This paper advances a new theoretical model to understand the effect of culture on creativity in a global context. We theorize that creativity engagement and success depend on the cultural tightness-the extent to which a country is characterized by strong social norms and low tolerance for deviant behaviorsof both an innovator's country and the audience's country, as well as the cultural distance between these two countries. Using field data from a global online crowdsourcing platform that organizes creative contests for consumerproduct brands, supplemented by interviews with marketing experts, we found that individuals from tight cultures are less likely than counterparts from loose cultures to engage in and succeed at foreign creative tasks; this effect is intensified as the cultural distance between the innovator's and the audience's country increases. Additionally, tight cultures are less receptive to foreign creative ideas. But we also found that in certain circumstances-when members of a tight culture do creative work in their own or culturally close countriescultural tightness can actually promote creativity success. This finding implies that some degree of convergent thinking as engendered by tight cultures could be beneficial for creativity, challenging the dominant view in creativity research that divergent thinking is a prerequisite for creative performance.

Virtual assistants are increasingly common on commercial websites. In view of the benefits they offer to businesses for improving navigation and interaction with the consumers, researchers and practitioners agree on the value of providing them with anthropomorphic characteristics. This study focuses on the effect of the voice of the virtual assistant. Although there are some studies of human-computer interaction in this field, there is no work that addresses the topic from a marketing perspective and compares the effect of a human voice versus a synthetic voice. Our findings show that consumers who interact with a virtual assistant with a human voice have a stronger impression of social presence than those interacting with a virtual assistant with a synthetic voice. The human voice also builds trust in the virtual assistant and generates stronger behavioural intentions.

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