Culturally associated brands that reflect the cultural backgrounds of other countries have been extensively studied, but research on the conformity consumption of culturally associated brands in specific countries has rarely been conducted. This study focuses on the fear of missing out (FoMO) phenomenon as a tool for explaining consumers’ conformity consumption and examines what causes it. Although the FoMO concept is primarily used in the online field, it is considered to be a very suitable tool for explaining offline consumption behavior as well. This study will be useful for establishing long-term and sustainable strategies by firms through matured discussions on conformity consumption.

There have been unusual collective consumption phenomena that consumer behavior conforms to as part of the pursuit of specific brands (e.g., teenagers wearing the same brand jacket). In order to explain bandwagon consumption behavior, previous studies focused on brand, personal traits, and group characteristics. However, previous studies seem somewhat limited in explaining excessive bandwagon consumption. This study addresses a psychological trait, the Fear of Missing out (FoMO), which describes why people want to belong to a main group. Along with FoMO, product characteristics influence bandwagon consumption behavior because consumers may show different behaviors for different product categories. Hence, this study combines FoMO levels (high/low) and product category (luxury/necessity) to explain bandwagon consumption behavior. The results reveal that the combination of high FoMO and luxury shows the strongest bandwagon consumption behavior. The next strongest combination is low FoMO and necessity, followed by high FoMO and necessity, and low FoMO and luxury. Based on these findings, this study might present implications for understanding excessive bandwagon consumption based on psychological traits and product characteristics, which makes it possible for marketers to provide customizing products and services as well as advertising messages for young consumers groups who experience high levels of FoMO when establishing their marketing strategies.

Social media platforms insist on the so-called “number of visits, clicking, and subscription” as a measurement of social media performance. However, this method of measurement does not take into account dormant user accounts and unintentional clicks or visits. To fully understand social media performance, this study aims to examine the process of users’ discontinuance behavior from the view of technostress creators and socialstress creators through social media fatigue. Also, this study investigates the influence of involvement between social media fatigue and discontinuance behaviors. To understand the impact of technostress and social stress creators on users’ discontinuance behavior, this study conducted an off- and online survey in Korea. Using Confirmatory factory analysis (CFA), this study has a strong academic contribution because it identifies the existing methods measuring social media performance through numbers of accounts or joining in as inaccurate.

Today's financial firms are required to disclose a great deal of data—including investment support information—on their corporate web sites. Since web sites have become an integral part of financial information disclosures, and because the multimedia characteristics embedded in those web sites have been shown to affect investors' responses, our research examines the various factors influencing investors' intention to use financial web sites to search for information. The basic premise of this study is that the reactions of individual investors in such situations translate naturally to an intention to use financial web sites and, ultimately, to actual use of these sites. By using a technology acceptance model, we conducted a rigorous questionnaire survey, over an illustrative web site on which financial information is disclosed on a regular basis as a means of providing individual investors with decision support. Our principal findings showed that: (1) consistency and technical convenience influence perceived ease of use; (2) decision quality, investment information and information quality affect perceived usefulness; and (3) perceived usefulness to the individual investor is affected most by decision quality, while perceived ease of use is influenced equally by consistency and technical convenience.

Adopting an evolutionary perspective, we introduce an alternative approach to the opportunism in strategic alliance where the accumulated risks during alliance operation lead to opportunism in alliance. To examine this process, a total of 358 employees from South Korean firms in the high technology sector completed a survey on opportunism in strategic alliance, measuring each firm's perceived risks on the relational and operational issues in alliance and their antecedents and outcomes. Key results show that perceived risks on the relationship between alliance partners cause a passive type of opportunism, whereas perceived risks both on the relationship between alliance partners and on the achievement of alliance objectives cause an active type of opportunism. Specifically, cultural difference showed the largest influence on relational risks, whereas issues in equity involvement showed the largest influence on performance risk. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications on the opportunism management in strategic alliance are discussed.