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Beneficiary photos on charity appeals are believed to engender prosocial behavior. This study explores photo framing of healthy and unhealthy beneficiary photos in the context of photo-rich online medical crowdfunding. Based on framing theory, emphasis framing effect (i.e. unhealthy photos only vs both healthy and unhealthy photos) and equivalency framing effect (i.e. healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos vs unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos) are identified.

A scenario-based experiment with 135 participants was used to empirically test the proposed research hypotheses. The subjects were randomly assigned to three treatment groups, with 45 subjects in each group. ANOVA, linear regression, and multiple mediation analysis were used to analysis data.

The results reveal that disclosing both healthy and unhealthy photos can elicit stronger sympathy and perceived need than merely disclosing unhealthy photos. Moreover, the order of unhealthy photos prior to healthy photos leads to a higher level of sympathy than the order of healthy photos prior to unhealthy photos. Furthermore, sympathy and perceived need are positively related to donation intention.

First, this study extends the photo-related research limited to certain characteristics of a single photo to the sequence effect of multiple photos. Second, this study contributes to framing theory by introducing photo framing, particularly the equivalence and emphasis framing effect of beneficiary photos. Finally, this study reveals the emotional and cognitive routes through which beneficiary photos stimulate prosocial behavior. It also offers practical guidance in the aspects of the framing effect of beneficiary photos for crowdfunding management.

Information asymmetry is an inevitable issue in e-commerce and largely hampers the development of online shopping. The purpose of this paper is to propose a model to investigate the emotional content of online customer reviews, which are considered an efficient way to reduce information asymmetry, as a potential signal of product quality. The moderating effects of perceived empathy and cognitive effort are also explored on the basis of signaling theory.

A laboratory experiment with 120 subjects was used to empirically test the proposed research hypotheses. The subjects were randomly assigned to two treatment groups, with 60 subjects in each group. ANOVA, linear regression and binary logistic regression were used.

The emotional content of online customer reviews positively influences perceived product quality, which subsequently and positively affects purchase decisions. The emotional content of online customer reviews greatly influences perceived product quality when perceived empathy or cognitive effort is high.

This study is the first to extend extrinsic cues to emotional content on the basis of signaling theory and reveals the important role of emotional content of reviews. Moreover, the mediating effect of perceived product quality and the moderating effect of perceived empathy and cognitive effort illustrate the mechanism of the influence of emotional content on purchase decision. Findings demonstrate the positive signal of emotional content and provide important practical implications for sellers and customers.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a rolling horizon procedure (RHP) to deal with the large‐scale and strongly NP‐hard problem on cooperative lockage‐timetables and service‐policies of the five locks in the Three Gorges Project.

RHP based approach is composed of a series of periodical short‐time sub‐optimizations instead of global optimization. Each of the sub‐optimizations is modeled by a mixed‐integer‐programming and solved by a branch and bound algorithm with terminal penalty.

The RHP method is found to be effective and efficient. The size of the rolling horizon is positively correlated to the total weighted area of ships.

Precision of short‐time predictions is the main limitation.

This procedure promotes the navigation capacity of the Three Gorges Project and proposes a solution to the lockage‐scheduling problem of the Three Gorges Project.