Green apparel buying behaviour: A Stimulus–Organism–Behaviour–Consequence (SOBC) perspective on sustainability-oriented consumption in Japan

The green apparel literature has previously examined the disparity between consumers' positive purchase intentions and their actual purchase behaviour. This dichotomous behaviour represents the critical ‘intention–behaviour gap’, which marketers must seek to reduce to increase sales of their products. The current study thus seeks to identify the drivers of green apparel purchase behaviour that may potentially mitigate this gap. The proposed conceptual model is grounded in the Stimulus–Organism–Behaviour–Consequence (SOBC) paradigm and is tested through an analysis of cross-sectional data collected from 387 green apparel product consumers in Japan who were sourced through Macromill Inc. The findings suggest that optimism as the stimulus is positively associated with labelling satisfaction and labelling desire, which, in turn, are positively associated with purchase intentions, representing behaviour. Furthermore, purchase intentions are positively associated with shopping routine and fully mediate the association between shopping routine and buying behaviour. The study provides interesting strategic inputs for green apparel marketers and retailers.     

Competitive sustainability and stakeholder engagement: Exploring awareness,motivation, and capability

In adding to competitive dynamics and sustainability literature, this study examines the role of a supplier and consumer on a focal firm's sustainability competitiveness through the awareness, motivation, and capability (AMC) perspective and stakeholder engagement research. Regression analyses are performed utilizing secondary sustainability and financial data to test proposed environmental and social competitiveness hypotheses. A constraint factor model is also tested. This study finds that a focal firm's motivation is positively associated with its own sustainability competitiveness. The study also finds that awareness and capability are negatively associated with environmental and social competitiveness. Finally, whereas suppliers' AMC have no significant impact, customer awareness and capability do. The findings reflect both conformity and divergence from the AMC model when applying it to a supply chain context as well as enhance the managerial understanding of how a supply and customer base can impact their own sustainability competitiveness.     

Behind the influence of job crafting on citizen value co-creation with the public organization: joint effects of paternalistic leadership and public service motivation

This research seeks to investigate the role of paternalistic leadership in fostering job crafting among public employees, which may in turn foster citizen value co-creation with the public organization. The data were collated from public employees working in public legal service agencies in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and citizens whom they served. The data analyses verified the negative association between authoritarian leadership behavior and job crafting, as well as the positive associations between benevolent and moral behaviors and job crafting. The results also revealed the positive effect of job crafting on citizen value co-creation via citizen-organization identification as a mediator.     

Morning larks travel more than night owls? Chronotypical effect on travel frequency through novelty seeking

Chronotype is a characterization of people's propensity to sleep at a particular time, spanning a spectrum from the two extremes of “morning larks,” who go to sleep early and rise early, and “evening owls,” who go to sleep late and rise late. We study the relationship between chronotype and the tendency to seek novelty in travel preference. Surprisingly, in contrast to the case of domain-general novelty seeking, morning larks are more domain-specific in their novelty seeking than night owls in relation to travel. To test the significance of this finding, we explore the downstream behavioral consequences of the tendency to be novelty seeking. Travel frequency for leisure is found to increase with novelty seeking. In addition, chronotype has an indirect effect on travel frequency through its influence on novelty seeking—a mediation relationship moderated by gender, with the effect of chronotype on novelty seeking especially strong among young females.     

Platform pricing redux

Platforms such as Airbnb, Amazon, Apple iOS, eBay, Microsoft Windows, and Uber are ubiquitous. The two-sided nature of platform markets, however, requires a reconsideration of the conditions for profit maximization and understanding of how platforms operate. Profit-maximization in two-sided markets is characterized as an intuitive extension of the inverse elasticity pricing rule (Lerner index). This is further expressed in terms of the participants' primitives: users' reservation values and the platform's marginal cost. Differences between one- and two-sided markets are demonstrated and discussed.     

Bridging the online offline gap: Assessing the impact of brands’ social network content quality on brand awareness and purchase intention

Social media is shaping the way companies and brands engage and interact with consumers, particularly Millennials. In light of this growing trend, this study aims to understand the influence of content quality and brand interactivity within social media on consumers' brand awareness and purchase intentions by proposing an empirical model which is tested using structural equation modeling. The study also explores whether the relation between social media stimuli and offline purchase intention is mediated by hedonic motivation, consumer engagement and brand awareness. Results reveal that the quality of content provided by brands on social media and company-users' interactivity are of major importance to Millennials. They increase the hedonic motive derived by these users from social media, strengthen their online engagement and intensify their brand awareness. This heightened online consumer engagement coupled with an increased online consumer brand awareness leads to an increase in the purchase intention of these brands offline. Consequently, companies are encouraged to invest in producing high-quality content on their social media pages, deploy all possible strategies to enhance brand users’ interactivity given the important role these variables play in entertaining, engaging users online, building brand awareness and influencing their offline purchase intentions.     

On the stability of portfolio selection models

One of the main issues in portfolio selection models consists in assessing the effect of the estimation errors of the parameters required by the models on the quality of the selected portfolios. Several studies have been devoted to this topic for the minimum variance and for several other minimum risk models. However, no sensitivity analysis seems to have been reported for the recent popular Risk Parity diversification approach, nor for other portfolio selection models requiring maximum gain–risk ratios.Based on artificial and real-world data, we provide here empirical evidence showing that the Risk Parity model is always the most stable one in all the cases analyzed with respect to the portfolio composition. Furthermore, the minimum risk models are typically more stable than the maximum gain–risk models, with the minimum variance model often being the preferable one. The Risk Parity model seems to be the most stable one also with respect to profitability when measured by the Sharpe ratio. However, the maximum gain–risk models, although quite sensitive to the input data, generally appear to attain better profitability results.     

‘Instagram made Me buy it’: Generation Z impulse purchases in fashion industry

This paper investigates what types of Instagram marketing tools are the most effective in relation to Generation Z's impulse purchasing behaviour within fashion industry in the context of the United Kingdom. The research applies Stimulus-Organism-Response model to the context of Instagram. The findings of this qualitative study based on eight extensive focus groups conclude that there are significant gender differences in relation to impulse purchasing behaviour on Instagram. Instagram is vastly influential in encouraging impulse purchases amongst females, however, this was not the case for male participants. A revised Stimulus-Organism-Response model is proposed to Instagram, concluding that advertisements, opinion leaders and user-generated content act as stimuli (S) in evoking positive emotions (O), which subsequently trigger impulse purchases (R) in Generation Z females.     

The impact of follower narcissism and LMX perceptions on feeling envied and job performance

Feeling envied is often an unfortunate consequence of excelling at one’s job. Despite much evidence that envied employees are the targets of resentment and hostility, little is known regarding the antecedents and consequences of feeling envied in the workplace. The current study addresses (1) the effect of employee narcissism on feeling envied, (2) the interactive effect of narcissism and leader-member-exchange (LMX) on feeling envied, and (3) the relationship between feeling envied and performance. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 20 locations of a restaurant chain (N = 184) and were supported. Specifically, narcissism positively affects feeling envied, which in turn negatively affects performance. Simple slopes analyses indicate that high narcissism and high LMX result in the highest levels of feeling envied while low narcissism and high LMX result in the lowest levels of feeling envied.