Stuart J. Barnes

King's College London | KCL · Department of Management

People rapidly and subconsciously process information from facial images. On sharing economy platforms, facial cues can provide a useful supplement to other information provided by reputation systems. Previous small-scale, rater-informed studies examining trust and attractiveness based on facial features on Airbnb found mixed support for impacts on...

Research has shown that the temporal focus of individuals can have a real effect on behavior. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study posits that temporal focus will affect adherence behavior regarding health control measures, such as social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing, which will be manifested through the degree of spread...

The impact of color psychology on behavior has been clearly demonstrated for tangible products and advertising. However, the use of colors in combination has had little attention and has not been examined in the service context. This paper tests the small palette principal and the visual coherence perspective in an accommodation sharing setting. Th...

In today’s busy world, convenience is on the rise. On-demand services (e.g., food delivery services) promise swift solutions to our daily needs. However, limited research explores how service inconveniences (e.g., order cancelations and delays) impact consumer satisfaction, and which factors exacerbate such impact. This study addresses this gap by...

Purpose Sports advertisements such as the Super Bowl showcase products and brands that have invested increasingly large sums financially to gain viewers’ attention. However, how audio features in advertisements impact viewers' behavior remains unexplored. Design/methodology/approach Using the lens of signaling theory, this research uses advanced d...

Color is ubiquitous on digital platforms. From listing images on accommodation platforms such as Airbnb or Booking.com to restaurant images on online reservation platforms such as OpenTable.com, the strategic use of color characteristics - particularly brightness and saturation - plays a critical role in shaping consumer attitudes and driving custo...

In the last decade, consumer brand engagement has emerged as a strategic imperative for establishing competitive advantage, and as a valuable factor for gauging corporate and brand performance (Bilro & Loureiro, 2020). Aligned with the increased practitioner interest in the engagement concept, the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) has listed the en...

Purpose Color psychology theory reveals that complex images with very varied palettes and many different colors are likely to be considered unattractive by individuals. Notwithstanding, web content containing social signals may be more attractive via the initiation of a social connection. This research investigates a predictive model blending varia...

Travel and tourism advertising is critical in developing positive associations to attract visitor patronage and build sustainable post-pandemic tourism. An important part of an advertising message is delivered through voice and other aspects of audio, for example, music. However, how audio features impact viewers of travel and tourism advertisement...

The resource utilization of a circular economy should reflect both economic and environmental values. Resource utility can be measured by GDP in the short term, while environmental value is challenging to measure; that is, the improvement in air quality is not effectively evaluated. In order to examine this initiative, using China’s pilot cities of...

Purpose Protecting a nation’s heritage is an essential element for sustainable development. Heritage attracts tourism and drives tourist income, as well as bringing wider economic, social and environmental benefits. This study aims to improve understanding of the relationship between heritage protection spending in countries and economic developmen...

The rebirth of global tourism with a massive rebound is anticipated due to an emerging touristic behavior coined as vaxication (i.e., post-vaccination travel). Despite the ongoing fatigue triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, travelers’ fear of missing out (FOMO), and destination crisis marketing (DCM) can further accelerate travelers’ momentum towar...

How do information systems and big data analytics help to enable a sustainable future? This question is investigated in nine papers in this special issue that examine the issue of big data analytics for sustainability from a variety of perspectives. Broadly, these papers can be considered in four main areas: health, online behavior and consumption,...

Marketing managers strive to build branded experiences that both excite and engage their customers in novel ways in order to enhance attitudes and encourage positive behaviors towards their brands. As it offers immersive and interactive encounters, Virtual Reality (VR) technology is a promising tool for managers to create these experiences, evidenc...

Social customer relationship management (CRM) deals with integrating social media data with traditional CRM in order to engage customers. This paper extends the Technology-Organization-Environment model with the diffusion of innovation theory to obtain insights into the factors and differences driving the use of social CRM in firms in Morocco, Alge...

Purpose This research tests empirically the level of consumer engagement with a product via a nonbrand-controlled platform. The authors explore how social media influencers and traditional celebrities are using products within their own social media Instagram posts and how well their perceived endorsement of that product engages their network of fo...

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided psych challenges for many in society. One such challenge is the anxiety that is created in many people faced with the risk of death from the disease. Another issue is understanding how individuals cope psychologically with the threat of death from the disease. In this study we examine the manifestation of death an...

Purpose Social CRM (SCRM) technologies, as distinct from CRM technologies per se , provide an important new resource for companies to develop their relationships with customers and drive business performance. This research develops and tests an original model exploring the impact of SCRM on firm performance and the relationships between SCRM use, e...

Purpose. The role of emerging digital technologies is of growing strategic importance as it provides significant competitive advantage to organisations. The chief information officer (CIO) plays a pivotal role in facilitating the process of digital transformation. Whilst demand continues to increase, the supply of suitably qualified applicants is l...

Renting a property via a peer-to-peer platform involves a variety of risks. Humans inherently, subconsciously use facial cues as important shortcuts in making assessments about other persons. On property sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, facial cues can be used in a similar fashion alongside reputational information. According to Dangerous Decisio...

ABSTRACT Virtual reality (VR) technology is predicted to become indispensable in the business world, as it fundamentally re-imagines the way in which firms interact with customers. This technology has sparked a VR ecosystem with multiple types of firms and other stakeholders interacting to create value. Thus, to fully leverage the potential of VR,...

An area of consumer behaviour that caught retailers and supply chains unprepared during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic was the increased prevalence of the purchase of utilitarian goods – referred to in the media as “panic buying.” In this study, we take a novel approach to understanding such panic buying during the pandemic using compe...

This paper takes a text analytics approach to measuring dimensions of employee-visitor encounters that impact on visitor outcomes. A conceptual model measuring dimensions of employee-tourist encounters is implemented using a big data analytics approach more suited to large-scale online review data than the traditional, limited survey approach. Usin...

The benefits and problems of sharing economy models have been debated heatedly in the literature. In this paper we investigate the introduction of ride-hailing services on pollution in the largest developing economy in the world, China. We use a difference-in-difference approach to longitudinally examine cities that introduced the Didi Chuxing serv...

Advances in digital technologies continue to transform the way that organisations conduct business, and none has been more widely anticipated than Virtual Reality. Numerous academics and practitioners in a variety of industries have identified valuable opportunities that come with implementing Virtual Reality technologies into various contexts. Sta...

Major public health incidents such as COVID-19 typically have characteristics of being sudden, uncertain, and hazardous. If a government can effectively accumulate big data from various sources and use appropriate analytical methods, it may quickly respond to achieve optimal public health decisions, thereby ameliorating negative impacts from a publ...

Purpose Despite the growing popularity of ride-sharing in China, our understanding regarding users' trust and behavioral intention toward this new type of hailing service is still limited. This study aims to examine the joint influences of institution-based, process-based and characteristic-based antecedents on customers' trust and continuance inte...

Recent advances in 5G-based disruptive technologies have ushered in a new smart era of interconnected mobility. Hence, smart city planners around the globe are facing the challenges of leveraging these new modalities of future mobility solutions. Some key innovations toward disruptive mobility are the next generation of the Internet of electric veh...

COVID-19 has radically transformed many aspects of human life and global society both now and for many years to come. A key aspect of the transformation has been increased digitalization and the accelerated implementation of previously predicted trends that have been discussed for many years in the information management literature. Human endeavour...

Due to the existence of multiple bias sources, the scores in online systems cannot reflect products or services unbiasedly. Regardless of the bias, the new consumer may be misled to make a wrong purchase decision, resulting in lower satisfaction. Therefore, research on the bias and distortion of online commentary information is an important issue o...

Experiences are a critical element in creating value for customers of service companies. In the tourism industry, employee–tourist encounters are particularly important as a lever for experience value creation. However, typically such encounters are based on a service quality logic that is standardised and functional (based on standard quality theo...

Marketing practitioners have long recognised the importance of non-transactional customer behaviour (Sashi 2012). In line with this, the industry introduced the ‘engagement’ metric in strategic marketing and branding to assess corporate and brand performance (Van Doorn et al. 2010). Prospect and trend reports from the industry indicate that advance...

Online collaborative consumption (OCC) models, such as Uber and Airbnb, have emerged as popular peer-to-peer platforms in the sharing economy. Our study investigates whether the adoption of a leading ride-hailing platform, Didi Chuxing, increases or decreases new car sales shortly after the platform’s entries across 51 cities in China. Our empirica...

The capacity and coverage requirements for 5th generation (5G) and beyond wireless connectivity will be significantly different from the predecessor networks. To meet these requirements, the anticipated deployment cost in the United Kingdom (UK) is predicted to be between £30bn and £50bn, whereas the current annual capital expenditure (CapEX) of th...

In this paper, we examine the mediating effect of experience value between experiential elements of employee–tourist encounters and the final experiential outcomes. The Tourism Encounter Mediated Experience Value (TEMEV) model is tested via a survey at 13 different locations (attractions, hotels, and retail) in Copenhagen (n=2,955). The findings il...

Once diagnosed with cancer, a patient goes through a series of diagnosis and tests, which are referred to as "after cancer treatment". Due to the nature of the treatment and side effects, maintaining quality of life (QoL) in the home environment is a challenging task. Sometimes, a cancer patient's situation changes abruptly as the functionality of...

The anticipated deployment cost of 5G communication networks in the UK is predicted to be in between {\pounds}30bn- {\pounds}50bn, whereas the current annual capital expenditure of the mobile network operators (MNOs) is {\pounds}2.5bn. This prospect has vastly impacted and has become one of the major delaying factors for building the 5G physical in...

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have provided exciting new tools for scientific research that have been applied in many domains, including medicine, engineering, finance, the physical sciences, and online consumer analytics. Although text analytics is now quite a mature approach, image ana-lytics is still developing as research approach...

The virtual reality topic spiked a lot of attention in different fields and research areas, and marketing is no different. Amongst marketing practitioners, scholars and their consumers, the technology has gained and maintained momentum over the past few years. This research advocates for the implementation of multi-user virtual reality to reach and...

Although ElectroEncephaloGram (EEG) signals allow subjects suffering from neuromuscular disorders to interface their brains with the cyber-physical world, occupational therapy can be enhanced with the introduction of further modalities better assist the disabled person. In this paper, we propose an in-home occupational therapy environment, which le...

V-commerce is an emerging phenomenon that is gaining traction in marketing and business literature and is becoming specifically more prominent in content related to retail practices. However, interpretations and explanations as to what exactly v-commerce refers to and comprises are inconsistent. This paper addresses the fluid conceptualisation of t...

Scholars have heatedly debated the benefits and limitations of the double-blind peer review. Scholars recently suggest that maintaining anonymity (i.e. the major advantage of a double-blind reviewing system) has become unfeasible in the age of Google because reviewers can easily find authors’ information through Internet searching and text citation...

In this manuscript, we present a novel method, process and system for calculating dyslexic symptoms, generating metric data for an individual user, community or group in general. We present a mobile multimedia Internet of Things (IoT) based environment, which can capture multimodal smartphone or tab-based user interaction data during dyslexia testi...

The purpose of the present study is to examine the differences between user addiction to smartphone devices versus addiction to social network services (SNS), and the role of user perceptions. While a growing corpus of work has demonstrated the potentially deleterious effects of smartphone usage, relatively few studies have differentiated between a...

Purpose: The recently developed resource orchestration theory studies the processes by which managers handle resources, to create competitive advantages. According to this theory it is the way that resources interact with each other that results in such advantages. Resource integration, i.e. the alignment, or fit between resources, is one importa...

This study investigates why some customers of a brand tend to purchase IT products launched by the same brand in a different category, but others do not. Combining insights from marketing and information systems research, the researchers developed an integrative model of cross-category purchases of IT products in a brand extension context. This res...

Online collaborative consumption models, such as Uber and Airbnb, have emerged as popular peer-to-peer platforms in the sharing economy. The recent introduction of ride-hailing apps for smartphones has generated a powerful medium for passengers to call cars effortlessly and flexible job opportunities for drivers. A central question surrounding the...

This paper examines how firm characteristics and local anti-corruption effort moderate the influence of political connections on enterprises’ private R&D investment using data from 2,587 Chinese A-share listed enterprises. Our results show that the local anti-corruption institutional environment significantly moderates the strong relationship betwe...

Over the past few decades, chargeback fraud from buyers has been identified as a major risk faced by online sellers, particularly small- and medium-sized enterprises, in cross-border electronic commerce. However, most previous studies have focused on trust and perceived risk from the buyers' perspective and in domestic online marketplaces, while ne...

Building upon the persuasion theory in the social psychology literature, this study investigates how companies can use microblogging services to influence consumers’ participation and brand loyalty. We develop and empirically test our research model using an online survey in China. Our findings show that persuasion factors, including information qu...

Collaborative consumption websites have enabled consumers to focus on shared access to products rather than owning them. This study aims at developing a comprehensive theoretical model to explain consumer outcomes for collaborative consumption. It develops and tests a structural equation model using partial least squares path modelling and survey d...

Existing theory suggests that social networks form a major factor in individual and team performance, including in academic collaborative research. However, there is currently a lack of a theoretical framework to explain the social network related factors that influence publication processes and decisions. We address this gap by adopting a theory-b...

This paper extends the IS continuance model to improve our understanding of the determinants of E2.0 post-adoption. Our proposed research model incorporates four constructs into the IS continuance model: firm size, firm scope, subjective norms and competitive pressure from the perspective of organizational and environmental context based on the TOE...

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of initiatives aimed at providing platforms to share resources among people. Collaborative consumption provides a model for a ‘sharing economy’ where the dominant logic of consumers is resource access rather than ownership. This study examines the nature and development of a variety of collaborative con...

Consumer-generated content has provided an important new information medium for tourists, throughout the purchasing lifecycle, transforming the way that visitors evaluate, select and share experiences about tourism. Research in this area has largely focused on quantitative ratings provided on websites. However, advanced techniques for linguistic an...

Tourism is an experience-intensive sector in which customers seek and pay for experiences above everything else. Remembering past tourism experiences is also crucial for an understanding of the present, including the predicted behaviours of visitors to tourist destinations. We adopt a longitudinal approach to memory data collection from psychologic...

Social media and web-based environments provide important new channels for the dissemination of messages and roles for central individuals in networks to provide conduits for marketplace information. The purpose of this research is to test individuals' propensity to transfer market mavenism – a characteristic associated with a group of highly knowl...

Understanding consumers’ needs and wants has been a major source of success for hotel organizations. Notwithstanding, investigating the valence of online reviews and modeling hotel attributes and performance is still a rather novel approach. Using partial least squares path modeling, Swiss country-level data for online reviews from 68 online platfo...

In this research, we aim to understand the influence of government subsidies on enterprises’ research and development (R&D) investment behavior, particularly in China’s renewable energy sector. We are also interested in examining how the attributes of enterprise ownership act as a moderating variable for the relationship between government subsidie...

Sharing activities underpinned by the technologies of the Internet have become dominant in the activities of individuals, business and governments. Recently, such sharing activity has grown from information and media content to wider resources, including money, physical goods and services — coined collaborative consumption. Sustainability is often...

Electronic games are often considered one of the main consumer markets in the mobile commerce arena. This is an area that has thus far been neglected by literature. The research performed in this paper develops and validates the usefulness of an instrument that evaluates the quality of mobile games. Data collected by the instrument is grounded in s...

Postponement has been recognized as a strategy to manage uncertainties in demand. Its performance however depends on various prerequisites. Numerous technical factors that influence postponement such as product modularity and process redesign have been widely studied. Notwithstanding, the effect of external factors on postponement have been paid mu...

Virtual Worlds are a significant new market environment for brand-building through experiential customer service interactions. Using value theory, this paper aims to assess the experiential brand value of real-life brands that have moved to the Virtual World of Second Life. A key premise is that current brand offerings in Virtual Worlds do not offe...

This paper extends the use of expectation confirmation theory through the development of a “socialness” construct, modeled as an antecedent of satisfaction. Personalization is introduced as an antecedent of socialness and satisfaction. The model is developed and tested using the corporate Web site of a large European utility and two rounds of surve...

The impact of mobile and wireless technologies on global consumers, businesses and society over the last decade has been very substantial. New Zealand businesses have developed an innovative reputation for implementing mobility applications. In this paper we examine the development of mobile business applications in industries in New Zealand from 2...

Destination branding has developed considerably as a topic area in the last decade with numerous conceptualizations focusing on different aspects of the brand. However, a unified view has not yet emerged. This paper examines destination branding via a new conceptualization, destination brand experience (DBE), which provides a more holistic and unif...