Pandemics often lead to food stigma, and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic provides some evidence to this belief. Mitigating food stigma during the pandemic is vital for consumption replenishment and economic recovery and helping the stigmatized people. We conduct an empirical study to examine consumer behaviors using Wuhan hot instant noodles (WHINs), a packaged version of the famous Chinese dish reganmian, as a case study. Although WHIN's name and origin signify Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, the noodles could be actually produced elsewhere, but since the COVID‐19 outbreak, WHIN has been avoided. On the basis of our results, we find that providing scientific information about the irrelevance between WHIN and the coronavirus is not effective in changing the minds of people with stigma. Moreover, stigma is more emotional than rational, especially among people with a lower self‐identified social class and poor psychological state. Therefore, psychological intervention programs may be warranted during pandemics to avoid potential stigmatization. The findings of this study could help to resolve the stigma affecting regional agriculture and the food economy. [EconLit citations: Q11, Q13].

Consumer food waste linked to restaurants and canteens has been a long-standing serious problem in China, which hungers for an effective solution. Although government and media have launched campaigns against food waste, limited information on consumer perceptions is provided in helping to guide campaign programs. The influence of perception associated with low food waste is lacking, along with targeting campaigns based on these perceptions. This research aims to fill this gap. The purpose of this paper is to identify consumption perceptions about food waste in the Chinese urban restaurant sector, so that they can be used in social marketing to promote food waste reduction behaviors. Employing Probit models using survey data collected, we found that food security and environmental perceptions are associated with low food waste. Campaigns directed toward reducing food waste should target raising awareness of food security alert and environmental concerns that are more generally appealing to altruistic spirits.

Purpose: The emergence of robots has had a huge impact on both the labor market and individual work, triggering job insecurity among individuals. To prepare for the coming of the future robot era, we should focus on job insecurity brought about by robots, which will help governments and enterprises to formulate reasonable policies to ensure that robotics will benefit mankind. As technology advances, robots are becoming more and more anthropomorphic. The impact of job insecurity on people’s choice of anthropomorphic robots, however, still needs to be further explored. This paper focuses on how job insecurity affects consumers’ choice of anthropomorphic robots. Design/methodology/approach: First, we use a best-worst scale measure to assess consumer preferences for anthropomorphic robots. Subsequently, we categorize anthropomorphic robots into appearance anthropomorphic robots and emotional anthropomorphic robots, analyzing the impact of job insecurity on consumers’ choice of appearance and emotional anthropomorphic robots and comparing their differences. Then, we assume that there are four types of robotic restaurants and analyze whether job insecurity will also affect the specific social places where consumers choose robots to participate. Findings: As the degree of anthropomorphism of robots increases, the participants' preferences show a trend similar to the Uncanny Valley curve. The job insecurities brought by robots will lead people to resist anthropomorphic robots. They are more resistant to emotional anthropomorphic robots than appearance anthropomorphic robots. The job insecurities brought by robots make consumers resist restaurants with a mixture of humans and highly anthropomorphic robots, but they are willing to accept restaurants only with ordinary robots. Originality/value: The marginal contribution of this paper is mainly in three aspects. Firstly, from a non-laboratory perspective (using the best-worst scaling method), this paper supports the Uncanny Valley theory. Secondly, as far as we know, this paper is the first to conduct a comparative analysis of the differences between consumers’ choices of robots with physical anthropomorphism and those with emotional anthropomorphism. Thirdly, different from previous literature that only discusses restaurants with a mixture of humans and ordinary robots, this paper meticulously divides restaurants into four types based on the degree of anthropomorphism.

Purpose: This study aims to test the compensatory consumption theory with the explicit hypothesis that China's new-rich tend to waste relatively more food.Design/methodology/approach: In this study, the authors use Heckman two-step probit model to empirically investigate the new-rich consumption behavior related to food waste.Findings: The results show that new-rich is associated with restaurant leftovers and less likely to take them home, which supports the compensatory consumption hypothesis.Practical implications: Understanding the empirical evidence supporting compensatory consumption theory may improve forecasts, which feed into early warning systems for food insecurity. And it also avoids unreasonable food policies.Originality/value: This research is a first attempt to place food waste in a compensatory-consumption perspective, which sheds light on a new theory for explaining increasing food waste in developing countries.

As the grassroots-party organizations of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are increasingly involved in the governance of private-owned enterprises (POEs), whether this new pattern promotes corporate innovation is still a research gap. Therefore, based on the data of 1357 POEs’ party-organization involvements and their patent applications from 2003 to 2017, this paper analyzes the impact of the party-organization involvements on corporate innovation by using the multiple regression model. The results include: (1) party-organization involvements including party organization activities and senior executives’ participation can significantly promote innovation, especially after 2012; (2) party-organization activities improve innovation by increasing research and development (R&D) investment and reducing operating risk, while the senior executives’ participation only influences on R&D investment; (3) the party-organization involvements have a stronger promotion on non-invention patent applications, especially for the utility-model-patent applications, than invention-patent applications; (4) the promotion is more pronounced for family businesses, technology-intensive and capital-intensive enterprises, as well as those located in the northern, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and Yangtze River delta. After applying PSM sampling and difference-in-differences (DID) analyses, and substituting the dependent variables, the results remain robust. This paper provides Chinese evidence for party construction and corporate innovation, and also provides references about political connection and corporate innovation for other countries to some extent.