PurposeIn recent years, closed social networking sites (SNSs) have become popular advertising media. Marketer-generated advertisements (MGAs) and user-generated advertisements (UGAs) are the two pillars of advertising businesses. The objective of this research is to investigate and compare how these ad types (i.e. MGA versus UGA) affect advertising effectiveness in closed SNSs.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a scenario-based experiment of 403 WeChat users in China and used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to examine the research model.FindingsThe study results indicate that UGAs perform better than MGAs in enhancing consumers' perceived informativeness, credibility and entertainment, while MGAs are more likely to make consumers feel irritated than UGAs in closed SNSs. Moreover, consumers' perceived informativeness, credibility and entertainment positively influence advertising effectiveness, whereas perceived irritation negatively affects it.Originality/valueThis study reveals consumers' psychological response mechanisms to MGA and UGA and sheds light on their differential effectiveness by extending the stimuli-organism-response model to the context of closed SNSs.
PurposeIn the sharing economy (SE), consumer misbehaviour is an operational challenge for platforms due to its negative outcomes. The psychological mechanism behind consumer misbehaviour remains unclear. As such, this research aims to investigate how consumers' sharing motivations affect their misbehaviours in the SE.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on motivated cognition theory, the authors establish a research model explaining the effects of consumers' sharing motivations on their cost–benefit analysis of misbehaviour and misbehaviour intention. A scenario-based online experiment is used to test the research hypotheses.FindingsThe results indicate that consumers' extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to share have different impacts on their perceived benefits and costs of potential misbehaviour, thereby influencing their misbehaviour intention.Originality/valueThis study reveals consumers' psychological mechanism underlying their misbehaviours in the SE and provides operational implications for platforms to help them effectively reduce consumer misbehaviours through preventive measures.
Sharing economy platforms are pressed to rapidly grow user bases at the early stage by aggressively targeting potential users through competitive actions. Due to the volatile nature of the sharing economy and its disruption to industry norms, these platforms encounter legitimacy challenges that impede user base growth. This paper integrates competitive repertoire and institutional legitimacy theories to develop a research model that explains early‐stage user base development in the sharing economy. We posit that the early‐stage user base is associated with structural characteristics of the competitive repertoire, whose effects are moderated by a platform's socio‐political legitimation efforts that address stakeholders’ regulatory and normative concerns. Using a comprehensive sample of 4644 monthly observations of 129 sharing economy platforms in China, we find that the volume of two context‐specific competitive actions, offering economic incentives and staging high‐visibility events, along with competitive repertoire complexity, are positively related to the platform's early‐stage user base. We also identify a significant negative relationship between repertoire differentiation and user base. Direct relationships are moderated by socio‐political legitimation, however, such that legitimation weakens the positive impact of context‐specific action volume but enhances those of repertoire complexity and differentiation. Managerial and practical implications are discussed in light of the findings.
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