Through our research based on survival model, we identify two major factors that significantly influence our decision making on product elimination, as well as their impact mechanisms. These two factors are, namely, the changing rate of sales in the early stage and the average sales in pre-elimination stage. Specifically speaking, the higher these figures are, the less likely it is for products to be eliminated, which also means the longer these product may survive. The results of our research also demonstrate that brands with different market shares serving as a moderator in this model are impacted by different factors. Different from our stereotyped understanding, results of our research show that products with lower market share actually survive longer (than those with larger market share), which can be explained by substitution effect. Overall, findings of our research have laid a theoretical foundation for companies' decision making on product elimination.

Using critical incident technique (CIT) and grounded theory, this paper explores the fellow customers’ reaction to customer misbehavior. Through in-depth interview, 232 customer misbehavior incidents are collected, and then CIT is used to categorize fellow customers' reaction patterns. Based on this, this paper discovers the antecedents of different reaction patterns. The finding suggests five types of fellow customers’ reaction patterns: helping the jaycustomer, mimicking the misbehavior, looking on indifferently, stopping the misbehavior, and giving himself up to help others. Five reaction patterns are quite different in frequency, motive, performance, and influence on five involved agents. The features of jaycustomer, focal customer, other fellow customers, employee and firm, will determine the choice of focal customer, through the intermediary effect of two mediator variables, that is, expectation of interaction consequence, and judgment on interaction responsibility. From the perspective of fellow customers' interaction, this paper not only enriches the literatures on customer misbehavior, but also provides managerial implication for customer misbehavior management and employee training program.

Exploring the effects of mate attraction goal based on evolutionary psychology on individuals’ consumption is a new prospering research topic in consumer behavior. This article conducted four studies and revealed female’s (vs. male) different psychological mechanism of conspicuous consumption: Female who have strong (vs. weak) desire for a romantic mate showed stronger endorsement on the belief that conspicuous consumption can enhance their beauty and attractiveness, thereby reported higher willingness to pay (WTP) on conspicuous items (study 1 and 3). Inducing female’s mate attraction goal can increase their WTP on conspicuous items (study 2 and 3) and beauty items (study 3) but not inconspicuous product (e.g. underclothes) (study 3). Additionally, female who in committed relationship (vs. single) reported higher desire for product which was advertised can enhancing females’ beauty and attractiveness (study 4). Overall, these findings suggested that female will take conspicuous consumption as a way to enhance their beauty and attractiveness so as to acquiring (for single) or keeping (for female in committed relationship) a desired mate, but not a way to displaying status and wealth like man.

Product convergence to converge various functionalities into one device is common and popular nowadays. Previous research suggests that the degree of goal congruity between added functionality and base product influences convergent product evaluations in a positive direction; and product category plays a moderating role resulting from the change of hedonic value. In this research, we extend the impact of product category from a new viewpoint of information processing style. Considering different information processing styles between hedonic and utilitarian products, the moderating role of product category is varied by the presence of concrete information and consumer’s mental construal. Results demonstrate that (1) for convergent products with a utilitarian added functionality, the positive goal congruity effect is stronger when concrete product information is absent than present to consumers. While a hedonic added functionality is converged, the goal congruity effect is observed no matter concrete information is present or not. (2) There is a stronger goal congruity effect resulting from the fit of global and abstract processing between hedonic added functionality and high-level construal. The findings are beneficial from both theoretical and managerial points of view.

Based on consumer perceived value, this paper connects the prevalence of online word-of-mouth and the sellers’ price-adjusting behavior in e-commerce. We build a two-stage pricing model for an oligarch seller, based on the influence of online word-of-mouth dissemination. The informed customers possess more product information and the less-informed customers own less product information. The information disseminated through online word-of-mouth can change customer perceived value. The informed customers pursue to maximize total utility acquired from both purchasing product and disseminate online word-of-mouth. The oligarch seller adopts reasonable pricing strategies to maximize total profit of two stages. We find that if the informed customers have more positive information, (1)With information gap decreasing gradually, (a)when information dissemination is relatively inefficient, the seller’s optimal pricing strategy usually experiences the following three processes sequentially: giving up incentive pricing strategy and no information disseminated by the informed customers, implementing incentive pricing strategy and some information shared by the informed customers, and ceasing to incentive strategy but the largest amount of information shared by the informed customers. (b)When information dissemination is relatively efficient, the seller’s optimal pricing strategy just experiences the last two processes of above three processes sequentially. (2)Under the existence of the difference of information value for the two segment customers, only when the inefficiency of information dissemination is smaller, relative to high information value, this difference can affect the optimal decisions of the seller and the informed customers. And from the qualitative point of view, with information value for the receivers (the less-informed customers) increasing continually, the range of information gap resulting in that the seller’s optimal strategy is to exert incentive pricing will increase first and then decrease. These findings provide some usefully managerial insights for online sellers’ pricing strategy.

With multi-national corporations’ development, the brand scandal of a company could spill over to different countries. Do consumers from different culture have different responses to a brand scandal? Based on the self-construal theory, this paper investigates the cross-culture difference of brand negative spillover effect. A cross-culture experiment and a priming experiment have been adopted, the results show that consumers from eastern countries (interdependent self-construal consumers) have bigger negative spillover effect than consumers from western countries( independent self-construal consumers). This is because interdependent self-construal consumers are inclined to adopt holistic thinking when facing other brands’ scandals; while independent self-construal consumers are inclined to adopt analytic thinking.

The authors develop a research model to test the effects of three psychological factors( customer involvement, customer psychological empowerment and customer psychological ownership) on customer engagement, and the impact of customer engagement on customer loyalty. The results show that customer involvement and customer psychological ownership are positively related to customer engagement; however, customer psychological empowerment affects customer engagement indirectly. Customer engagement has direct and positive effect on customer loyalty.

Based on the Chinese business environment, the paper firstly conducts an empirical analysis using Taobao’s data. Results are the online product review follows a reversed "L"-type distribution, of which the mean is a biased estimator of the product’s true quality. These findings are different from the existed results that online product reviews follow a normal distribution. They are also distinct from the empirical results of foreign e-business data. In order to study the reasons for the biased online product reviews and the features of the reversed "L"-type distribution, the paper constructs a theoretical model to obtain the conditions for the mean of the online product reviews to be an unbiased estimator. And we further demonstrate that the “default good reviews” mechanism, “return evaluation” mechanism and the deviation of consumer’s initiative evaluation are the main reasons for the biased online product reviews.

Based on affection effect and framing effect of Behavioral Economics, we explored consumers’ trade-ins behavior and their different action mechanism. We conducted a 3×2×2 between-subjects experiment and verified that when rational and have preference consistency, consumers attached more importance to new products’ purchase price; due to affection effect, they thought highly of the old products’ selling price; because of the framing effect arising from limited cognition, enhanced information would influence consumers’ preference between old and new products; the main factor was consumers’ personality, namely consumer innovation, while the affection effect and framing effect had moderating effect.