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Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Promoting Sales of Online Games through Customer Engagement AbstractWith keen competition in the online game industry, game developers and publishers are finding new ways to induce players' to spend money on subscriptions and virtual items. As the online game itself provides a highly engaging environment, this study examines online sales from the perspective of customer engagement. We propose a research model that examines why game players actively engage in playing online games, and how such engagement can contribute to sales of online games, empirically testing the model using 377 online game players. The results support our research hypotheses and illustrate the effect of customer psychological engagement on stimulating game players' spending in online games. In particular, both psychological and behavioral engagement exerted a positive influence on online sales, and the dimensions and antecedents of psychological engagement were also identified. The findings of this study are expected to provide some suggestions for game developers and publishers on promoting the sales of digital items/goods. This study also adds to the current understanding of customer psychological engagement by identifying its antecedents and consequences in the context of online games.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the business world is fast changing its way of communicating and collaborating. In this study, we regarded the use of instant messaging in team collaboration as a social behavior and examined the changing roles of social influence processes in the formation of usage we-intention (i.e. social intention). Building on the belief-desire-intention model and the social influence theory, an integrated model was developed and empirically tested using survey data collected from 482 students. The results demonstrated that desire partially mediates the effects of group norm and social identity on we-intention to use. In addition, the effect of group norm is more significant for users with lower usage experience, whereas the effect of social identity is more significant for users with higher usage experience. We believe this study provides several important implications for both research and practice.

It has been demonstrated that online consumer reviews are an important source of information that affect individuals’ purchase decision making. To understand the influence of online reviews, this study extends prior research on information adoption by incorporating the perspective of herd behavior. We develop and empirically test a research model using data collected from an existing book review site. We report 2 major findings. First, argument quality and source credibility predict information usefulness, which affects the adoption of online reviews. Second, we determine that the adoption of online reviews is also influenced by 2 herd factors, namely, discounting own information and imitating others. We further identify the key determinants of these herd factors, including background homophily and attitude homophily. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.