Kai-Yu Wang

• PhD, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Professor at Brock University

This study proposed a model to explain customers’ willingness to accept chatbot intervention in service recovery. Grounded in the realism maximization theory and the service robot acceptance model, it investigated whether the incorporation of realism in chatbot messages (through message relevance and message warmth) can enhance service recovery out...

Purpose Although businesses increasingly use augmented reality (AR) to enhance service experiences, the way AR service marketing inspires consumers remains underexplored. Drawing on the consumer inspiration literature, the authors examine how AR service marketing activities such as entertainment, interaction, trendiness and customization enhance co...

Purpose This study proposes a framework that demonstrates how the perceived value of augmented reality (AR) shopping influences the formation of psychological ownership of product and technology. The mediating role of flow experience and the moderating role of perceived control are identified. Design/methodology/approach An online survey study rec...

This research explored whether customer forgiveness mediated the relationships between service failure severity (SFS) and customers’ coping behaviors and examined the moderating role of perceived justice in the proposed model. The results indicated that customer forgiveness played a crucial role in restoring relationships and reducing customers’ av...

Virtual reality (VR), and the profound immersive experiences it generates, has the potential to revolutionize the digital retail landscape, providing numerous advantages for both consumers and retailers. While VR environments can provide consumers with an immersive environment, there is a scarcity of research that considers how certain consumer beh...

Purpose This research investigates the role of customer forgiveness as the result of online service recovery transparency in predicting customer engagement. It also examines the moderating roles of timeliness and personalization in this proposed model. Design/methodology/approach An online survey study using retrospective experience sampling and a...

Drawing on augmented reality (AR) and social networks literatures, this study investigates social AR’s influence in building relationships among customers through a shared social experience that includes shared sense of place, social interaction, and social identity. The study recruited 528 active users of a social AR application and used the Struc...

This research investigates the impact of using emojis (i.e., the pleading-face emoji) on customer forgiveness in relation to handling complaints on social media. Specifically, this research proposes that perceived firm sincerity and perceived firm empathy play mediating roles in the relationship between emoji use and customer forgiveness. In additi...

Although the literature suggests that logos impart symbolic meanings via visual elements that influence consumers' early evaluation of brands, few such elements have been studied, with others (e.g., logo thickness) awaiting scholarly investigation. According to the literature, visual thickness seems to influence perception of power and consumers' c...

Limited by e‐tailers' ability to present accurate information about their products, consumers often misunderstand and misinterpret product messaging, which can heighten their perception of deception among e‐tailers and result in unfavorable consumer behaviors and actions. Integrating perceived deception and existing consumer behavior theories, this...

This research proposes and tests an integrated model to explain how information overload influence vaccine skepticism and vaccination intention. In addition, this research investigates the effectiveness of using a celebrity endorsement strategy in promoting vaccination and compares its effectiveness with other endorsement types. A survey study (Stu...

This research examines the influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness to retain customers in the context of service recovery via social media. We propose that customer forgiveness mediates the effect of service recovery transparency on switchover intentions. We further posit that the effect of service recovery transparency o...

Counterfeit-related studies have revealed motivational drives for counterfeit consumption. Little is known concerning the implications of consumers’ enduring and normative beliefs about proper standards of conduct as the determinants of counterfeit patronage. Drawing on the Schwartz theory of human values, experience literature and construal level...

Objectives: Dieting is a cognitively taxing task that does not always advance well-being. A dieting lapse may result in overconsumption that undermines long-term health goals. This research explores how a process known as counterfactual thinking (CFT), reliving an event to figure out where things went wrong, may help consumers faced with a temptat...

Purpose This research investigates whether and how perceived firm remorse (PFR) influences consumers’ coping behaviors in the digital media service recovery context. It also examines how an apology should be delivered to generate PFR. Design/methodology/approach In Study 1, 452 mobile application service users were recruited for a survey study, an...

Based on the stimulus-organism-response model, this research proposes a model that illustrates the effect of perceived interactivity on brand community members’ attitudes toward the site and brand community relationships. This research recruited 425 Facebook Fan Page (FBFP) users for a survey study, and structural equation modeling was used to test...

This research investigates the impact of service failure severity on consumers’ negative emotion (anger) and coping behaviors (revenge and avoidance) in the context of mobile application service failure. It also identifies the moderating role of technology anxiety on the relationship between service failure severity and blame attribution. The sampl...

Based upon the service-dominant (S-D) logic and the well-established belief-behavior framework, this study proposes a research model that captures the belief/perception factors and the interactive process driving people to balance and trade-off their cybersecurity concerns for co-created value in social media use. The model was validated with a lar...

Purpose Understanding how to develop users’ word of mouth to promote a virtual community (VC) is an important issue in VC management. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that lead to VC participation and promotion from a social influence perspective. Design/methodology/approach This research recruited 368 VC (i.e., Fashion Gu...

Local and global brands alike have increasingly used code-switching to enhance advertising persuasion. Although this tactic is widely used, previous studies have focused on bilinguals but not monolinguals. Because of the emerging use of code-switching in advertisements in monolingual markets, more research efforts are required to understand its eff...

This study investigates the influence of brand origin and foreign language familiarity in code-switched (CS) ad effectiveness for monolingual consumers. CS ads refer to ads containing foreign words or phrases in an advertising copy (e.g., headline and slogan), resulting in a mixture of native and foreign languages. In this research, we conducted a...

Recent research in the marketing literature indicates that while consumers’ interest in ethical products is growing, demand for such products still remains weak. Previous research indicates that anticipated guilt can be an antecedent to ethical consumption. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to identify three possible moderating variables: soci...

Consumer demand for counterfeit luxury brands is often viewed as “unethical,” but the demand is also robust and growing. The aim of this exploratory research, which employs in-depth interviews, is two-fold: 1) to identify the psychological and emotional insights that both drive and result from the consumption of higher involvement counterfeit goods...

This research involved conducting two studies to investigate whether the asymmetric language effects observed by Krishna and Ahluwalia (2008) among bilinguals can be replicated among monolinguals. In Study 1, we observed asymmetric language effects for local firms but not for multinational corporations (MNCs), which differs from Krishna and Ahluwal...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate if brand might affect consumers’ response to replacing size-zero models (SM) with average-sized models (AM) in advertising and how individuals’ psychological states might underlie consumers’ reactions. Design/methodology/approach – Three studies manipulating brand and model body size were condu...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a customer retention contingency model in service failure settings. Specifically, this research investigates how service recovery satisfaction (SRS) influences the relationship quality (RQ)-behavior chain. It also examines the moderating role of RQ and switching cost (SC) in the...

The purpose of this research is to investigate how an overall store price image (OSPI) is formed and subsequently influences repurchase intentions in retail settings. In addition, the moderating role of retail store formats and store images in the proposed model are examined. Six hundred and fifty-nine respondents, who were intercepted in front of...

Using the dual mediation hypothesis, this study investigates the role of interestingness (the power of attracting or holding one's attention) attitude towards the news, in the formation of Facebook Fan Page users' electronic word-of-mouth intentions. A total of 599 Facebook fan page users in Taiwan were recruited and structural equation modeling (S...

Using mature computing technologies, firms are able to obtain consumer network data more easily now than ever before. Although marketers are interested in social networks for WOM marketing, they previously ignored the importance of understanding network structures (Van den Bulte & Wuyts, 2007). Therefore, this research proposes an integrated approa...

Abstract Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has been an important factor influencing consumer purchase decisions. Using the ABC model of attitude, this study proposes a model to explain how eWOM affects online discussion forums. Specifically, we propose that platform (Web site reputation and source credibility) and customer (obtaining buying-related i...

This research examines the impacts of exposure duration and banner ad complexity on advertising persuasion in a web advertising environment. Processing fluency is used to explain the underlying process that occurs among consumers during exposure to advertisements, and refers to the ease of stimulus encoding and processing that is facilitated by pri...

In order to maintain their competitive edges in the market, high-tech firms cannot simply rely on superior technology alone. In addition, due to rapid technological changes, market demands in the high-tech industries have become volatile and difficult to forecast. This study proposes an option (i.e. franchising) that high-tech firms can use in orde...

The purpose of this research is to propose and empirically test a customer commitment model in a business-to-business (B2B) market. Specifically, this research investigates the development and role of dependence and trust in relationship management from the customer's perspective and their impact on commitment. Based on the social exchange theory,...

This research proposes and empirically tests a customer switching intentions model from a disconfirmation perspective in a service failure and recovery context. Specifically, the research examines how initial (discrepancy between service failure expectation and service performance) and recovery (discrepancy between recovery expectation and recovery...

This research examines the role of post-purchase recovery initiatives in offsetting the negative effect of a dissatisfactory product experience. Experiment 1 explores the effect of counterfactual thinking, a mental simulation process of reflecting upon past events and generating alternative possible outcomes, on product evaluations after an individ...

Social networks are extremely important for word-of- mouth (WOM) marketing. However, marketers often ignore network structures when developing WOM marketing strategies. Specifically, there is clearly a lack of research on looking into overall structures and structural heterogeneities of social networks. This research investigates structural heterog...

This study proposes a model to explain how web site characteristics influence customer e-loyalty and positive word-of-mouth (WOM) via relationship quality (trust, satisfaction, and commitment) in business-to-business e-commerce. Three hundred and twelve online services users of the Market Intelligence Center in Taiwan were recruited and structural...

Large amount of social (communication) data have been generated in many applications for personal communication purpose. However, these data have not been used well currently. In this paper, we will introduce a methodology to collect and analyze those personal data, and by this for extracting social networks from the data. A system architecture wil...

The purpose of the research paper is to analyze the characteristics of users in social networking Web sites as well as the related contents of the Web sites. This research expect to use the techniques of social network analysis and Web mining to illustrate the networks of the blog users and by this to discover the interest groups. The analysis resu...

With the development of Web 2.0, weblogs (blogs) have been a popular application that people use for social networking. Scant research has investigated determinants of people's intention to use blog for social interaction. Based on Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), we developed a model and empirically test this model with 348 blog users. The results i...

The objective of this article is to investigate the optimal pricing policy and advertising strategy for firms introducing a new product into a demand uncertainty market. We develop a pricing-advertising model to investigate how the market forecasting information impacts the firm's pricing policy and advertising spending and examine how the effect o...