Towards an understanding of consumer´s behavior of buying secondhand products on social media

Due to the research scarcity in consumers’ secondhand shopping behaviors and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses on social media platforms, this thesis decided to concentrate on both secondhand products and social media. The aim of this thesis is to explore the consumers’ behaviors of buying secondhand products on social media – a new channel of doing C2C businesses. To achieve the research aim, I conducted a combined method consisting of 106 questionnaires and ten semi-structured interviews to collect empirical data in this study. After an analysis of empirical data including both qualitative and quantitative data, three main findings were concluded. (1) The thesis firstly explored the social media as an open online marketplace for doing secondhand transactions. Consumers exchange secondhand products on social media in an ‘informal’ way. (2) The finding highlighted that, when consumers buy secondhand products on social media platforms, they are involved either in a ‘passive shopping’ process or an ‘active shopping’ process, and it is highly possible for them to experience hedonic factors (e.g. excitement, fun) due to the occasional and unexpected shopping results. This finding provides two new angels (passive shopping and active shopping) for researchers to analyze consumer behaviors in the future. (3) By extending the study of secondhand shopping motivation from Guiot & Roux (2009, 2010) in an online trading environment, the findings showed that utilitarian aspects of shopping such as price, convenience, product information, and trust mainly drive consumers’ behavior of buying secondhand products on social media. Environmental consideration and recreational motivation are less important than those utilitarian aspects

How does CSR influence a firm's profitability? : - A case study of Sandvik

With the increased concentration on the corporate social responsibility (CSR), firms are not only required to focus narrowly on generating profit returns for shareholders, but also asked to take responsibilities for firms’ other stakeholders, e.g. customers, employees, society etc., from social, environment and economic perspectives. Hence, nowadays, both having a decent CSR performance and adding profitability are the significant aspects for the company to achieve the sustainable success in the long term. In terms of that, this dissertation aims to explore the CSR-profitability relationship, namely, to explore how does CSR influence the firm’s profitability. After reviewing related literature, and choosing the single-case research method, collecting and handling quantitative and qualitative data analysis, findings are: (1) the CSR-profitability relationship in the case company is not clear in last five years; (2) the prior finding shows ambivalent view and inconsistency with the positive mediating process, a process used to define the CSR-profitability association, of the case company. After discussion of the findings, this study concludes that: (1) the CSR-profitability relationship cannot be clearly defined due to the complex mediating process and direct or indirect effects from tangible/intangible mediating factors; (2) generally, it is not likely to measure the financial impacts from the whole CSR performance, but, the financial impacts can be measured project by project; (3) those intangible resources that related to the CSR cannot be measured; (4) the inconsistent result from the finding may due to some other reasons, e.g. the problem of depending on accounting-based approach to measure the financial impacts from CSR, influence from specific financial crisis, lacking comprehensive measurement system of CSR etc.