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This study examined the effect of prior experience with esports gameplay on its antecedents and consequences. Prior experience is considered a significant factor in consumers’ intention and behavior, and in gameplay engagement it is considered the amount of gameplay time. While esports consumers are heterogeneous, only a few esports studies have been conducted. Thus, this study focused on prior esports gameplay experience to explain consumers’ behavior better and examine antecedents, esports gameplay intention, and live esports streaming content across two groups (i.e., high and low frequencies of esports gameplay). Data were collected via an online survey in Amazon Mechanical Turk (M-Turk) from esports consumers who engaged in esports gameplay and live-streaming. One-third of the median cases were excluded to create two groups designated by weekly esports gameplay hours. The results revealed different patterns in the two groups. Specifically, esports gameplay had no effect on engagement in live esports streaming content for consumers who played esport games frequently. However, gameplay intention predicted live esports streaming content engagement successfully in the group who played infrequently. These findings contributed to (1) esports research by demonstrating consumers’ heterogeneity, and the (2) extension of technology acceptance and use research in esports engagement by identifying the role of prior gameplay experience.

Cause-related marketing (CRM) has been a crucial concept of sport marketing literature in the professional sport context. However, there is little evidence available to address the effectiveness of CRM when the levels of sport fans' embedded psychological characteristics helping others are considered. The present study aimed to investigate the influence of sport fans' perceived CRM motive of a sport team on fan attitude and purchase intention for the team-licensed products, and the moderating effects of sport fans' altruism on the relationships among these variables in the context of the Korean professional baseball league. A total of 164 Korean baseball fans participated in the present study. Results revealed that sport fans' perceived CRM motive significantly affected fan attitude and purchase intention for the team-licensed products, and fan attitude also had a significant impact on purchase intention. Moreover, sport fans' altruism had significant moderating effects on the relationships between perceived CRM motive and purchase intention, as well as team attitude and purchase intention for the team-licensed products. Consequently, the present study might demonstrate that professional sport fans with high altruism are more likely than fans with low altruism to evaluate the motive of a team's CRM campaign as cause-oriented and show their support for the campaign.

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This study was designed to examine the moderating effects of the power–distance belief (PDB) on the relationship between employees’ service failures and customers’ transactional and non-transactional outcomes in a fitness center context. To test the relationships among these variables, we employed two pretests and a main experiment. In Pretest 1, a critical incident technique (CIT) was used to identify the employees’ service failure situations in fitness centers. Then, in Pretest 2, we developed two written scenarios that described employees’ service failures according to low and high severity and confirmed the differences between these two scenarios with a manipulation check. In the main experiment, we employed scenarios to examine the relationships among service failures’ severity, PDB, and customers’ non-transactional and transactional outcomes. We used Hayes’ PROCESS macro to test the PDB’s single moderating effect on the relationship between the service failures’ severity and the customers’ responses. According to the results, the moderating effect on the relationship between the service failures’ severity and fitness center customers’ non-transactional and transactional behaviors was confirmed. We extended the understanding of fitness center customers’ reactions, depending upon individual PDB to service failures, by comparing low- and high-service failure situations. Our findings also suggest that segmenting fitness center customers may help managers recognize that their customers’ varying responses depend on PDB.