The “like” feature on Facebook has emerged as a commonly used paralinguistic tool for communicating, and its importance as an indication of positive feelings toward the posts of others is likely to increase. Comprehensive research is needed into why and how users are motivated toward ‘liking’ behavior, and whether this behavior generates an intention to continue using Facebook over time. This study combines the theory of uses and gratification and a subjective norm perspective to create an integrated model that predicts liking behavior and usage intentions on Facebook. The research model is tested with data collected from online users of Facebook and the proposed model is supported by a measurement and structural model analysis based on empirical data collected from 267 Facebook users. The findings indicate that the most salient motivations for users to liking behavior are enjoyment, information seeking, social interaction, and subjective norms, and that they subsequently reinforce their continuous intention toward the Facebook. The results also revealed that subjective norms contribute strongly to the projections of liking behavior and continuous usage intention. The proposed research model contributes to global marketing research and information-technology service management by integrating personal and social motivators to understand the acceptance of social networking technologies by users in Asia. In particular, the outcomes stand to enhance the current state of knowledge of social networking site developers, managers, and organizations to improve acceptance of their services or products, development of customer support, advertising, and/or product development. The present results lay the foundation for uses and gratification theory and subjective norms model that have important theoretical and practical implications and may guide future research efforts in this context.

Purpose: Using the theory of planned behavior as its basis, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships among beliefs about electronic service quality (E-S-QUAL); consumers’ need for uniqueness (CNFU); and beliefs about perceived behavioral control, expectations of important others, and cross-border online purchasing behavioral intention. The effects of E-S-QUAL and CNFU on attitude are examined with data collected from Korean consumers who have cross-border online purchasing experience.Design/methodology/approach: The authors evaluate the research model in this study and test the hypotheses using partial least squares, an OLS regression-based estimation method that focuses on predicting independent variables hypothesized to have a causal relationship that maximizes the explanatory variance of the dependent variable.Findings: Analysis of the data emphasizes that beliefs about E-S-QUAL and CNFU positively affect attitudes toward buying online from international sites, which in turn positively affect purchasing intention. Also, beliefs about self-efficacy and normative structure regarding cross-border online purchasing positively affect behavioral intentions.Originality/value: This paper develops a conceptual model explaining consumers’ intentions to shop online across national borders. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, none of the previous studies have particularly mentioned the associations between beliefs about e-service quality and actual behavioral intentions in the context of cross-border online shopping. Also, the important role of CNFU has been ignored as one of the factors that can affect consumers’ decisions to shop online beyond national borders. In regard to this matter, the authors aim to investigate cross-border online shopping factors that can help international e-commerce gain a better understanding of the needs of their consumers.

Livestreaming has gained popularity as a new e-commerce platform, communication tool, social network, and source of entertainment for millions of users. It is important to examine the nature and history of this developing area of e-commerce since it has the potential to be exploited to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges. Therefore, this study critically explores the consumer livestreaming purchasing behavior and proposes a model, which composed of stimulus, organism, and response as the extension of stimuli-organism-organism model. The structural equation modeling approach applies for analyzing 434 survey responses from a convenience sample. The results suggest that the stimulus variable (source credibility, response capability, platform interactivity) significantly affects the organism variables (customer engagement, swift guanxi), which in turn significantly contribute to creating responses (purchase intentions, actual purchase behavior). Customer engagement and swift guanxi also have potent mediating effects in the model. We offer novel insights into new consumer behaviors in livestream commerce that can underpin future research to promote businesses and services even under challenging conditions.

Telemedicine ensures quality, cost-effective, and equally accessible healthcare services for everyone. Nonetheless, a poor usage rate could curb its progression in developing cultures like Bangladesh. Therefore, this research examines how external stimuli promote the continuous usage intentions of synchronous telemedicine services through engagement and satisfaction by deploying the stimulus-organism-response framework. A final sample of 312 telemedicine users was analyzed using the structural equation modeling in AMOS. The average age of the participants was 26.28 (std. deviation 5.53), and their average use of telemedicine was 2.39 times (std. deviation 1.31) over the last six months. This study empirically endorsed that the stimuli, including performance expectancy, information quality, and contamination avoidance, as well as organismic factors such as engagement and satisfaction, directly impacted the continuance desires for telemedicine use. In addition, the analyses validated the mediation roles of engagement and satisfaction. Furthermore, performance and effort expectancies influenced engagement, which affected satisfaction along with performance expectancy, functionality, and information quality. Accordingly, telemedicine facilitators should integrate these critical attributes into the system to sustain engagement, satisfaction, and usage intentions. This study has pioneered the effects of performance and effort expectancies on continuous usage intentions facilitated by engagement and satisfaction in the telemedicine landscape.

Purpose: Banking services encounter major challenges in determining customer's psychometric behavioral intentions. Scholars suggest that a theoretical approach to better understand the key constructs of service marketing, such as service quality, perceived value, customer satisfaction, corporate image and behavioral intentions, is critical to bank performance. The present study aims to design and test a comprehensive multidimensional and hierarchical model of service quality with higher-order psychometric constructions and their mediation effects in the model.Design/methodology/approach: Data from a self-administered structured questionnaire are analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.Findings: Empirical results confirm that multidimensional and hierarchical service quality are best suited to assess overall banking service quality, in which outcome, interaction and environment quality are the important primary dimensions, with each of them having several subdimensions. Service quality is the significant antecedent of behavioral intentions, customer satisfaction, corporate image and perceived value. Customer satisfaction and service quality are the best determinants of behavioral intentions. In addition, customer satisfaction, perceived value and corporate image are complementary variables, having significant mediation effects on the relationship between service quality and behavioral intentions.Originality/value: As a maiden study in the context of emerging economies, this research integrates a comprehensive service quality theory and valuable customer loyalty constructs, which are crucial to banks' financial performance, bolstering evidence for the theoretical pitch. This study also provides managers with a clear idea of how they can develop sustainable service marketing strategies and policies on the psychometric perceptions of customers, thereby leading banks to achieve long-term goals.

Today, the banking sector plays a significant role due to the substantial increase in the number of banks and has become an intensely competitive field. The purpose of this paper is to strengthen knowledge of retail banking services by finding the interrelationships between service justice, service quality, social influence, and corporate image concerning service satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, we sought to determine the moderating effect of bank ownership (i.e., state-owned and private sector banks) on the above relationships. Data were collected at random through online surveys that were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Empirical findings revealed that service justice and quality have a significant effect on service satisfaction and customer loyalty. Social influence has a significant effect on customer loyalty, but not on service satisfaction; however, corporate image is positively related to service satisfaction, but not to customer loyalty. Understandably, service satisfaction was assumed to have a fundamental relationship to consumer loyalty. However, moderation results indicated that state or private sector ownership of banks was an equally important moderating factor for almost all dimensions relevant to customer loyalty, other than service justice, social influence, and service satisfaction. The study presents theoretical contributions and considers the managerial implications for banking services that are potentially applicable to other financial institutions.