Search Results (216)

Shopping malls have become major retail and lifestyle destinations that influence travel demand, mode choice, traffic congestion, private vehicle dependence, and transport-related environmental impacts. However, research connecting shopping mall visitation with sustainable urban mobility remains fragmented across transport, urban planning, retail, consumer behaviour, and environmental sustainability. This study uses bibliometric analysis to investigate publication patterns, intellectual structures, international collaboration, thematic clusters, and emerging trends in this interdisciplinary field. A total of 567 English-language articles and reviews published between 1 January 2000 and 7 May 2026 were retrieved from Scopus and analysed using descriptive indicators and VOSviewer-based document co-citation, country-level co-authorship, and keyword co-occurrence analyses. The findings indicate that publication activity has grown considerably since 2017, with China emerging as the most productive contributor and as a central hub for international research collaboration. Document co-citation analysis revealed six intellectual clusters related to parking and traffic congestion, online and in-store shopping behaviour, the built environment and land use, consumer value and retail experience, retail attractiveness and sustainable community planning, and retail revitalisation and urban regeneration. The keyword analysis revealed five main themes: urban transport, carbon emission, travel behaviour, shopping mall, and shopping activity. More recently, carbon emissions, sustainable development, online shopping, energy efficiency, and data-driven solutions have attracted increasing research attention. This study synthesises the fragmented knowledge base and suggests future research directions for low-carbon shopping mobility and sustainable access to retail destinations. Full article

Background: Counterfeit governance in e-commerce platforms is a real-world problem characterized by strategic interdependence, information asymmetry and dynamic feedback among platforms, merchants and consumers. Linear or single-actor regulatory approaches are often insufficient to address such complexity, as platform regulation, merchant behaviour, consumer trust and online reputation mechanisms jointly shape the evolution of market trust. Methods: Guided by systems thinking, this study conceptualizes counterfeit governance as a socio-technical system and develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving e-commerce platforms, merchants and consumers. The model delineates the system boundary around transaction-stage platform governance and incorporates key variables, including regulatory costs, fraudulent gains, honest transaction costs, subsidies, penalties, consumer transaction costs, online word-of-mouth influence and reputation losses. System dynamics simulation using Vensim PLE 10.5.2 is then employed to examine evolutionary trajectories, local stability, parameter sensitivity and threshold regions. Results: The results show that weak or static regulation may allow fraudulent strategies to persist or fluctuate, whereas stronger penalties and subsidies for honest transactions can reshape the payoff structure and promote merchant integrity. Transaction-related consumer incentives and enhanced online word-of-mouth mechanisms support consumer trust and stabilize the system toward trustworthy transactions. Conclusions: This study operationalizes systems thinking through system dynamics, while evolutionary game theory provides behavioural micro-foundations for stakeholder strategy adjustment in digital platform governance. Full article

Online shopping is expanding rapidly in emerging European markets, yet many consumers still combine digital channels with offline verification. This study asks whether the resulting heterogeneity among young consumers is genuinely complex or reducible to a simpler structure. Drawing on technology-acceptance and perceived-risk perspectives, it analyses survey data from 457 Romanian university students, of whom 269 were routed to eight attitudinal items on online smartphone purchasing. The questionnaire was distributed to students at two Romanian universities through institutional email and faculty social media accounts, yielding a non-probability convenience sample; no probability-based selection procedure was applied. After examining the dimensionality and reliability of the items through exploratory factor analysis, K-means clustering was used to segment respondents, and the solution was checked against hierarchical clustering. Two segments emerged: cautious, lower-online-orientation consumers, who report lower perceived convenience, speed, price advantage, and overall use of online purchasing, and online-oriented adopters, who view digital channels as efficient and convenient. Rather than many fine-grained segments, the data point to a dominant behavioural axis, namely overall orientation towards online purchasing. The findings provide evidence consistent with a parsimonious two-segment account of consumer heterogeneity in a rapidly developing digital market, and they suggest differentiated omnichannel strategies: confidence-building and risk-reduction measures for cautious consumers and experience optimisation for digital adopters. Full article

Cultured meat is proposed as a sustainable protein alternative, yet consumer acceptance remains one of the principal barriers to its commercialisation, and the evidence base remains overwhelmingly Western. India—the world’s most populous nation, characterised by dietary pluralism and the principle of ahimsa—remains understudied. Using a cross-sectional online survey, this study applied an extended Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify psychological predictors of the intention to try cultured meat among English-speaking Indian consumers (N = 255), employing latent-variable structural equation modelling with a robustness check for common-method variance. Perceived behavioural control was the strongest predictor of intention (β = 0.609, p < 0.001), followed by attitude (β = 0.295) and subjective norms (β = 0.263, sensitive to method variance); however, dominance decomposition attributed the largest share of explained variance to subjective norms. Ethical concern for animal welfare was the strongest predictor of attitude (β = 0.487), while disgust was a significant negative predictor (β = −0.272); perceived unnaturalness, health concern, and dietary-group differences were non-significant. The model explained 69.9% of the variance in intention. Acceptance reflected perceived feasibility and ethical concern for animal welfare rather than perceived unnaturalness, diverging from Western evidence and carrying implications for marketing and certification strategies. Full article

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is diffusing among consumers at exceptional speed, yet little is known about how its adoption relates to households’ prior engagement with digital financial services, or about the barriers associated with non-adoption. Methods: Using individual microdata from the 2025 Spanish Survey on ICT Equipment and Use in Households (INE; 14,642 internet users aged 16 and older), we estimate survey-weighted logistic regressions of GenAI adoption on financial digital engagement, digital skills and sociodemographics, with autonomous community fixed effects and cluster-robust standard errors, complemented by average marginal effects, alternative variance estimators, and an analysis of all stated reasons for non-use. Results: GenAI adoption is 37.3% among internet users. Online banking users have 73% higher adjusted odds of adopting GenAI (OR = 1.73; 95% CI 1.53–1.97), and adoption rises monotonically from 18% to 79% across a 0–4 financial digital engagement index, although this gradient is driven mainly by the online banking (extensive) margin. A steep age gradient is present, but the financial digital advantage does not significantly widen with age. Among non-adopters, the most frequently stated reason for non-use is a lack of perceived need (67%); privacy or security concerns are also prominent (43%) and are cited disproportionately by online banking users, women, and older individuals. Conclusions: Prior financial digital engagement is a strong correlate, rather than a demonstrated cause, of consumer GenAI adoption, consistent with experience and facilitating condition constructs in UTAUT2. Among capable non-adopters, for whom access and skills are not the obstacle, privacy- and security-related concerns, rather than a broader deficit of trust in AI, emerge as the most salient barriers to adoption, underscoring these concerns as priorities for consumer-facing AI in financial services. Full article

Shopping mobility accounts for a significant share of total travel, while the growth of e-commerce is reshaping consumer purchasing behaviour and retail dynamics. Comprehending how territorial and sociodemographic factors shape the choice between physical and digital retail channels is therefore a key issue for transport planning and sustainable urban mobility. In this context, it is important to understand how accessibility to different classes of retailers is configured and how it can impact purchasing choices. Through a discrete choice analysis, this study examines the sociodemographic and territorial determinants of purchasing behaviour, focusing on the clothing market. Four purchase alternatives are considered: medium-sized and small urban retail stores, shopping malls, online purchasing, and no purchase. This multi-alternative framework enables the direct estimation of substitution patterns not only between physical and digital retail, but also between distinct forms of physical retail. Data were collected through a survey conducted in Southern Italy, providing empirical evidence from a territorial setting that is structurally underrepresented in the existing literature. A multinomial logit model and a two-level hierarchical logit model incorporating pedestrian accessibility—measured as walking time from residence to the nearest clothing store—alongside sociodemographic and territorial attributes were calibrated to analyse alternative choice behaviour. The calibrated models show interesting results, highlighting the role of pedestrian accessibility in the choice of clothing stores in city centres. Age, income, and territorial variables further differentiate channel preferences across population segments. The findings offer relevant implications for policymakers, governance managers, urban planners, and researchers concerned with retail location, sustainable accessibility, and consumer behaviour. These insights are highly valuable for developing planning that addresses the United Nations 2030 Agenda, particularly Sustainable Development Goal 11. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being deployed in various sectors of e-commerce. Consequently, it becomes necessary to identify the impact of algorithmic design parameters on buyer behaviour. This study examines the impact of algorithmic anthropomorphism (ANT), algorithmic transparency (TRAN) and perceived algorithmic fairness (FAIR) on consumer purchase intentions (PI) in the Turkish e-commerce market. In addition, this study examines technology acceptance—operationalised through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)—as a boundary condition, with particular attention to the differential moderating roles of perceived ease of use (PEOU) and perceived usefulness (PU). A structured questionnaire was distributed among 384 online consumers in Türkiye via Qualtrics. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) established the psychometric adequacy of the measurement model (all AVE > 0.50, all CR > 0.87; HTMT < 0.85 across theoretically distinct constructs). The proposed model was tested using the PROCESS macro for sequential mediation and moderation analyses, with bootstrap confidence intervals based on 5000 resamples. The results reveal that: (1) algorithmic anthropomorphism positively affects both algorithmic transparency and perceived algorithmic fairness; (2) algorithmic transparency has a significant positive effect on both perceived fairness and purchase intention; (3) perceived algorithmic fairness mediates the relationships between algorithmic anthropomorphism and purchase intention, as well as between algorithmic transparency and purchase intention; and (4) although the composite technology acceptance level (TAL) measure does not significantly moderate the anthropomorphism–purchase intention path (p = 0.075), disaggregating TAL into its sub-dimensions reveals that PEOU significantly moderates this relationship (p < 0.001), whereas PU does not (p = 0.199). The composite-TAL result is therefore not statistically supported, but the dimension-specific PEOU finding is robust. These findings offer theoretical contributions to AI-driven consumer behaviour research and practical implications for the design of algorithmic e-commerce systems in emerging digital markets. Full article

Background: Food waste at the consumption stage creates inefficiencies in food supply chains, with restaurants acting as downstream nodes where consumer behaviour affects operations. This study examines the behavioural drivers of plate waste in restaurants in Greece, within a Mediterranean context, and considers their implications for sustainable logistics. Methods: A cross-sectional online survey was conducted with 228 restaurant consumers in Greece. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Spearman’s rank-order correlation, and one-way ANOVA to examine associations between behavioural factors, restaurant type, socio-demographic characteristics, and self-reported food waste frequency. Results: Environmental awareness, intention to reduce food waste, and likelihood of taking leftovers home were negatively associated with self-reported food waste frequency. Perceiving food waste as a serious societal problem was not significantly associated with waste behaviour. Restaurant type had no significant effect, while socio-demographic effects were limited. Conclusions: Consumer-level behavioural factors explain restaurant food waste more consistently than structural restaurant characteristics. Behaviourally informed interventions, including portion flexibility and facilitated leftover retention, may improve both food waste reduction and restaurant efficiency. Full article

Buying local food can support local economies, but the factors that drive these purchases in specific retail settings, such as local shops, are still not well understood. Research that considers sustainability alongside factors such as trust and perceived retail access remains limited. This study examines how dimensions of sustainability, trust, and perceived retail access influence purchase intention, using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Data were collected via an online survey in Međimurje County, Croatia (n = 303), and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), which explained 55% of the variance in purchase intention. The results show that, in addition to attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control, only the environmental dimension of sustainability significantly influences purchase intention. These findings suggest that consumer decision-making in local shops is more strongly shaped by internal evaluations and perceived environmental benefits than by trust or access. The study provides channel-specific evidence from an intermediated short food supply chain (SFSC) format and shows that the relevance of extended TPB predictors varies across retail contexts. Full article

Alcohol use has been linked to sexual risk-taking behaviour, particularly among young people in Australia, who are also substantially represented in sexually transmissible infection (STI). While research on alcohol use and sexual risk-taking among university students in Australia exists, no studies outside recent Tertiary Students Sexual and Reproductive Health Survey (TSSHS) publications have distinguished between Australian-born and overseas-born domestic students, despite evidence that migrant populations may show different alcohol use and sexual behaviour patterns. Using data from the TSSHS and a cross-sectional anonymous online survey of university-enrolled students, this study is the first to compare sexually active Australian-born domestic, overseas-born domestic, and international students on alcohol use and sexual risk-taking. Findings align with past research, with Australian-born domestic students being more likely to consume alcohol at high-risk levels than international and overseas-born domestic students. Differences in sexual risk-taking behaviours between the three enrolment groups were fully mediated by harmful alcohol use, indicating an indirect effect between group membership and sexual risk-taking. Age moderated this mediation, with the association between harmful drinking and sexual risk-taking strongest among students aged 20–24, compared with younger and older groups. Full article

Background/Objectives: Sustainable food habits are essential for reducing the environmental impacts of a food system. We investigated food sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and food waste-related behaviours among Saudi adults and assessed their associations with socio-demographic characteristics and dietary choices, which are subjects that remain under-researched. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 855 Saudi adults (≥18 years) using convenience sampling. Data were collected using a validated online questionnaire assessing sustainability knowledge, attitudes, food waste behaviours, dietary choices, and socio-demographic characteristics. Descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, and linear regression analyses were performed using SPSS version 29. Results: Overall, 32% of the study population demonstrated adequate sustainability knowledge, 61% expressed positive attitudes towards food sustainability, and 45% demonstrated favourable food waste management. Women were more knowledgeable than men. Participants who possessed a better understanding of food sustainability consumed more vegetables, fruits, and bread and less processed meat. Those with a positive attitude towards food sustainability exhibited higher consumption of red meat, white meat, eggs, milk, yogurt, cheese, vegetables, fruits, bread, and sweet or savoury snacks. Meanwhile, individuals with better food waste behaviours demonstrated significantly lower consumption of legumes, fish, pasta, red meat, white meat, processed meat, eggs, milk, yogurt, cheese, fruits, bread, and sweet or savoury snacks. Conclusions: Saudi adults possess limited knowledge of sustainability and suboptimal food waste behaviours despite having relatively positive attitudes. These findings highlight opportunities for intervention. Public education, targeted campaigns, and media communication could enhance sustainability awareness and promote healthier, environmentally sustainable dietary patterns. Full article

This study integrates the SOR framework with signalling theory, centring on information disclosure transparency as the core construct, to systematically examine its direct and indirect effects on consumers’ purchase hesitation. It specifically investigates the mediating roles of seller uncertainty and product uncertainty, whilst also testing the moderating effects of product price, type, and attributes. The research employs PLS-SEM in conjunction with the PROCESS Macro for empirical validation, drawing on 814 valid responses collected from online consumers in Taiwan. The principal findings indicate the following: (1) information disclosure transparency exerts a significant negative direct effect on purchase hesitation (B = −0.582, p < 0.001); (2) both seller uncertainty (indirect effect = −0.061) and product uncertainty (indirect effect = −0.060) exhibit partial mediation; (3) the model demonstrates strong predictive relevance for purchase hesitation (Q² = 0.486), underscoring its robust explanatory power in consumer decision-making processes; and (4) product price, type, and attributes significantly moderate the relationships between information disclosure transparency and the two uncertainty constructs. By extending signalling theory—originally developed in traditional markets—to the digital consumption context, this study provides empirical support for the signalling efficacy of information disclosure. It thereby offers an alternative theoretical lens for analysing consumer behaviour in online environments. Full article

Public authorities have increasingly focused on digital financial inclusion (DFI) owing to its potential to enhance overall financial inclusion (FI) and, ultimately, to mitigate households’ financial vulnerability (FV). Although the existing literature generally reports a negative relationship between DFI and FV, most studies focus on economically less developed countries and apply heterogeneous measurement approaches. This study adopts a quantitative methodology to assess DFI as a potential determinant of FV in a developed economy—Spain—using both objective and subjective indicators of FV. DFI is proxied by the diversity of payment and transfer methods conducted via Internet and mobile devices. Empirical findings confirm a negative association between DFI and FV, indicating that higher levels of digital engagement are associated with lower FV. However, results also reveal a potential adverse effect on savings behaviour, possibly linked to the reduced “pain of paying” commonly associated with online transactions. These insights suggest that policies promoting DFI should be complemented by initiatives to enhance financial literacy, strengthen consumer protection laws, and reintroduce the “feel of cashback” within online payment platforms. By providing evidence from a developed country, this paper contributes to the limited literature by also examining subjective measures of FV variables and offline FI. Full article

The present study is dedicated to exploring key factors impacting US pet owners’ preferences for brand, price, country of origin, and health and nutrition claims as important extrinsic and credence attributes. Pet engagement and subjective and objective knowledge, as well as varying forms of pet humanisation behaviour, were thought to be suitable factors. The study is of an explorative and quantitative nature, rooted in an online consumer survey, descriptive statistics, and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). To strengthen the PLS-SEM model, relative preference shares derived from a best–worst analysis were integrated into the model. The results with the strongest effect sizes indicate that US pet owners’ objective knowledge is positively associated with pet non-humanisation behaviour, those who actively engage with their pet are positively associated with loving humanisation behaviour, and that health and nutritional claims on pet food are less important for those reporting non-humanisation behaviours. The analysis between the varying types of pet humanisation behaviours and the best–worst-derived relative preferences for extrinsic and credence attributes provides a diverse picture. Together, the results suggest that pet engagement and both subjective and objective knowledge are associated with pet humanisation behaviour, which are differentially linked to the importance of pet food product attributes. Best practice recommendations for marketers in the pet food industry are provided. Full article

Background/Objectives: To promote sustainable and healthy diets, increased consumption of pulses (the edible grains of legumes) is recommended. Adolescence is a period in which perceptions and behaviours develop that can impact lifelong dietary behaviours. Therefore, this study aimed to understand how Australian adolescents perceive healthy, sustainable diets and perceive and consume pulses. Methods: Students (11–17 years old, median = 15 years, n = 33) in Brisbane, Australia, participated in school-based face-to-face focus groups and an online survey. Results: Students’ perceptions of healthy and sustainable dietary behaviours largely focused on the health aspects of food and consideration of food waste. The main factors that adolescents identified as influencing the health and sustainability of their diet were a lack of perceived responsibility for the impact of their meal choices and lack of knowledge of what constitutes a healthy and sustainable diet. Most students were unfamiliar with the term ‘pulses’ and lacked a desire to consume pulses more often. Consumption of pulses was below recommendations in national and international dietary guidelines. The main factors that adolescents identified as influencing pulse consumption related to students’ lack of capability to prepare pulses and the limited opportunities to access pulse-based foods. Conclusions: Perceptions of sustainable diets and pulses were very limited, and a lack of knowledge, skills, and limited availability were identified as barriers to their consumption. Education and cooking classes, in conjunction with increased availability of tasty pulse foods, are recommended to increase students’ pulse consumption as part of a healthy and sustainable diet. Full article