During the COVID-19 pandemic, fresh live broadcasting has been widely present in consumers’ daily lives but has been scarcely examined in academic research. The major purpose of the current study is to examine how fresh live broadcast features (visibility, interactivity, and authenticity) impact consumers’ willingness to buy through consumers’ perceived value and perceived trust based on the stimulus–organism-response theory. A total of 307 Chinese webcast users participated in this study. The data were collected through an online questionnaire survey and analyzed by SPSS and Amos software. The findings discovered that the fresh live broadcast features positively impact consumers’ perceived utility value and trust, and the visibility and interactivity enhance the perceived hedonistic value of consumers. Moreover, perceived value and perceived trust mediate between fresh live broadcast features and consumers’ willingness to buy. This study emphasizes the important role of fresh live features and provides insight for fresh sellers to increase consumer willingness to buy based on the perspective of consumers’ perceived value and trust.

User marketing information sharing plays a significant role in boosting the effectiveness of short video marketing. Exploring the factors influencing the willingness to share has become a meaningful way to improve the dissemination of marketing information. This study examines how the characteristics of short video platforms affect users’ willingness to share marketing information and investigates the mediating role of users’ flow experience. We adopted qualitative and quantitative analyses to explore the issue. Twelve participants were recruited to conduct the online interviews and 306 valid data points on users’ willingness to share marketing information were obtained through a questionnaire. The study was conducted using structural equation modelling (SEM) and mediating effect tests. The interviews verified that the information quality, the service quality, and the system quality are essential characteristics of a well-established short video platform. The results of the empirical analysis showed that the information and the service and system quality of short video platforms have a positive impact on users’ willingness to share marketing information through perceived control and pleasure, respectively. The effect of information quality on users’ desire to share marketing information is the strongest. This study provides a reference for short video platforms to optimize and improve their marketing effectiveness.

As a booming branch of online retailing, live-streaming e-commerce can present abundant information dimensions and diverse forms of expression. Live-streaming e-commerce has enabled online retailers to interact with customers face-to-face, resulting in widespread instances of emotional and impulse buying behavior. Prior research in live-streaming e-commerce has suggested that live streamers’ characteristics, especially the live streamer’s face, can affect customers’ purchase intentions. The present research used questionnaire surveys and an eye tracking experiment to investigate the impact of live streamer’s facial attractiveness on consumer purchase intention for search-based and experience-based products. The questionnaire survey analyzed 309 valid questionnaires and revealed that attractive faces are the key influencing factor driving consumers’ impulse purchase intentions. Moreover, consumers’ emotional experience plays a partial mediating role in the process of live streamers’ faces influencing purchase intention. The eye tracking experiment further explored the mechanism of a live streamer’s facial attractiveness on consumers’ purchase intentions of search-based products and experience-based products from the perspective of visual attention by analyzing 64 valid sets of data. The results showed that attractive faces attract more consumers’ attention and, therefore, increase their purchase intention. Furthermore, there is a significant interaction between product type, the live streamer’s facial attractiveness, and consumers’ purchase intentions. In the case of unattractive live streamers, consumers are more likely to buy search-based products than experience-based products, while the purchase intention does not vary between search-based products and experience-based products in the case of attractive live streamers. The present study provides evidence for ‘beauty premium’ in live-streaming e-commerce and sheds light on the design of the match between live streamers and different types of products.

Based on the leadership literature, this study investigates how paternalistic leadership (PL) and polychronicity (PC) affect the life satisfaction (LS) of nurses, specifically in public hospitals. Moreover, the mediating role of work-family conflict (WFC) and family-work conflict (FWC) is also assessed the relationships among PL, PC, and LS. The cross-sectional study design is used in this study due to its cost benefits and the convenience of data collection at a single point in time. A survey questionnaire is used to collect data from 226 nurses, and the Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique is used to investigate the proposed model. The findings of this study confirmed that PL and PC have a positive relationship with LS. Furthermore, WFC partially mediated the relationships among PL, PC, and LS. In addition, FWC partially mediated the relationship between PL and LS; the role of FWC in mediating the relationship between PC and LS has been found to be insignificant. Employees with high PC and those whose supervisors show PL behavior become more satisfied with their lives and have relatively low WFC and FWC. In addition, the theoretical and practical implications have also been discussed.

Sentiment contagion is similar to an infectious disease that spreads in a crowd. In this study, we extend the proposed SOSa-SPSa model (susceptible-optimistic-susceptible and susceptible-pessimistic-susceptible) by considering the interaction between optimists and pessimists. Simulation results show that our model is reasonable and can better explain the entire contagion process by considering three groups of people. The recovery speed of pessimists has an obvious regulative effect on the number of pessimists and the possibility of optimists coming in contact with pessimists to be infected as pessimism plays a greater role than that of reverting to susceptibility. The number of pessimists is positively related to the possibility that optimists come in contact with pessimists to become pessimistic but is negatively related to the possibility of the other way around. When the speed of spontaneous generation is slow, the number of pessimists sharply increases. However, the increase is not so apparent when the speed of spontaneous generation reaches a certain number.

Corporate negative events have been frequently exposed in the information age. Research on the dissemination mechanism of negative emotional information for netizens contributes corporates to monitor public opinion trends and resolve public opinion crises. Combining emotional infection theory and the classic infectious disease model, we first divided emotional communication stage into individual and group propagation stages and constructed the SEI₁I₂R model of negative emotional information communication among netizens under corporate negative events. Then, we performed the model analysis and simulation. Results indicated that trust and communication conversion rates are in direct proportion to negative emotional diffusion speed; corporate response rate is inversely proportional to negative emotional diffusion speed; however, the effects of self-regulation are insignificant.