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A novel phenomenon in product and service promotions, social coupons facilitate group buying at lower prices, bringing key benefits to customers, merchants and coupon aggregators. This study maps the evolution and innovations in social couponing, identifies knowledge gaps in the domain and sets the future research agenda.

Through a detailed systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis, this study maps the evolution of social coupons over time. The analysis examines social coupon research by studying research outputs by authors, institutes, countries and research themes. It also explores how the social couponing phenomenon has benefited the three key stakeholders: customers, merchants and coupon aggregators.

An innovation in couponing, social coupons are discount coupons that feature group buying, pre-purchase and daily deals. Based on the extensive review of extant literature, the study proposes a conceptual model for the social couponing process. The study also provides inputs for future research on social coupons and delineates their academic and managerial implications.

This study makes a pioneering endeavor to comprehensively map the knowledge structure of social coupons from multiple dimensions.

Consumers in a Metaverse have an immersive engagement with products and services. This study aims to explore the multidimensional features of the Metaverse that influence consumers’ usage and gratifications, leading to their purchase behavior.

This study uses uses and gratifications theory to examine how hedonic, utilitarian and social gratifications influence Metaverse consumers’ retail behavior. Empirical analysis (N = 291) using structural equation modeling via SmartPLS and PLSpredict validated the model’s robustness and predictive accuracy.

Metaverse retail authenticity and virtuality influenced hedonic gratifications; autonomy and virtuality affected social gratification. Hedonic and social gratifications drove purchases, while utilitarian gratification had no significant effect.

This study applies uses and gratification theory to identify Metaverse-specific motivation factors, contributing to literature and aiding the practical design and development of Metaverse retail environments.

This paper investigates the impact of last-mile logistics on consumers’ intentions when purchasing organic foods through e-commerce. By addressing challenges such as trust, pricing and supply chain issues, the study aims to demonstrate how sustainable delivery options can improve consumer perceptions of the long-term viability of organic foods. It examines how e-commerce platforms can mitigate these challenges, drawing on the “Stimulus-Organism-Response” model and the “Theory of Planned Behavior” to explore the cognitive processes that shape consumer decisions in the context of organic food purchases. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of how last-mile logistics affect consumer behavior in online organic food shopping.

To validate the proposed model, survey data were collected from 412 respondents across 19 Indian states through both online and offline channels. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS version 4. The study also examines the mediating role of perceived trust in influencing consumers’ willingness to pay for organic food adoption.

The study reveals that environmental concerns, last-mile logistics and website response time are key factors in determining consumers’ willingness to pay for organic foods. Furthermore, the findings indicate that price fairness and health consciousness significantly influence consumers’ behavioral intentions to purchase organic foods online.

The study emphasizes that consumer awareness campaigns are crucial for fostering green e-commerce adoption and achieving a sustainable future. It also underscores the potential of e-commerce platforms to address environmental and health concerns associated with organic food consumption.

This research highlights essential elements of organic food adoption that can increase consumer confidence, particularly through the role of last-mile logistics and e-commerce platforms. It underscores the importance of consumer awareness programs and education in promoting greener e-commerce practices, organic food adoption and a more sustainable future.

Achieving sustainability and sustainable performance has emerged as a critical area of focus for both academic research and practice. However, this pursuit faces challenges, particularly concerning the inadequacy of supply chain information. To address this issue, our study employs the organizational information processing theory to explore how adopting blockchain technology enables firms to learn from and collaborate with their supply chain partners, ultimately facilitating their sustainable performance even in the presence of organizational inertia.

Underpinned by the organizational information processing theory and drawing data from 220 manufacturing firms in China, we use structural equation modeling to test our conceptual model.

Our results demonstrate that blockchain technology adoption can significantly enhance sustainable performance. Furthermore, supply chain learning acts as a mediator between blockchain technology adoption and sustainable performance, while organizational inertia plays a negative moderating role between blockchain technology adoption and supply chain learning.

These findings extend the existing literature on blockchain technology adoption and supply chain management, offering novel insights into the pivotal role of blockchain in fostering supply chain learning and achieving sustainable performance. Our study provides valuable practical implications for managers seeking to leverage blockchain technology to enhance sustainability and facilitate organizational learning.

This paper aims to consider the proliferation of journalistic articles that declare English Language Arts’ death –Heller’s, 2023 The New Yorker piece “The End of the English Major” as a most recent iteration. It puts recent mainstream publications in conversation, reading them as a genre of elegies that, while largely discussing English at the university level, contribute to a pessimistic milieu around the discipline of English Language Arts (ELA) and its teaching. This paper aims to trouble the common defenses against such “death sentences” to engage this cultural conversation from the field of English teaching to imagine a new conversation.

The paper foregrounds articles from major mainstream news outlets, ranging from 2009 to 2023, as data to take seriously how popular opinions of English, as a subject and a discipline, shape the field of ELA and its teaching. Six articles resulted from the search and were subsequently coded for thematic categories as they emerged.

The essay describes and discusses three major resonances that arose among each of the four texts: financial concerns, STEM and statistics as growing disciplines, and the notion that studying English is superfluous and/or “White.” Considerations of common refutations to the aforementioned resonances and potential positioning for ways forward conclude the essay, working to imagine a new conversation.

This paper engages a conversation affecting many English literacy practitioners, through shifting attitudes and public discourse, that is currently under-discussed in the field more broadly.

The rise of the mobile Internet has accumulated much text information in various online financial forums. Such information often contains the emotional attitudes of investors toward financial technology (fintech) platforms, so extracting the sentimental tendency information has great practical value for the development of fintech platforms. Based on the investor sentiment theory, the paper aims to analyze the relevant social media data and test the influence path of online news evaluation on the stock price fluctuation of fintech platforms.

Taking Oriental Fortune as the research object, this paper selects multiple variables such as stock bar popularity, snowball popularity, news popularity and news sentiment scores collected by UQER and combines the sentiment scores of single daily news into a daily sentiment score. Based on the period from November 1, 2019 to March 31, 2020, during the emergence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as the background, the authors conduct the Granger causality test based on the vector autoregressive (VAR) model and analyze the relevant evaluation of Oriental Fortune through the empirical model.

The authors' results show that different online evaluations impact the rise and fall of stock prices differently, while news popularity has the most significant impact. Besides, news sentiment scores on share price fluctuation have a relatively substantial influence. These findings indicate that the authoritative news evaluation can strongly guide investors to make relevant investment behavior operations in the information dissemination process, significantly affecting stock prices.

The research findings of this paper have good inspiration and reference values for investors and financial regulators.

The education services sector faces ever-changing global market dynamics with creative disruptions. Building knowledge brands can push the higher education sector beyond its geographical boundaries into the global arena. This study aims to identify key constructs, their theoretical background and dimensions that aid in building a global knowledge brand. The authors' research focuses on adapting and validating scales for global knowledge and education services brands from well-established academic literature.

The authors have adopted a mixed methodology approach and a systematic literature review. Authors interviewed 18 subject matter experts as part of content and face validity to arrive at select constructs, dimensions and items. Quantitative methods with random sampling were adopted as the primary methodology. Initially, the survey was administered to 390 students to test preliminary results. The survey was also administered to 5,112 students at a later part of this study. Valid responses stood at 3,244 with a 63% response rate. Further, the authors conducted confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to test the reliability and validity of scales. This study analyzed composite reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity to finalize items for scales. The authors also validated the hypotheses based on the discriminant validity assessment scores.

Authors' key research findings are that academic stimulus, campus infrastructure and student intent play a significant role in campus culture and events design and experience at campus. Authors were able to bring out 16 key constructs and 55 critical dimensions vital to global education services brand building. This study also adapted and validated 99 items that meet construct validity and composite reliability criteria. This study also highlights that constructs such as student intent, academic stimulus, campus infrastructure scalability, selection mechanism, pedagogical content knowledge, brand identity, events experience and campus culture play a vital role in global brand recognition.

The authors' work is fairly generalizable to education services and the higher education sector. However, this study must be extrapolated and empirically validated in other industry sectors. The research implications of this study are that it aided the authors in building theoretical background for student brand loyalty theory, student expectation theory and study loyalty theory. This study adds to the body of knowledge by contributing to theoretical concepts on students, knowledge culture, events, infrastructure and branding. Researchers can adopt the scales proposed in this study to build research models in higher education branding. This study acts as a catalyst for building theories in education services areas. Researchers can delve deep into proposed research aspects of campus infrastructure, knowledge infrastructure, campus knowledge culture, events design and events experience.

This study aids educators and brand managers to develop global education services and optimize their effort and budget. Administrators in the education services sector must focus on practical aspects of student perception, campus infrastructure, culture and events experience. Practically administrators can reorient their efforts based on this study to achieve global brand recognition.

This study highlights that students are not customers but are co-creators of value in the education sector. This study provides scales and dimensions needed to build co-creation frameworks and models.

Most research in higher education branding has not covered wider aspects of global brand building. Existing theories proposed in higher education and education services articles cover only narrower aspects of campus infrastructure, culture, events design and branding. This study presents a comprehensive list of critical factors that play a vital role in global knowledge brand building. This study highlights the constructs and scales integral to building a global education services brand.