FEARING ONLINE IDENTITY THEFT: A SEGMENTATION STUDY OF ONLINE CUSTOMERS

The growth of online transactions coincides with the rise of cyber-criminals’ intent on stealing con-sumers’ personal and financial data. This fosters fear of online identity theft (FOIT), which in turn may lead to changes in consumer behavior and negatively affect e-business performance. This re-search aims to identify empirically derived segments of FOIT-prone consumers. Using a large sample of online shoppers, four distinct clusters are identified—‘less fearful shoppers’, ‘strong fear but ignor-ing shoppers’, ‘fearless shoppers’, and ‘fearful shoppers’. The clusters differ significantly with respect to primary cluster variables as well as numerous secondary cluster variables. The relevance of FOIT for segmenting online consumers and theoretical implications for IS research are discussed

Sustainable consumption and third-party certified labels: consumers' perceptions and reactions

Compared with conventional products, sustainable products continue to attract relatively lower market shares. To increase customer acceptance, many sustainable products feature third-party certified labels (TPCL), yet it is unclear whether TPCL are effective and what processes and boundary conditions define their role in consumer decision making. Across three experimental studies, this research determines that sustainable products are characterized by credence qualities, associated with increased perceptions of risk, which negatively influence consumers’ purchase intentions. Drawing on signaling theory, this study also shows that TPCL on sustainable products provide brand-like information cues that reduce the perceived risk of sustainable products. Finally, a third experimental study demonstrates that consumers must perceive TPCL as credible for them to reduce consumers’ risk perceptions

Service productivity:what stops service firms from measuring it?

Productivity measurement poses a challenge for service organizations. Conventional management wisdom holds that this challenge is rooted in the difficulty of accurately quantifying service inputs and outputs. Few service firms have adequate service productivity measurement (SPM) systems in place and implementing such systems may involve organizational transformation. Combining field interviews and literature-based insights, the authors develop a conceptual model of antecedents of SPM in service firms and test it using data from 276 service firms. Results indicate that one out of five antecedents affects the choice to use SPM, namely, the degree of service standardization. In addition, all five hypothesized antecedents and one additional antecedent (perceived appropriateness of the current SPM) predict the degree of SPM usage. In particular, the degree of SPM is positively influenced by the degree of service standardization, service customization, investments in service productivity gains, and the appropriateness of current service productivity measures. In turn, customer integration and the perceived difficulty of measuring service productivity negatively affect SPM. The fact that customer integration impedes actual measurement of service productivity is a surprising finding, given that customer integration is widely seen as a means to increase service productivity. The authors conclude with implications for service organizations and directions for research

Investigating links between cultural orientation and culture outcomes:Immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel and Germany

Marketers are justifiably interested in ethnic consumers; formulating effective ethnic marketing strategies requires insights into these consumers’ attitudes and behaviors. However, prior research provides few insights into how different cultural environments might shape the consumption behavior of consumers with the same cultural heritage. To address this knowledge gap, the present study examines the cultural orientation and relevant consumer outcomes (i.e., desire for unique products and fashion consciousness) of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who move to Israel and Germany. The results reveal differences in the cultural orientations of immigrants to Israel versus Germany, as well as different relational patterns between cultural orientation and the proposed consumer outcomes. These findings provide both theoretical and managerial implications

Unintended reward costs: The effectiveness of customer referral reward programs for innovative products and services

To encourage customers’ referral behavior and expand their customer base, providers of innovative products and services often use customer referral reward programs (CRPs), though not all CRPs deliver on their initial promise. With one field experiment and four online experiments, this research investigates the effectiveness of rewarded referrals for recruiting new customers for more innovative (versus less innovative) offerings and outlines the conditions in which public referral rewards have unintended ramifications and decrease customers’ referral likelihood. In addition to establishing these effects for more innovative offerings, this research identifies some moderating consequences, such that the detrimental effect of referral rewards on referral behavior can be attenuated by not disclosing referral rewards (for recommenders) to referral recipients, increasing the referral reward size, and rewarding both recommenders and referral recipients. These findings have theoretical and managerial implications

Lead Users’ Innovative Work Behavior in Digital Platform Ecosystems: A Large Scale Study of App Developers

Application developers constitute an important part of a digital platform’s ecosystem. Knowledge about psychological processes that drive developer behavior in platform ecosystems is scarce. We build on the lead userness construct which comprises two dimensions, trend leadership and high expected benefits from a solution, to explain how developers’ innovative work behavior (IWB) is stimulated. We employ an efficiency- oriented and a social-political perspective to investigate the relationship between lead userness and IWB. The efficiency-oriented view resonates well with the expected benefit dimension of lead userness, while the social-political view might be interpreted as a reflection of trend leadership. Using structural equation modeling, we test our model with a sample of over 400 developers from three platform ecosystems. We find that lead userness is indirectly associated with IWB and the performance-enhancing view to be the stronger predictor of IWB. Finally, we unravel differences between paid and unpaid app developers in platform ecosystems

SHORT DIGITAL STRESS SCALE - PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES AND CROSS-CULTURAL VALIDATION

Due to the massive, global, and seemingly unabated growth in mobile and social media use, across private and work lives, users likely experience perceived digital stress, which might undermine important behavioural outcomes. Hall et al. (2021) have established a digital stress scale (DSS), developed among U.S. adolescents and young adults; the current study offers a cross-cultural test of the scale and proposes a shortened version, by almost 60%. Social media use tends to blur work and nonwork spheres, and psychometric scales need to be cross-culturally valid, so the present study tests perceived digital stress among employees from three countries. The well-established validation procedures and samples from Germany, Italy, and Japan affirm the reliability, validity, and cross- national applicability of a 10-item short DSS. The extended application also reveals the impact of perceived digital stress on three sets of employee outcomes. In turn, this research offers implications for both IS research and practice