social media and advertising skepticism as moderating variables of these linkages. In this way, this study contributes to the social media advertising literature by better exploring Millennials’ cognitive mechanisms toward luxury purchase intention. The model is tested using bootstrapping moderated-mediation analysis on a sample of 290 Millennials using social media to get information on and purchase luxury brands. Consistently with the literature, materialism significantly mediates the social media – purchase intention relationship. Counterintuitively, also morality plays a significant role as a mediating variable of such a relationship. Finally, motivation to use significantly moderated both the linkages between social media usage and materialism and morality; similarly, advertising skepticism is also a significant moderating variable in the model.

This research investigates whether consumers display similar brand perceptions between physical and virtual store environments. Specifically, it explores the set of causal relationships through which the virtual store experience affects consumers’ perceptions and intentions toward the retailer’s brand. The results from an experimental study manipulating the store environment (virtual vs. physical) reveal that individuals exposed to a virtual-reality-based retail environment perceive higher levels of presence than those exposed to a more traditional, physical store environment; moreover, this positive effect does not depend on individuals’ technological self-efficacy perceptions. Higher levels of presence positively affect the shopping experience, which then produces a positive change in value perceptions, which ultimately lead to higher patronage intentions and WOM referral. Despite the presence of inattentional blindness found in the virtual environment, the results show that such an image transfer from the store environment to patronage intention holds even when individuals cannot correctly recall the store brand.

A growing body of research has emerged on digital retailing due to the introduction and rapid spread of technologies that changed the retail settings. Retailers are constantly making decisions about the implementation of digital technologies, evaluating every negative and positive effect from the costs saving to the customers’ satisfaction (Verhoef et al., 2009). These developments are modifying the way to do shopping, making it more exciting and involving, thanks to a large range of services offered (Liao & Shi, 2009). This systematic review of the literature (Tranfield et al., 2003) aims to identify, classify, and analyze the main current research fields on digital retailing developing an overall interpretation of the topic investigated. The process of analysis has been divided into three stages. In the first one, authors planned the review by delimiting the subject area, identifying the main purposes of the analysis, and consequently developing the review protocol including details of the information source (authors, title, year of publication, journal, keywords). During the second stage, authors collected the papers published from 2013 to 2016 in the databases EBSCO, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science. In order to retrieve relevant publications in the field of digital retailing, authors selected the search query keywords “digital” and “online” linked via Boolean and with the keyword “retailing.” The search resulted in overall 693 articles. After a screening process, authors select 290 papers belonging to the field of B2C level and tangible goods digital retailing. In the third stage, authors codified the results by running a content analysis through the software NVivo (Bazeley & Jackson, 2013) aiming at codifying a set of main themes, according to the thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The themes were identified launching the auto-coding wizard query of the software on titles, abstracts, and keywords allowing researchers in the identification of the main topics. This process resulted in both father nodes and son nodes, summarized by authors into six father nodes with relative son nodes. Finally, the interactions among the nodes were measured to understand the eventual conceptual links and bonds between them, running the word similarity cluster analysis, through the using of the Pearson correlation, a tool for estimating the linear relationship between two quantitative random variables (De Ona et al., 2014).