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Online shoppers feel insecure due to the various unethical practices of e-tailers. It is, therefore, crucial for online retailers to alleviate customer concerns. Extant literature indicates that country-of-origin (COO) cues influence consumer perception. A relatively underexplored phenomenon in an emerging market context, the COO image of the online retailer, i.e. a foreign-origin online retailer (FOOR) or an Indian-origin online retailer (IOOR), needs validation. The current study investigates customer expectations of online retailers' ethical behaviour against the backdrop of online retailer-based signals in emerging markets.

The researchers floated an online questionnaire using a seven-point Likert scale. The authors sought recipient responses in Google Forms shared via e-mails and social media connections. The authors analysed 1,018 useable responses using partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) in Smart PLS 3.

The empirical study examined the influence of the consumer perception of ethics of online retailers (CPEOR) and COO on consumer purchase intention. It validated the proposed research model. The research findings inform that the CPEOR and the COO influence purchase intention through the mediation effects of trust and satisfaction. Results indicate that privacy, security, non-deception, fulfilment, customer service, FOOR and IOOR strongly predict consumer trust. In contrast, privacy, non-deception, fulfilment, customer service and FOOR strongly predict consumer satisfaction. However, security and IOOR did not influence consumer satisfaction.

The study results have theoretical and practical implications for academic researchers and online retailing managers. Future studies can validate the model in different geo-demographic scenarios and e-commerce settings.

The study enriches the extant literature on CPEOR in the Indian context. This study is pioneering work examining consumer purchase intention by adding the COO construct to the CPEOR model.

The research applied service-dominant logic of marketing theory, a customer-centered and relational that principally grounded in service relationships and actor networks. In actor networks, salespeople provide their skills and knowledge, such as expertise, service quality, ethics and shared value to cocreate value for buyers. Therefore, this study explores the attributes of salespeople that influence the quality of the relationship (trust and satisfaction) and, as a result, loyalty in the context of the business-to-business (B2B) relationship in the Taiwan market.

A causal relationship and survey research design are applied. The study collected 266 valid responses from B2B account managers representing various companies and industries. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that salespeople’s expertise demonstrated the most significant influence on both trust and satisfaction, followed by ethics, service quality and share value, in a descending order of impact. Consequently, trust and satisfaction had a significant impact on customer loyalty.

The four attributes of salespeople play a pivotal role in establishing lasting relationships and maximizing the customer lifetime value. To achieve long-term success in customer interactions and relationships, a well-rounded salesperson should diligently strive to excel in all these attributes.

The novelty and contribution of this study are twofold. First, investigating the quality of the relationship in the context of Taiwanese manufacturers in a B2B setting is still rare, and this is the study first to explore the Taiwanese B2B relationship with its global customers. As Taiwanese manufacturers play a pivotal role in the global supply chain, the research findings have symbolic meaning and practical implications for global business partners. Second, drawing from service-dominant logic theory, this research takes an integrative view by examining the attributes (expertise, service quality, shared value and ethics) that influence and establish a quality trusting relationship and consumer loyalty in the B2B context.

Online retail platform corporate sustainable development (ORPCSD) has garnered significant interest and appeal among consumers. However, no scale has been developed to measure consumer perceptions of ORPCSD. Therefore, this study aimed to delineate the conceptual framework and dimensions underlying these perceptions and construct a reliable and valid measurement tool.

This study employed established qualitative and quantitative methods in two studies. In the first study, the dimensions and measurement items of consumer perceptions of ORPCSD were proposed using the grounded method. In the second study, the measurement scale was refined and validated using exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and nomological validity examination.

The results indicated that consumer perception of ORPCSD consisted of three dimensions: economic, social, and environmental sustainability. The measurement scale for these dimensions comprised 25 items, demonstrating excellent psychometric properties.

This study contributes original insights by enhancing the current understanding of consumer perceptions of ORPCSD. Additionally, it provides researchers and managers with psychometric metrics to gauge these perceptions and offers actionable strategies for sustainable marketing initiatives.

This paper seeks to deepen and improve our understanding of business ethics in services by developing a typology that reconciles and integrates disparate and often conflicting ideas and viewpoints while providing practical guidance for ethical decision-making.

The paper examines current theoretical approaches in ethics to provide an understanding of the ethical theories, how they have been applied and how they have evolved in businesses and marketing. It discusses conceptual issues related to ethical dilemmas and the available typologies.

Based on the axioms of the Triple-A Framework for Ethical Service Research, the Typology of Ethical Dilemmas in Services (TEDS) is proposed. The typology identifies three types of dilemmas based on four dimensions considering all service interactions guided by normative ethics (virtue, deontological and consequentialism).

The proposed DILEMMAS process illustrates the practical application of TEDS.

This paper extends the ethics and services literature by offering a novel theoretical and practical approach to addressing ethical dilemmas. TEDS is authentic, advances our knowledge and applies to all service organizations that aim to manage ethical dilemmas effectively.

Social media platforms are a pervasive technology that continues to define the modern world. While social media has brought many benefits to society in terms of connection and content sharing, numerous concerns remain for the governance of social media platforms going forward, including (but not limited to) the spread of misinformation, hate speech and online surveillance. However, the voice of citizens and other non-experts is often missing from such conversations in information systems literature, which has led to an alleged gap between research and the everyday life of citizens.

The authors address this gap by presenting findings from 16 h of online dialog with 25 citizens on social media platform governance. The online dialog was undertaken as part of a worldwide consultation project called “We, the internet”, which sought to provide citizens with a voice on a range of topics such as “Digitalization and Me,” “My Data, Your Data, Our Data” and “A Strong Digital Public Sphere.” Five phases of thematic analysis were undertaken by the authors to code the corpus of qualitative data.

Drawing on the Theory of Communicative Action, the authors discuss three dialogical processes critical to citizen discourse: lifeworld reasoning, rationalization and moral action. The findings point toward citizens’ perspectives of current and future issues associated with social media platform governance, including concerns around the multiplicity of digital identities, consent for vulnerable groups and transparency in content moderation. The findings also reveal citizens’ rationalization of the dilemmas faced in addressing these issues going forward, including tensions such as digital accountability vs data privacy, protection vs inclusion and algorithmic censorship vs free speech.

Based on outcomes from this dialogical process, moral actions in the form of policy recommendations are proposed by citizens and for citizens. The authors find that tackling these dark sides of digitalization is something too important to be left to “Big Tech” and equally requires an understanding of citizens’ perspectives to ensure an informed and positive imprint for change.

The world today is heavily controlled by the content available on the internet, where a one-star rating gain may work wonders for a company and a one-star rating decline can cause huge damage. Online booking platforms provide more freedom, privacy and contact with experienced travelers than physical hotel booking. The study identifies the factors shaping travelers' online hotel booking intention (OHBI).

We utilized structural equation modeling (SEM) to expand the horizons of the technology acceptance model (TAM) and stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework in the hospitality sector. The results are based on the data collected from 705 travelers who made online hotel reservations.

The findings demonstrate that online reviews, hotel website quality and hotel website convenience quotient favorably shape prospective tourists' perceived trust, magnifying their inclination to book a hotel online. Website convenience quotient and trust partially mediate the association between the constructs. In addition, the linkage between perceived trust and OHBI is strengthened by promotional offers but weakened by perceived risk.

Our findings provide several important implications for hotel managers, prospective travelers, hotel owners, website developers, policymakers, hotel employees, the local community and competitors to expedite the growth of the Indian hotel industry.

The literature reveals that website convenience quotient, perceived trust and promotional offers have not received enough attention in the hospitality industry and warrant attention. Our study strives to broaden the scope of the TAM and SOR models to better understand these constructs in the backdrop of the Indian hospitality sector. The study also examines how promotional offers and perceived risk influence the linkages between the underlying constructs.