Mingli Zhang’s research while affiliated with Beihang University and other places

Purpose In social media context, service failures become public domain, making them visible to vast audiences of customers who are virtually present. Thus, this study aims to discuss the roles of service failure type and management response on observers’ perceived helpfulness. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted econometric analyses on a dataset incorporating 107,984 reviews and 34,641 management responses to negative reviews. Findings The results reveal that, for process failures, specifying a form of action (initiatives for solving the problem) is associated with more perceived helpfulness of reviews than accounts (explanation) or acknowledgments (recognition and acceptance), while responding to an outcome failure by providing an account is associated with increased perceived helpfulness of reviews. Practical implications For process failures, managers should make every effort to convince observers through specific actions that similar failures are less likely to occur in the future. For outcome failures, managers should strive to provide clear and fast explanations of the failure causes to restore observers’ evaluation of the firm’s capabilities. Originality/value The authors’ work extends sparse insights on observers and sheds new light on the effect of service failure type and response strategy on observers’ actual behaviors. The interplay between service failure type and response strategy provides guidance on how to use management responses to influence potential customers.

Despite the dominant role of images on social platforms, the research on evaluating visual content is limited in marketing literature. We innovatively proposed using image richness to measure the visual contents by adopting a deep learning algorithm. We collected images embedded in posts by influencers from Sina Weibo and investigated how image richness affects customer engagement. Results show that image richness is positively related with emotional engagement and behavioral engagement, while negatively connected with cognitive engagement. Further, we find that the effect of image richness on customer engagement is more pronounced for experience goods and posters with greater social influence. However, the relationship is weakened by posts' text length, especially for emotional and cognitive engagement. Our paper enriches the literature on the effectiveness of visual content and advances the understanding of customer engagement on social media platforms. These results also shed light on implementing social marketing strategies with images.

The emergence of short-video platforms offers individuals an opportunity to build personal branding. This study selected two personal brandings on Bilibili.com, Li Ziqi and HuaNong Brothers, to explore the differences in the effect of personal branding stereotypes on user engagement on short-video platforms. We first identified the perception of users based on the Stereotype Content Model, then adopted regression models to construct the relationship between personal branding stereotypes and user engagement. The results show that perceived warmth exerts a more significant influence on user emotional engagement, while perceived competence impacts more on user cognitive and behavioral engagement. Moreover, we find the live comments’ sentiment moderates these effects. This research provided references for individuals and managers to benefit from personal brandings.

This paper combines sentiment analysis with latent Dirichlet allocation model to study how review valence and content categories (i.e., the specific way in which a review describing positive or negative sentiment) affect its value. We find five categories of customer complaints toward hotels, namely, facility complaints, environment complaints, food complaints, service complaints and money complaints. Econometric analyses show that reviews with the same valance while describing distinct experiences have different impacts on reader’s evaluations of review value. For example, service complaints are perceived as more helpful compared with facility complaints or money complaints. Furthermore, we investigate how hotel grades moderate the impact of review content characteristics on its perceived value. Results show that service complaints posted on high-end hotels’ pages receive significantly more helpful votes than those posted on low-end hotels’ pages. These nuanced yet important differences can only be revealed by mining meaning from text data, going beyond valence.

Nowadays, signed network has become an important research topic because it can reflect more complex relationships in reality than traditional network, especially in social networks. However, most signed network methods that achieve excellent performance through structure information learning always neglect neutral links, which have unique information in social networks. At the same time, previous approach for neutral links cannot utilize the graph structure information, which has been proved to be useful in node embedding field. Thus, in this paper, we proposed the Signed Graph Convolutional Network with Neutral Links (NL-SGCN) to address the structure information learning problem of neutral links in signed network, which shed new insight on signed network embedding. In NL-SGCN, we learn two representations for each node in each layer from both inner character and outward attitude aspects and propagate their information by balance theory. Among these three types of links, information of neutral links will be limited propagated by the learned coefficient matrix. To verify the performance of the proposed model, we choose several classical datasets in this field to perform empirical experiment. The experimental result shows that NL-SGCN significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baseline methods for link prediction in signed network with neutral links, which supports the efficacy of structure information learning in neutral links.

Peer-to-peer sharing accommodation commerce has witnessed unprecedented rapid development in recent years, which relies much on the contribution of service providers who largely control the servicescapes by providing both housing assets and relevant services. Differentiating from customers’ perspective in most previous studies, we focus on the behaviour intentions and explore the influence mechanism from the perspective of service providers. Based on the socio-technical systems theory, the results show that the technical enabler (perceived usefulness) and social enablers (perceived control, perceived familiarity, and self-investment) positively affect service providers’ attitude towards platform use and further influence their behaviour intentions (namely, online interacting intention and willingness to charge a lower price). Besides, the existence of offline interaction between service providers and customers counter-intuitively weakens the positive effect of service providers’ attitude toward platform use on their behavioural intentions. The research is of particular interest to the industry platform managers by showing why they need to concern about providers’ performance and how they can boost providers’ better usage.

This study investigates how cultural traits play a role regarding the effect of attribute-level experiences on tourist satisfaction. Adopting Deep Learning algorithm, we proposed Attribute-Level Sentiment Analysis Model (ASAM) to extract tourists’ attribute-level experiences from online reviews. Then, based on nearly 50000 online reviews collect from TripAdvisor, we empirically find that positive attribute-level experiences exert the greater influence on individualism American tourists’ satisfaction, while negative attribute-level experiences affect collectivism Chinese tourists’ satisfaction. In addition, we find that attribute type moderates the effect of perceived attribute experiences on overall satisfaction. Specifically, American tourists are more influenced by positive experiences with vertical attributes, while Chinese tourists are more affected by negative experiences with horizontal attributes. This research contributes to hospitality literature by enhancing the understanding of the cross-cultural factors in influencing tourist satisfaction. These findings also shed light on practices regarding improving tourist satisfaction.

Due to its outstanding advantages of openness, unrestraint and low cost, MOOCs have been growing rapidly in recent years. However, this new self-directed online learning model faces the challenge of the low course completion rate. Based on self-determination theory, this paper combines learners’ intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and thus constructs a comprehensive theoretical framework to explore the learner engagement mechanism in MOOCs learning. Empirical results reveal that learners’ intrinsic motivation (interest) and extrinsic motivation (perceived knowledge value) is critical to learner engagement, and thus improve learner satisfaction. However, the self-development motivation of extrinsic motivation has no significant effect on learner engagement behavior. The findings enrich and expand the relevant researches on learner engagement and e-learning, and provide guidance for practitioners.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors influencing content generation and community initiative in PESCs. Taking advantage of an emerging PESC – Xiaohongshu APP, the study identifies three antecedent resources, including customer-owned knowledge, harmonious passion to shopping and perceived information usefulness, that affect content generating and further community initiative. Design/methodology/approach Based on the service-dominant (S-D) logic model and resource integration related work, the authors proposed a conceptual framework empirically tested using data of a survey and the real content-generating behavior from 347 respondents. Findings This paper identifies three resource antecedents of content generating behavior with significant influence. Furthermore, there is a moderating effect of perceived information usefulness among these three resources, which echoes the concept of resource integration. Content generating has a significant and positive influence on community initiative. Originality/value First, the paper identified customer and platform resources promoting the prosperity of PESCs, enhancing the research on antecedents of community prosperity. Second, the paper empirically quantifies the process and outcome of resource integration conceptual model. Third, it enriches the understanding of C2C interaction by investigating the value creation process on PESCs. Moreover, findings in the study provide insights for community managers to improve the operation of PESCs.