Purpose: This study aims to explore the relationship between different categories of motivation and the intention to engage in collaborative consumption (CC), using attitude as a mediator. Design/methodology/approach: The authors extend an existing measurement scale focused on sustainability, enjoyment, reputation and economic benefits, as factors relevant in shaping how people perceive CC. The extension includes the role of personal beliefs and social relationships. The authors conduct a mediation analysis using partial least squares path modelling. Findings: This study partially confirms existing literature: sustainability and enjoyment are positively related and statistically significant in predicting attitude towards CC, while only enjoyment impacts behavioural intention; attitude further impacts behavioural intention. Further, reputation and economic benefits positively and significantly impact attitude; economic benefits are not significant for behavioural intention in this study’s Romanian sample, but reputation is. Neither beliefs nor relationships are significantly associated with behavioural intention. Originality/value: The authors investigate CC determinants in a post-communist economy, a novel setting for the development of sharing economy, as most studies focus on traditionally developed economies.

Hospital accreditation, as a quality signal, is gaining its popularity among low- and middle-income countries, such as Romania, despite its costly nature. Nevertheless, its effectiveness as a quality signal in driving patients’ choice of hospital services remains unclear. In this study, we intend to empirically explore the perceptions of both healthcare professionals and patients toward Romanian hospital accreditation and identify perception gaps between the two parties. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out to extract the latent constructs of health professionals’ perceived effects of hospital accreditation. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Kruskal–Wallis test were used to identify correlations between patients’ sociodemographic characteristics and their behavioral intentions when confronted with low-quality services. We found that health professionals believe that hospital accreditation plays a positive role in improving patient satisfaction, institutional reputation, and healthcare services quality. However, we found a lack of awareness of hospital accreditation status among patients, indicating the existence of the perception gap of the accreditation effectiveness as a market signal. Our results suggest that the effect of interpersonal trust in current service providers may distract patients from the accreditation status. Our study provides important practical implications for Romanian hospitals on enhancing the quality of accreditation signal and suggests practical interventions.

The development of decentralized technologies greatly facilitates the growth of user-generated content (UGC) markets. However, existing literature debates whether the decentralized UGC platform model can be economically sustainable. This study investigates the differential impacts of four voter groups, categorized by their social engagement and financial investment, on the two critical issues pertaining to decentralized UGC markets (i.e., creator popularity disparity and content contribution). We empirically tested our hypotheses using data from a leading decentralized UGC platform. The results indicate a consumer engagement tradeoff between promoting fair growth opportunities in the interest of the creators and extending the creator network in the interest of the platform. Our findings shed light on how creator popularity disparity may arise through votes from the four voter groups and their differential network externalities exerted on the creator network.

With the aggravation of the aging problem, the research on the real-time monitoring technology of the elderly is of great significance. Among them, falling is the main reason threatening the health and life of the elderly. Aiming at the shortcomings of traditional fall detection technology for the elderly, this paper proposes a fall detection technology for the elderly based on wireless signal, which uses neural network for feature extraction and classification. Complete efficient and accurate detection on the premise of protecting privacy. The experimental results show that the detection rate is as high as 95%, which has a good application prospect.

Motivated by the recent adoption of a blockchainbased token-weighted incentive mechanism in online crowdsourcing markets, which has sparked concerns over power and popularity concentration, this study investigates the interactions between the distributions on the two sides (voters and contributors) of a blockchain-based crowdsourcing platform (BCP). Built upon the theories of long tails and two-sided markets, we propose a two-sided long-tail framework to uncover the distributional dynamics on BCPs. Our weekly panel data analyses show that the concentration in token holdings distribution among voters negatively affects content growth, which in turn leads to a higher content popularity concentration. Such an adverse effect is more pronounced in niche content growth compared to popular content growth. The results also show that the distribution of voters' token holdings positively affects content diversity, which in turn results in a more evenly distributed content popularity. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of our findings are discussed.