In customer reviews, customers vary in the evaluations of the product. In recent years, many researchers have investigated the influence of variance on the sales. Most of them have studied the rating variance, but they got different conclusions. The variance of customers’ evaluation result from different evaluations of product attributes, which is named preference variance. The article uses text analysis to measure preference variance in customer reviews and empirically studies the relationship between preference variance and product sales. The article finds that preference variance has significantly positive effect on product sale, volume negatively moderates this effect and valence positively moderates this effect. The research explores the mechanism of online customer reviews, and can help managers to monitor and utilize online word-of-mouth.

The research focuses on the influence of social exclusion on consumers' beauty product spending. Social exclusion would threaten people's basic need of belongingness, while beauty product can help people improve their physical attractiveness and reestablish social connections. So we proposed that excluded consumers are more likely to adopt beauty spending as a coping strategy. Due to the greater importance of physical attractiveness to women, the proposed effect would be stronger in female participants. From four experiments we demonstrated that social exclusion would enhance women's beauty spending tendency. When being excluded, female participants would regard beauty spending as more meaningful, be willing to spend more on beauty products, and show greater willingness to pay for beauty products. The mediating role of focus level and the moderating role of the social function manipulation were also tested to reveal the underlying mechanism.

In channel relationship with dependence asymmetry, it remains unanswered whether contract governance could curb the opportunistic behavior of two parties in the relationship. In the context of contractual channel of agriculture products, this study investigates the effect of contract governance on the opportunistic behavior of two parties (farmer and buyer) in channel relationships, as well as the moderating role of two important environmental variables, market uncertainty and government support. Findings show that, despite of dependence asymmetry, explicit contract can directly curb opportunistic behavior of two parties in channel relationships. Moreover, the market uncertainty and government support have different moderating roles. Specifically, market uncertainty strengthens the effect of explicit contract on farmer （the more dependent one） opportunistic behavior, but it does not moderate the effect of explicit contract on buyer （the less dependent one）opportunistic behavior. Additionally, government support weakens the effect of explicit contract on farmer opportunistic behavior, but strengthens the effect of explicit contract on buyer opportunistic behavior. Finally, this paper includes a discussion of the research findings, corresponding managerial suggestions and the future research directions.

Corporate donation strategies have big influence on corporates’ reputation. We study the differences between two kinds of donation strategies, high-frequent-low-amount donation and large-amount-less-frequent donation. We also consider how does the consumers’ different regulatory focus affect consumers’ attitude and purchase intention of the company’s brand and products. Based on goal commitment theory, achievement attribution theory and regulatory focus theory , using one qualitative and one experiment study and spotlight analysis method, we find out the subjective perception of the two donation strategies are different; the interaction effect between consumers regulatory focus and donation strategies is significant. Promotion focused consumers prefer frequent but low amount donation strategy and have higher purchase intention of their products, while prevention focused consumers like large amount but less frequent donation strategy better.

Based on the valid survey data from 210 manufacturers in alliance with their distributors, this paper investigates empirically the impacts of two types of opportunism on relationship conflict between alliance partners, and analyzes emphatically the moderating effects of the manufacturer’s initial trust in the distributor. The research results show as follows: firstly, both of passive opportunism and active opportunism taken by the distributor affect relationship conflict positively, but the latter’s effect is greater; secondly, the manufacturer’s initial benevolence trust weakens the positive effect of the distributor’s passive opportunism on relationship conflict, while strengthens the positive effect of its active opportunism on relationship conflict; thirdly, the manufacturer’s initial competence trust weakens the positive effect of the distributor’s passive opportunism on relationship conflict, while strengthens the positive effect of its active opportunism on relationship conflict. This paper expands the relative theoretical research of initial trust and opportunism in channel alliance, and provides practical guidance for effective management of channel alliance relationship.

In recent years, the effect of other customers on service experience has received much more attention, but extant research are mainly focusing on the negative effect of other customers, and lack in research of the positive effect of other customers. Based on the research of individual group-pooling tourist, this paper introduced interpersonal attraction theory, and focused on the way and mechanism of how other customers promote the customer's service experience in shared service settings. The study found that three features of interpersonal attraction （similarity, appearance attractiveness, suitable behavior） have a significant positive influence on quality of C2C interaction and service experience. This paper also discussed some relevant implication to service experience management and customer portfolio management.

The brand-group crisis is a type of social phenomenon that very different from brand crisis, its nature and evolution processes haven’t been reasonable explained yet. Observing crises broken out among the brand-groups now and then, this study borrowed the theories of brand clusters from marketing as well as the theories of intergroup conflict and collective action from social psychology, define the concept of the brand-group crisis, and conduct a qualitative research with discourse analysis on a representative case from Tianya Froum to explain the mechanism of brand-group crisis. The authors construct a dual way model which mainly containing the path of ‘social comparison →fraternal relative deprivation’ and ‘group identification → negative intergroup emotions’, and the reciprocal effects among these two paths as well. The findings shows that, an individually service failure or product harm may provoke the dual way mechanisms, which will induce the relative deprivation and negative emotions to the group especially the disadvantaged one. Then the intergroup relationship may be destroyed by those conflicts like boycotts. The study makes some contributions to the researches on intergroup relationships and collective actions.

The current research investigates the influence of customer loyalty program’s soft and hard benefits on customer loyalty and customer relationship behavior by analyzing the collected data from aviation industry. It’s demonstrated that loyalty program’s soft and hard benefits have positive effects on both program loyalty and brand loyalty. More specifically, the soft benefits have more significant influence on brand loyalty than on program loyalty, whereas the hard benefits have more significant influence on program loyalty than on brand loyalty. Furthermore, brand loyalty positively influences share of wallet, while program loyalty positively influences repeat purchase. Besides, through brand loyalty, program loyalty can impact customer relationship behavior. A discussion of managerial implications is included in the end of the paper.

Consumers’ willingness to pay is an important part of the market research. Taking organic food for example, this paper analyzed and compared the main data acquisition methods of consumers’ willingness to pay, such as contingent valuation method, choice experiment, conjoint analysis and experimental auctions and the main data processing approaches such as discrete choice model and Tobit model. And then the paper investigated the main factors affecting the consumers’ willingness to pay and did a systematic summary. In the end, the future research emphasis was presented based on the evaluation and analysis of the existing relative research.