Search Results (6,092)

With the increasing prominence of sustainable consumption and the rising influence of Generation Z in the fashion market, secondhand fashion e-commerce platforms have become essential carriers of green fashion. Although AI-assisted recommendation mechanisms are widely embedded in these platforms, their psychological and behavioral effects on users’ continuous use and social engagement remain insufficiently examined. To address this gap, this study incorporates the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) framework to investigate the psychological reaction pathways and behavioral intentions of Generation Z users within Human-AI Collaboration-enabled green e-commerce environments. Three AI-driven service stimuli—Human-AI Collaborative Recommendation Perception, AI Interaction Transparency, and Perceived Personalization—were conceptualized as stimulus variables; Psychological Immersion, Emotional Triggering, Cognitive Engagement, and Platform Trust were modeled as organism variables; and Continuous Use Intention and Social Sharing Intention served as behavioral response variables. Based on 498 valid samples analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), the results demonstrate strong empirical support for all proposed hypotheses. Specifically, AI-driven stimuli significantly and positively influence psychological responses, which subsequently strengthen users’ continuous usage and social sharing intentions. This research provides theoretical insights for developing Human-AI Collaboration-enabled service systems that balance efficiency and emotional resonance on green e-commerce platforms, and offers practical implications for promoting sustainable fashion values among younger consumers. Full article

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is one of the fastest-growing waste streams globally. Disposable e-cigarettes are among the products that have gained popularity in recent years. Their complex construction and embedded lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) present environmental, safety, and resource recovery challenges. Despite growing research interest, integrated analyses linking material composition with user disposal behavior remain limited. This study is the first to incorporate device-level mass balance, material contamination assessment, battery residual charge measurements, and user behavior to evaluate the waste management challenges of disposable e-cigarettes. A mass balance of twelve types of devices on the Polish market was performed. Plastics dominated in five devices, while non-ferrous metals prevailed in the others, depending on casing design. Materials contaminated with e-liquid residues accounted for 4.4–10.7% of device mass. Battery voltage measurements revealed that 25.6% of recovered LIBs retained a residual charge (greater than 2.5 V), posing a direct fire hazard during waste handling and treatment. Moreover, it was estimated that 7 to 12 tons of lithium are introduced annually into the Polish market via disposable e-cigarettes, highlighting substantial resource potential. Survey results showed that 46% of users disposed of devices in mixed municipal waste, revealing a knowledge–practice gap largely independent of gender or education. Integrating technical and social findings demonstrates that improper handling is a systemic issue. The findings support the relevance of eco-design requirements, such as modular casings for battery removal, alongside the enforcement of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes. Current product fees (0.01–0.03 EUR/unit) remain insufficient to establish an effective collection infrastructure, highlighting a key systemic barrier. Full article

In recent years, the application of augmented reality digital technology in brands has transformed the way consumers interact with brands. This study focuses on the impact of augmented reality (AR) technology on consumption behavior and brand communication related to intangible cultural heritage products, integrating the TAM and UTAUT2 theories to construct a research model. This study employed a time–location sampling method, utilizing SPSS and AMOS software for data analysis based on valid questionnaires completed by 305 AR-experiencing consumers in Changsha City, Hunan Province. Results indicate that the presence and novelty of AR technology significantly and positively influence consumers’ attitudes toward using AR technology, which in turn affects their purchase intent, social media sharing behavior, and brand attitudes. The study confirms that emotional factors and consumer perceptions play a guiding and decisive role in the new consumption reality enabled by AR technology. These research findings have practical significance and value for ICH brand building and AR marketing, demonstrating that AR is an effective means to enhance the visibility and influence of the ICH brand. They inject new vitality into promoting more sustainable ICH protection and popularization, as well as the development of the digital creative industry. Full article

As the largest exporter in the global solid tire market, Sri Lanka’s natural rubber supply chain plays a critical role in global production, yet its social dimension remains largely unaddressed. Our study aims to assess the social performance of a Sri Lankan natural rubber supply chain in solid tire manufacturing using social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) in a cradle-to-gate approach. Study adapts “More Good and Less Bad” method which captures both positive and negative social impacts, addressing traditional S-LCAs’ focus on negative impacts solely. It applies to updated methodological sheets to distinguish “good” and “bad” social conditions across subcategories based on baseline compliance. Social impacts were quantified using a Social Performance Index (SPI), calculated by multiplying social performance levels by working hours at the organizational level, comprising SPI_good for good social impacts and SPI_bad for bad social impacts. Data was collected through stakeholder interviews, with working hours calculated using a “working hour model”. Results showed mixed social performance across 39 subcategories, identifying six social hotspots: promoting social responsibility (27.67% less bad, 72.32% more good), wealth distribution (26.87% less bad, 73.13% more good), commitment to sustainability issues (100% less bad), social benefits (100% less bad), safe and healthy living conditions (100% less bad), and hours of work (88.74% less bad, 11.26% more good). Full article

This study examines the tension between “substance” and “form” in standardized sustainability reporting within an emerging market context. Using 21,964 firm-year observations from Chinese A-share listed companies (2018–2023), we investigate whether the adoption of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework enhances substantive Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and creates firm value. While baseline regressions suggest a positive link between GRI and ESG performance, rigorously applying Propensity Score Matching (PSM) reveals a critical nuance: the effect of mere framework adoption attenuates after controlling for selection bias, whereas independent assurance remains a robust driver of substantive governance quality. Furthermore, mediation analysis using bootstrap resampling documents a distinct “Labeling Effect”: GRI adoption directly enhances market valuation (Tobin’s Q), yet the indirect path via ESG scores is statistically insignificant. This indicates that investors utilize GRI as a heuristic signal of legitimacy rather than pricing granular performance metrics. We also identify a “Valuation Latency”, where substantive ESG improvements significantly boost operational profitability (ROA) but are not yet fully incorporated into stock prices. Heterogeneity analysis shows these effects are stronger for non-state-owned enterprises (Non-SOEs), supporting the view that private firms leverage standardized reporting and verification to mitigate legitimacy deficits. These findings provide empirical evidence for regulators and investors to distinguish between the “label” of adoption and the “substance” of verification. Full article

This study investigates the impact of city-level capital factor market integration on corporate ESG performance, using a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2010 to 2024. We find that greater capital factor market integration significantly improves firms’ overall ESG performance. Mechanism analysis reveals that capital factor market integration operates through three channels: market competition, technological advancement, and attention reconstruction, enhancing both firms’ capabilities and incentives to engage in ESG activities. The positive effect is stronger for state-owned enterprises, firms in less polluting industries, and those in regions with high government environmental attention. Further analysis indicates that capital factor market integration suppresses corporate greenwashing behavior and reduces discrepancies across ESG rating agencies. Moreover, capital factor market integration exhibits asymmetric effects across ESG sub-dimensions, significantly improving environmental and governance performance while weakening social responsibility performance. This reflects firms’ preference, under competitive pressure, for environmental and governance domains characterized by shorter payback periods and more readily quantifiable outcomes, as well as their cautious stance toward the social responsibility domain where effects take considerably longer to materialize. This study contributes to understanding the micro-level mechanisms through which capital factor market integration influences corporate sustainable development, providing empirical evidence for China’s construction of a unified national market and the advancement of sustainable development strategies. Full article

Labor market forecasting relies heavily on economic time-series data, often overlooking the “health–wealth” gradient that links population health to workforce participation. This study develops a machine learning framework integrating non-traditional health and social metrics to predict state-level employment density. Methods: We constructed a multi-source longitudinal dataset (2014–2024) by aggregating county-level Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data with County Health Rankings to the state level. Using a time-aware split to evaluate performance across the COVID-19 structural break, we compared LASSO, Random Forest, and regularized XGBoost models, employing SHAP values for interpretability. Results: The tuned, regularized XGBoost model achieved strong out-of-sample performance (Test $R^2$ = 0.800). A leakage-safe stacked Ridge ensemble yielded comparable performance (Test $R^2$ = 0.827), while preserving the interpretability of the underlying tree model used for SHAP analysis. Full article

This study explores the relationship between board gender diversity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in explaining the financial performance of firms listed on the Lima Stock Exchange during 2022–2023, using 242 firm year observations for 121 firms. The research addresses a broader question on how gender representation in corporate governance and engagement in social and environmental policies influence firms’ profitability and liquidity in an emerging market context. Using a multiple linear regression model, financial performance was measured through return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), asset turnover (ATO), and the current liquidity ratio (LIQ). The results indicate that CSR is positively associated with profitability indicators (ROA, ROE, ATO), while board gender diversity shows a negative short term relationship with these variables. Both CSR and board gender diversity are negatively associated with liquidity, reflecting short term financial commitments arising from sustainability and inclusion initiatives. These findings suggest that the financial implications of diversity and CSR initiatives may vary across temporal horizons and institutional contexts. The study contributes empirical evidence from a Latin American emerging market and underscores the importance of evaluating corporate governance and sustainability practices by considering the short term financial trade-offs of diversity and CSR initiatives and their potential longer term implications. Full article

High-quality development of agricultural enterprises is essential for China’s rural revitalization, yet the institutional conditions that support it remain poorly understood. Drawing on institutional logics and configuration theory, this study adopts a holistic systems perspective to examine how government, market, and social institutions interact to shape enterprise performance. Using provincial data (2013–2023) matched with firm-level data for 119 listed agricultural enterprises, we estimate total factor productivity as the core outcome and apply dynamic fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (dynamic fsQCA) to identify equifinal institutional pathways. The results reveal that high-quality development is an emergent property of complex institutional systems; instead, high-quality development emerges from several distinct configurations combining policy support, marketization, financial development, Agricultural Infrastructure Index, market stability, and urban–rural integration. Two contrasting configurations are associated with non-high-quality development, characterized by financial scarcity and infrastructure deficits or by fragmented policy support under weak regulation. Dynamic analysis further reveals clear temporal and spatial heterogeneity: some market–finance driven paths lose robustness over time, while policy–urbanization and regulation–infrastructure based configurations become increasingly stable. These findings extend institutional configuration research to the agricultural sector, demonstrate the value of dynamic fsQCA for capturing temporal effects, and offer differentiated policy implications for optimizing institutional environments to foster the high-quality development of agricultural enterprises. Full article

This study examines the recent diversification of the Korean golf market into traditional field, popular virtual reality (VR), and park golf, which is rapidly expanding among older adults. Comparing participants’ psychological characteristics and behavioral intentions across golf types is essential for sustainably developing the golf industry. Therefore, differences were investigated in participation satisfaction (physical, mental, and social), switching intention, loyalty, and continuous participation intention among regular participants in all three golf types in urban Korea. Data were analyzed from 327 adults aged 20 years or older (Field: 98, VR: 132, Park: 97) in Korea using on/offline surveys, and a multivariate analysis of variance with post hoc tests was implemented to compare psychological and behavioral differences across the three golf types. The findings showed that, first, physical and mental satisfaction were significantly higher in the park golf group than in the rest of the groups. Second, switching intention was higher in the field golf group than in the VR golf group. Third, loyalty and continuous participation intention were highest in the park golf group. Each golf type thus offers unique experiential value, with park golf particularly effective in fulfilling participants’ physical and psychological needs. Conversely, field golf faces potential risks of participant attrition because of cost and time burdens. The findings provide useful implications for predicting demand and developing differentiated marketing and management strategies tailored to generational needs. Full article

We investigate how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risk can spread between peers and its impact on long-term firm performance. Using data across six geographically diverse countries over a fourteen-year period, we find a significant spillover of ESG risks among multinational firms, which fails to yield a meaningful impact on the performance of affected firms. These findings place a spotlight on a critical gap in ESG risk management and echo an urgent signal for policy intervention, aligning with the United Nations’ faltering Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. This work is a clarion call for immediate academic and practical action in a world teetering on the brink of unsustainable practices. Our findings suggest that market-based mechanisms alone may be insufficient to discipline ESG risk, highlighting a potential role for regulatory oversight and policy attention. Full article

Understanding how moral and emotional language operates in paid social advertising is essential for evaluating persuasion and its ethical contours. We provide a descriptive map of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) language in Meta ad copy (Facebook/Instagram) drawn from seven global beverage brands across eight English-speaking markets. Using the moralstrength toolkit, we implement a two-channel pipeline that combines an unsupervised semantic estimator (SIMON) with supervised classifiers, enforces a strict cross-channel consensus rule, and adds a non-overriding purity diagnostic to reduce attribute-based false positives. The corpus comprises 758 text units, of which only 25 ads (3.3%) exhibit strong consensus, indicating that much of the copy is either non-moral or linguistically ambiguous. Within this high-consensus subset, the distribution of moral cues varies systematically by brand and category, with loyalty, fairness, and purity emerging as the most prominent frames. A valence pass (VADER) indicates that moralized copy tends toward negative valence, yet it may still yield a constructive overall tone when advertisers follow a crisis–resolution structure in which high-intensity moral cues set the stakes while surrounding copy positions the brand as the solution. We caution that text-only models undercapture multimodal signaling and that platform policies and algorithmic recombination shape which moral cues appear in copy. Overall, the study demonstrates both the promise and the limits of current text-based MFT estimators for advertising: they support transparent, reproducible mapping of moral rhetoric, but future progress requires multimodal, domain-sensitive pipelines, policy-aware sampling, and (where available) impression/spend weighting to contextualize descriptive labels. Full article

In the rapidly evolving digital economy, the expansion of business-to-business e-commerce ecosystems has compelled traditional industries to integrate into digital supply chains to achieve sustainable development. Industrial e-commerce is no longer limited to online transactions but extends to the digital transformation of backend operations. Drawing upon the perspective of the digital business ecosystem, this study investigates how digital supply chain integration, manifested through digital transformation, impacts energy efficiency. By utilizing a panel fixed effects model and advanced text mining techniques on a dataset of 721 listed firms in the resource-intensive sectors of China spanning from 2011 to 2023, this research constructs a novel index to quantify corporate digital maturity based on semantic analysis. The empirical results demonstrate that digital transformation significantly enhances energy efficiency by facilitating optimized resource allocation and data-driven decision making required by modern digital markets. Mechanism analysis reveals that green innovation functions as a pivotal mediator that bridges the gap between digital investments and environmental performance. Furthermore, this relationship is found to be contingent upon corporate social responsibility strategies, ownership structures, and the scale of the firm. This study contributes to the electronic commerce literature by elucidating how traditional manufacturers can leverage digital technologies and green innovation to navigate the twin transition of digitalization and sustainability, offering theoretical implications for platform governance in industrial sectors. Full article

Globally, human capital is recognized as a structural determinant of economic growth, with evidence of a positive, bidirectional, and significant relationship between both variables. However, in Colombia, few studies have directly measured the influence of human capital on national economic growth. To date, there is no academic review that integrates and analyzes the available evidence on this link, even though such studies are fundamental for understanding the drivers of development, reducing structural inequalities, and guiding policies that promote productivity and social inclusion. This study conducted a literature review across major international and Colombian academic databases, with a specific focus on Colombia and a minimum 25-year observation window, to identify research gaps and establish conceptual foundations for future research. In total, 140 articles were reviewed. In general terms, the findings show that, although human capital is an essential driver of Colombia’s economic growth, its full impact is constrained by structural and regional inequalities, corruption, violence, labor informality, institutional fragmentation, and mismatches between education and labor market demands. These results underscore the need to expand empirical research to better measure its effects and to inform more inclusive and sustainable development policies. Full article

The electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has emerged as a communication tool that significantly influences consumers’ attitudes and purchasing behavior in the online market. Research indicates that the effect of eWOM sources, such as (strong ties, weak ties, and influencers) varies in terms of perceived value components (price, quality, emotional, and social value) and purchase intention, particularly with regard to gender. This study, which is based on the SOR framework; examines the role of eWOM as a stimulus affecting student responses and considers the mediating role of perceived value components and the moderate effect of gender. A sample of 901 students from Westbank universities was analyzed using Smart PLS software. The findings reveal that strong ties and influencer eWOM are positively associated with perceived value components and purchase intention, while weak tie eWOM does not directly correlate with purchase intention. Mediation analyses show that perceived quality and social value act as mediators of purchase intent towards eWOM sources, while emotional value specifically mediates strong relationships and influencers. Notably, price value exerts only a mediating effect on purchase intention when communicated through influencers, highlighting the unique role of the influencer in shaping price perceptions and its broad impact on all components of perceived value. Gender differences were observed in students’ responses to eWOM content; particularly in terms of price, quality, and emotional appeal but not in terms of social factors. The outcomes of this study underscore the significance of considering both the source of the message and the characteristics of the audience when formulating targeted marketing strategies. Full article