Metaverse beyond the hype: Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy

The metaverse has the potential to extend the physical world using augmented and virtual reality technologies allowing users to seamlessly interact within real and simulated environments using avatars and holograms. Virtual environments and immersive games (such as, Second Life, Fortnite, Roblox and VRChat) have been described as antecedents of the metaverse and offer some insight to the potential socio-economic impact of a fully functional persistent cross platform metaverse. Separating the hype and “meta…” rebranding from current reality is difficult, as “big tech” paints a picture of the transformative nature of the metaverse and how it will positively impact people in their work, leisure, and social interaction. The potential impact on the way we conduct business, interact with brands and others, and develop shared experiences is likely to be transformational as the distinct lines between physical and digital are likely to be somewhat blurred from current perceptions. However, although the technology and infrastructure does not yet exist to allow the development of new immersive virtual worlds at scale - one that our avatars could transcend across platforms, researchers are increasingly examining the transformative impact of the metaverse. Impacted sectors include marketing, education, healthcare as well as societal effects relating to social interaction factors from widespread adoption, and issues relating to trust, privacy, bias, disinformation, application of law as well as psychological aspects linked to addiction and impact on vulnerable people. This study examines these topics in detail by combining the informed narrative and multi-perspective approach from experts with varied disciplinary backgrounds on many aspects of the metaverse and its transformational impact. The paper concludes by proposing a future research agenda that is valuable for researchers, professionals and policy makers alike

Mitigating risk in ecommerce transactions: perceptions of information credibility and the role of user-generated ratings in product quality and purchase intention

Although extremely popular, electronic commerce environments often lack information that has traditionally served to ensure trust among exchange partners. Digital technologies, however, have created new forms of "electronic word-of-mouth," which offer new potential for gathering credible information that guides consumer behaviors. We conducted a nationally representative survey and a focused experiment to assess how individuals perceive the credibility of online commercial information, particularly as compared to information available through more traditional channels, and to evaluate the specific aspects of ratings information that affect people's attitudes toward ecommerce. Survey results show that consumers rely heavily on web-based information as compared to other channels, and that ratings information is critical in the evaluation of the credibility of online commercial information. Experimental results indicate that ratings are positively associated with perceptions of product quality and purchase intention, but that people attend to average product ratings, but not to the number of ratings or to the combination of the average and the number of ratings together. Thus suggests that in spite of valuing the web and ratings as sources of commercial information, people use ratings information suboptimally by potentially privileging small numbers of ratings that could be idiosyncratic. In addition, product quality is shown to mediate the relationship between user ratings and purchase intention. The practical and theoretical implications of these findings are considered for ecommerce scholars, consumers, and vendors. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

The Role of Habit and the Changing Nature of Relationship between Intention and Usage.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the changing nature of the relationship between intention and usage over time. Our main argument is that as individuals get into the habit of continuously using a system, the predictive power of intention will be diluted. Consequently, the more usage is performed out of habit, the less cognitive planning is involved. In other words, as habit of using an IS increases, the relationship between intention and usage weakens. This paper describes the theory bases, the research method, as well as the potential contribution of this work-in-progress

The Role of Habit in IS Continuance: Examining the Evolving Relationship between Intention and Usage.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the evolving relationship between intention and information systems usage over time. Our main argument is that as individuals get into the habit of continuously using a system, the predictive power of intention will be diluted. Consequently, the more usage is performed out of habit, the less cognitive planning is involved. The research model is tested in a longitudinal setting and the results present strong support to the hypotheses. The moderating effect of habit on the relationship between intention and usage increases over time, while the impact of intention on IS continued usage weakens over time. In addition, prior behavior is found to have a strong and significant effect on continued usage. The implications of this study are noteworthy for both researchers and practitioners

Comprehensive influence propagation modelling for hybrid social network

Springer International Publishing AG 2016.The evolution of influencer marketing relies on a social phenomenon, i.e., influence diffusion. The modelling and analysis of influence propagation in social networks has been extensively investigated by both researchers and practitioners. Nearly all of the works in this field assume influence is driven by a single factor, e.g., friendship affiliation. However, influence spread through many other pathways, such as face-to-face interactions, phone calls, emails, or even through the reviews posted on web-pages. In this paper, we modelled the influence-diffusion space as a hybrid social network, where both direct and indirect influence are considered. Furthermore, a concrete implementation of hybrid social network, i.e., Comprehensive Influence Propagation model is articulated. The proposed model can be applied as an effective approach to tackle the multi-faceted influence diffusion problems in social networks.We also evaluated the proposed model in the influence maximization problem in different scenarios. Experimental results reveal that the proposed model can perform better than those considering a single aspect of influence