Online shopping has developed rapidly, but recently, the sales of some online stores have suffered due to the decrease in people’s income caused by the epidemic. How to grasp the psychology and behavior of consumers and formulate effective marketing strategies is important for increasing sales. This paper puts forward a research model and eight hypotheses based on the research on the promotion situation and the types of products promoted on consumers’ impulse shopping, and uses regression analysis, t-test, stepwise regression and analysis of variance to conduct data analysis. The results show that online promotion has a significant impact on consumers’ willingness, and the anticipated regrets in different directions have totally different effect on willingness; the type of product promoted, and the impulsive characteristics of consumers play a moderating role; online promotion affects consumers’ impulsive online shopping intentions through the intermediary effect of expected regret. The influence of anticipated regrets on impulsive online shopping intention is proposed creatively, and the results also provide e-commerce merchants and customers with new insights in managing and treating online promotions. Managerial implications like controlling the duration of promotions and the number of preferential goods are put forward based on our analysis.

Live-stream shopping is developing rapidly, but the sales levels of live streaming products vary by different hosts. How to increase the sales volume of live streaming products has become a problem. Consumers’ purchase behavior in live streaming is determined by some subjective factors, and the persuasiveness of linguistic style affects this subjective judgment to a certain extent. Therefore, the persuasiveness of the hosts’ linguistic style will lead to changes in consumers’ purchase intentions, which will affect the sales volume of products sold in the live streaming. Based on Hovland’s persuasion model, Aristotle’s rhetoric skills, text analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic extraction model and grounded theory, this study divides the host’s linguistic persuasive style in the social e-commerce environment into five types: appealing to personality, appealing to logic, appealing to emotion, appealing to reward, and appealing to exaggeration. Combined with the sales volume of the product, we establish a regression model, and obtain the influence results of the host’s various linguistic persuasive styles on the sales of live streaming products. The results show that: the linguistic persuasive style of appealing to personality has the greatest positive impact on the sales volume of live broadcast products, but the linguistic style of appealing to logic has a negative impact. Interestingly, the same linguistic style has different effects for different types of products: the linguistic style of appealing to exaggeration has a negative effect on the sales volume of apparel products, but it has a positive influence on the sales volume of digital electrical products. Therefore, different linguistic styles should be used for different product types.

No abstract

In the context of e-commerce, online travel agencies often derive useful information from online reviews to improve transactions. Based on the dispute on the usefulness of different types of reviews and social exchange theory, this study investigates how the characteristics of pictures and text influence review reading and review posting behaviors and thus influencing the efficiency of online review systems. By analyzing crawled data of online hotels and conducting experiments, we first find that picture reviews are more useful than text reviews, and high-quality pictures in reviews have a significant impact on review usefulness. Second, posting pictures requires review posters to pay more perceived costs. Third, negative review posters have higher perceived costs, so they are more unwilling to post pictures, especially high-quality pictures. Our results indicate that review platforms need to add incentives to encourage consumers to post high-quality picture reviews and design workable interfaces to reduce the burden of negative reviewers to speed up the purchase decision process for review readers. This study provides theoretical implications by demonstrating how the adoption of the picture in review systems influences both review readers’ and review posters’ behaviors. Additionally, our findings also provide useful managerial insights for online travel suppliers in terms of building an effective review system to promote sales.

With the view toward improving the racial diversity in organizations, this work seeks to uncover the reasons why larger groups have an advantage in terms of job opportunities. Based on people’s preference for diversity in commodity selection, we propose a potential feature that may exist in human resource management and call it the isolated choice effect, which unconsciously affects the racial diversity of organizations. Specifically, when making selections in isolation (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting a single person at a time), people are less likely to choose the one whose race would increase group diversity than when making selections in collections (i.e., when they are responsible for selecting several people at a time). We set up eight experiments (n = 2,792) in which participants make hiring or firing decisions among choices that are more white people than black people. We find that participants in the isolated choice group are less likely to choose black people, the smaller group, than those in the collective choice group. Our results show a potentially important contributing factor to the underrepresentation of black people in many organizations because hires are often made in isolation while layoffs are often made in collections, which provides a starting point for improving racial diversity in organizations by avoiding the isolated choice effect.