Suchergebnisse

Purpose
In the digital era, business-to-business (B2B) salespersons are encouraged to communicate with buyers on social media platforms and shape customer loyalty. However, the effect of social media usage and its mechanism remain unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how salespersons' social media usage influences B2B buyers' trust beliefs and purchase risk, and therefore, customer loyalty.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors conduct an online-survey, use partial least squares structural equation modeling to analyze the data, and adopt SPSS PROCESS macro 2.13 to test mediation effects.


Findings
Salespersons' social media usage can enhance buyers' trust beliefs on salespersons' ability, integrity and benevolence, but only the latter two can improve customer loyalty. Social media usage does not directly affect purchase risk, and only benevolence can reduce purchase risk. Serial mediation models reveal that the effect of social media usage on customer loyalty is mediated by buyers' trust beliefs on salespersons' integrity/benevolence and purchase risk.


Originality/value
First, the authors confirm the effect of social media usage on customer loyalty in B2B context and refute the fallacy of social media uselessness in B2B practices. Second, the research shows that buyers' trusting beliefs on salesperson's ability and integrity do not significantly influence perceived risk. The finding is different from the stereotypical judgment in B2C scenarios. Third, the authors distinguish differently weighted influences of buyers' trusting beliefs on salesperson's ability, integrity and benevolence, and highlight the role of salespersons' altruism attributes in shaping customer loyalty.

Na Li,1 Xiang Yu,2 Michael Pecht3 1School of Law, Ningbo University, Ningbo, People's Republic of China; 2School of Law and Politics, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, People's Republic of China; 3Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USAAbstract: The concept of pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection comes from the West. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) establishes the basic rules for pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection. People's Republic of China's domestic law is consistent with the TRIPS agreement. In the drug registration approval process of the People's Republic of China's Drug Supervision Department, pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection has encountered some problems, including data authentication, exclusive rights to data, number of drugs requiring data to be submitted, and drug costs. In view of the long-term interests of the People's Republic of China's pharmaceutical industry and intellectual property protection trends, there are a lot of difficulties in the enforcement of pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection law that need to be overcome. Some measures can be taken, such as establishing a shorter data exclusivity protection period, only protecting the data submitted and relied on in the People's Republic of China, only protecting the drugs that use new chemical components, allowing application and necessary research before the expiry of pharmaceutical data exclusivity protection period of generic drugs.Keywords: drug, developing countries, approval, competition

Chinese social organizations are influenced by a variety of factors, including their relatively short history of development, the complex environment in which they grow, and their daunting mission of innovation. Viewing them from different perspectives leads to different conclusions. This paper examines the legal status of social organizations, exploring what they ought to be, could be, and are not. It finds that today, Chinese social organizations already have a certain capacity for behaving autonomously, the capacity for endorsement, and the capacity for public service. At the same time, there are imbalances in the development of the capacities of different types of social organizations. To build social organizations, there should be a full range of diagnostics regarding their capacities, relevant legal guidelines, concentration of resources to optimize their capacity structures, enlargement of their capacity reserves, and the endeavor to propel social organizations to play a greater role in social development and social management.

Although there is an increasing amount of research on support-seeking in cyberspace, very little is known about what features of online support-seeking can enhance the quality of received support. The present experiment examined how support-seekers' use of cues to personal identity in their user profile can influence the level of person-centeredness and politeness in others' responses to their support-seeking postings. Results showed that support-seekers whose user profile contained a portrait picture and a first name ID tended to receive higher person-centered and more polite support messages than support-seekers whose user profile did not contain those cues to personal identity.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the link between consumer psychology and puffery law in China and the USA, by reporting two empirical studies that investigated whether puff claims had different effects on Chinese and US college students in their perception of advertising truthfulness, brand attitude, and purchase intent.Design/methodology/approachThe first study tested the six levels of puffery, identified by Preston, with two products, cane sugar and bottled spring water. The second study employed four products to test the interaction effects of product type and the "best" puff claim.FindingsIt was found that puffery had very limited effects on the participants' brand attitude and purchase intent, and the Chinese consistently reported higher purchase intent than the Americans.Research limitations/implicationsThe studies had two primary limitations. First, all the participants were college students. Future studies may want to sample the general population and further examine how factors such as age, education, social class, and product experience influence the perception of puffery. Second, to strive for cross‐cultural equivalence, the ad stimuli used consisted of very simple designs and focused solely on puff claims without much context. The findings outline a possible roadmap to regulatory harmonization based on consumer psychology, which bridges the sharp divide between the two models of puffery regulation represented by China and the USA.Originality/valuePrevious empirical studies on the effects of puffery were all confined to the US context. The paper is the first effort to investigate the effects of puffery in a cross‐cultural context.

AbstractOnline knowledge‐sharing platforms construct risk knowledge and provide the audience with risk‐related scientific facts. We study how speakers organize narratives in past, present, and future foci to influence the audience's emotions through the audience's appraisal of motive congruency and coping potential. Empirical evidence from 210 Technology, Entertainment, Design talks about disasters from 2002 to 2018 demonstrates that emphasizing the past, present, and future in risk narrative leads to the audience's comments with more negative, less positive, and more positive emotions, respectively. Concrete (vs. abstract) portrayal of the risk narrative improves the audience's situational awareness, enhances their risk appraisal, and intensifies the impact of temporal focus on emotions, providing evidence of how temporal focus impacts. These findings demonstrate that temporal focus can effectively reduce risk overreaction or ignorance and facilitate emotion regulation in risk communication.

AbstractThe policy actions of countries reflect adaptive responses of local components within the system to the dynamic global risk landscape. These responses can generate interactions and synergy effects on alleviating the evolution of global risks. Adopting a network perspective, the study proposes a theoretical framework that connects three structural characteristics of policy synergy, namely, synergy scale, alignment intensity, and timing synchronization. Focusing on the Covid‐19 pandemic as a typical global risk context, the study finds that policy synergy with a larger scale, stronger alignment intensity, and more synchronized timing has a positive impact on mitigating global risks. The effect of alignment intensity is particularly pronounced when polycentric governance involves 20 countries facing severe risks, whereas the effect of timing synchronization is more significant when the multicenter group comprises more countries. Building upon the concept of an efficient scale of polycentric governance in various dimensions, this study develops a policy synergy index model. Through multiple empirical analyses, this study validates the causal relationship between policy synergy and the future evolution of global pandemic risk. Policymakers can leverage the dynamic changes in the policy synergy to predict future risk situations and implement well‐rounded and appropriate policy actions, thereby enhancing the efficacy of the synergy effect of multi‐country policy actions for risk governance.