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The purpose of this paper is to explore how rating mechanisms encourage emotional labor norms among sharing economy consumers.

This study follows a mixed-methods research design. Survey data from 207 consumers were used to quantify the impact of three distinct rating dimensions on a consumer behavioral outcome (emotional labor). In the second step, 18 focus groups with 94 participants were used to investigate the conditioning functions of ratings in more depth.

Rating mechanisms condition consumers toward performing socially desirable behaviors during sharing transactions. While consumers accept the necessity of bilateral rating mechanisms, they also recognize their coercive nature. Furthermore, the presence of bilateral rating mechanisms leads to negative outcomes such as annoyance and frustration.

This study contributes to sharing economy literature by examining bilateral rating mechanisms as a means of behavioral conditioning for consumers. This study points to improvements in platform design and informs theory on tripartite markets as well as trust.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to current hospitality and tourism research on the sharing economy by studying the under-researched aspects of regulatory desirability, moral legitimacy and fairness in the context of home-sharing platforms (e.g. Airbnb).

Three separate 2×1 between-subjects experimental vignette surveys are used to test the effects of three types of fairness (procedural, interpersonal and informational) on two outcomes: moral legitimacy and regulatory desirability.

The results of the research show that high perceived fairness across all three types increases moral legitimacy and reduces regulatory desirability. Respondents who perceive a fictional home-sharing platform to be fair consider it to be more legitimate and want it to be less regulated.

Following established practices and reducing external validity, the study uses a fictional scenario and a fictional company for the experimental vignette. The data collection took place in the UK, prohibiting cultural comparisons.

The research is useful for home-sharing platform managers by showing how they can boost moral legitimacy and decrease regulatory desirability through a strong focus on fairness. It can also help policymakers and consumer protection advocates by providing evidence about regulatory desirability and how it is affected by fairness perceptions.

The study adds to hospitality and tourism research by offering theoretically meaningful and practically relevant conclusions about the importance of fairness in driving stakeholder opinions about home-sharing platforms.

This conceptual contribution is based on the observation that digital inequalities literature has not sufficiently considered digital footprints as an important social differentiator. The purpose of the paper is to inspire current digital inequality frameworks to include this new dimension.

Literature on digital inequalities is combined with research on privacy, big data and algorithms. The focus on current findings from an interdisciplinary point of view allows for a synthesis of different perspectives and conceptual development of digital footprints as a new dimension of digital inequality.

Digital footprints originate from active content creation, passive participation and platform-generated data. The literature review shows how different social groups may experience systematic advantages or disadvantages based on their digital footprints. A special emphasis should be on those at the margins, for example, users of low socioeconomic background.

By combining largely independent research fields, the contribution opens new avenues for studying digital inequalities, including innovative methodologies to do so.

Digital platform users not only consume but also produce communication related to their experiences. Although service research has explored users' motivations to communicate and focused on outcomes such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), it remains largely unexplored how users iteratively interact with communication artifacts and potentially create value for themselves, other users and service providers. The purpose of this paper is, thus, to introduce communicative affordances as a framework to advance user-created communication (UCC) in service.

Drawing from the literature in communication, service research and interactive marketing, an affordance perspective on UCC in service is introduced.

Three UCC affordances for the service context are presented – interactivity, visibility and anonymity – opportunities and challenges for service providers associated with these affordances are discussed and, finally, affordance-specific research questions and general recommendations for future research are offered.

By conceptualizing UCC in service from an affordances perspective, this paper moves beyond the traditional sender–receiver communication framework and emphasizes opportunities and challenges for service research and practice.

Instead of focusing separately on specific technologies or user behaviors, it is recommended that service managers adopt a holistic perspective of user goals and motivations, use experiences and platform design.

By conceptualizing UCC as an augmenting, dialogical process concerning users’ experiences, and by introducing communicative affordances as a framework to advance UCC in service, an in-depth understanding of the diverse and ever-evolving landscape of communication in service is offered.

Online gig labor platforms bring together a global and fast-growing workforce to complete highly granular, remote and decontextualized tasks. While these environments might be empowering to some workers, many others feel disenfranchised and removed from the final product of their labor. To better understand the antecedents of continued participation in forms of crowdsourced digital labor, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between worker’s ability to create a narrative of their work mattering regardless, and their continued work engagement (WE) in these work setups.

The authors approach the relationship between individual mattering and digital WE through a longitudinal study among workers on the crowdworking platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. The authors further provide qualitative insight into individual perceptions of mattering based on essay data.

The authors develop a measure of mattering in crowdworking with four dimensions: reliance, social recognition, importance and interaction. Reliance is the most pronounced dimension, followed by interaction, importance and social recognition. In the final longitudinal model, only importance affects WE positively, while the other three mattering dimensions do not have a significant effect.

The findings indicate that individuals who feel that they themselves and their work “count” and “make a difference” will be more engaged in their digital labor. By clarifying the dimensionality of mattering in crowdwork and studying its differentiated effect on WE, the paper makes a contribution to research on crowdwork and the future of work. Beyond the theoretical contributions, the finding that perceived importance fosters WE has important implications for task and platform design.

Recent years have seen resurgent interest in professionalism in public relations, with several initiatives to enquire about the state of the communication profession and its part in organizational strategy. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings of a quantitative investigation into the work roles of European communication professionals. In particular, the research investigates different professional roles, as developed in previous roles research, while taking a particular look at managerial role enactment.

The authors report the findings of an explorative study among 551 European communication professionals. The measures are used in this study are closely aligned with previous roles research, but modernized. The authors analyzed the data with factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The authors unfold four distinct contemporary managerial tasks (“diagnosis,” “coaching,” “liaison,” and “execution”), extending previous research rooted in distinguishing these managerial tasks from more technical ones. As a result the authors show that managerial role enactment is predominately determined by education and work experience, with a diminishing gender gap when it comes to performing managerial tasks alone, and that these roles just partly relate to salary but highly relate to job satisfaction, particularly when it comes to taking part in management decision making (tasks that require responsibility, accountability, job diversity, and also an analytical, strategic mindset).

The results of the study point to the further transformation of the PR Roles’ concept, turning a more execution oriented job profile into a more managerial and strategically oriented profession.

The purpose of the study is to propose a normative approach for market segmentation, profile and monitoring using computing and information technology to analyze User-Generated Content (UGC).

The specific steps include performing a structural analysis of the UGC and extracting the base variables and values from it, generating a consumer characteristics matrix for segmenting process, and finally describing the segments' preferences, regional and dynamic characteristics. The authors verify the feasibility of the method with publicly available data. The external validity of the method is also tested through questionnaires and product regional sales data.

The authors apply the proposed methodology to analyze 53,526 UGCs in the New Energy Vehicle (NEV) market and classify consumers into four segments: Brand-Value Suitors (32%), Rational Consumers (21%), High-Quality Fanciers (26%) and Utility-driven Consumers (21%). The authors describe four segments' preferences, dynamic changes over the past six years and regional characteristics among China's top five sales cities. Then, the authors verify the external validity of the methodology through a questionnaire survey and actual NEV sales in China.

The proposed method enables companies to utilize computing and information technology to understand the market structure and grasp the dynamic trends of market segments, which assists them in developing R&D and marketing plans.

This study contributes to the research on UGC-based universal market segmentation methods. In addition, the proposed UGC structural analysis algorithm implements a more fine-grained data analysis.

Online shoppers make product purchase decisions based on product information shown on a retailer's website and potentially in comparison to that seen on competitors' websites. Insufficient, poor quality or missing information about a product can lead to reduced retailer sales. Measuring online product information quality (PIQ) is therefore an essential element in helping retailers maximize their potential success. This paper aims (1) to identify directly quantifiable PIQ criteria, (2) to assess the effects of PIQ and (3) to evaluate the moderating effect of product involvement.

The authors conducted a scenario-based experiment within 3,544 do-it-yourself (DIY) online shoppers from the United Kingdom (UK). Within an 8 × 2 × 2 between-subjects design, the authors manipulated the factors PIQ criteria (8), PIQ level (2) and product type (2).

The findings support that poor PIQ has a negative impact on consumers online shopping outcomes. The authors also found that the effects of PIQ differ between the various criteria, the product category and the level of consumer involvement in the selling process. In the context of product depiction, title readability and product attribute comparability with other retailers' websites a high level of PIQ is required. Moreover, high involvement products need a higher level of PIQ than low involvement products.

This research expands website quality and service failure literature by introducing PIQ criteria and its effects in the context of online retailing. The authors also establish actionable managerial recommendations to assist retailers to embrace and utilize PIQ to better understand their own potential website and thus business improvements.