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The rapid development of e-commerce live streaming is inseparable from the important role of live-streamer. However, research exploring the impacts of live-streamers’ characteristics on customer engagement in different types of live streaming rooms remains limited. This study aims to examine the impacts of live-streamers’ characteristics (i.e. expertise, moral reputation, popularity, responsiveness) on consumer engagement in e-commerce live streaming, and verify whether there are differences in the impact of live-streamers’ characteristics on consumer experience for different types of live-streamers.

Data were gathered from 266 Chinese adults who have experience watching e-commerce live streaming. Partial least squares techniques were used to verify the model.

The results show that expertise, moral reputation, popularity, and responsiveness of live-streamers have positive impacts on consumer engagement through perceived trust and perceived pleasure. Moreover, through multi-group analysis, this study found that compared with enterprise live-streamers, the moral reputation of individual live-streamers exerts a stronger effect on consumers’ perceived trust, and the popularity of individual live-streamers exerts a stronger effect on consumers’ perceived pleasure. Compared with individual live-streamers, the responsiveness of enterprise live-streamers exerts a stronger effect on consumers’ perceived pleasure.

This study contributes to e-commerce live streaming research by categorizing live-streamers into two types: individual live-streamers and enterprise live-streamers, and verifying the specific difference in the impacts of live-streamers’ characteristics on consumer experience for the two types of live-streamers.

In this study, the authors sought to investigate how the implicit social ties of both project owners and potential backers are associated with crowdfunding project success.

Drawing on social ties theory and factors that affect crowdfunding success, in this research, the authors developed a model to study how project owners' and potential backers' implicit social ties are associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The proposed model was empirically tested with crowdfunding data collected from Kickstarter and social media data collected from Twitter. The authors performed the test using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model with fixed effects.

The authors found that project owners' implicit social ties (specifically, their social media activities, degree centrality and betweenness centrality) are significantly and positively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. Meanwhile, potential project backers' implicit social ties (their social media activities and degree centrality) are negatively associated with crowdfunding projects' degrees of success. The authors also found that project size moderates the effects of project owners' social media activities on projects' degrees of success.

This work contributes to the literature on crowdfunding by investigating how the implicit social ties of both potential backers and project owners on social media are associated with crowdfunding project success. This study extends the previous research on social ties' roles in explaining crowdfunding project success by including implicit social ties, while the literature explored only explicit social ties.

This study aims to investigate the influence of the reviewed establishment’s price level and the user’s social network size and reputation status on consumers’ tendency to post more visual imagery content. Furthermore, it explores the moderating effects of user experiences and geographic distance on these dynamics.

This study adopts a multi-method approach to explore both the determinants behind the sharing of user-generated photos in online reviews and their internal mechanisms. Using a comprehensive secondary data set from Yelp.com, the authors focused on restaurant reviews from a prominent tourist destination to construct econometric models incorporating time-fixed effects. To enhance the robustness of the authors’ findings, the authors complemented the big data analysis with a series of controlled experiments.

The reviewed establishments price level and the users reputation status and social network size incite corresponding motivations conspicuous display “reputation seeking” and social approval motivating users to incorporate more images in reviews. “User experiences can amplify the influence of these factors on image sharing.” An increase in the users geographical distance lessens the impact of the price level on image sharing, but it heightens the influence of the users reputation and social network size on the number of shared images.

As a result of this study, high-end establishments can increase their online visibility by leveraging user-generated visual content. A structured rewards program could significantly boost engagement by incentivizing photo sharing, particularly among users with elite status and extensive social networks. Additionally, online review platforms can enhance users’ experiences and foster more dynamic interactions by developing personalized features that encourage visual content production.

This research, anchored in trait activation theory, offers an innovative examination of the determinants of photo-posting behavior in online reviews by enriching the understanding of how the intricate interplay between users’ characteristics and situational cues can shape online review practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic had amplified feelings of isolation and alienation, particularly among school-aged children. The pandemic-related social distancing policies had led to a marked decline in students’ physical and social well-being, potentially fostering a sense of apathy among them. Upon returning to the “normal” in late 2022, a Chinese martial arts Outreach Program was launched in over 50 schools in Hong Kong, involving the entire student body and teachers at each school. This paper aims to explore the potential role of sports in enhancing student well-being in post-COVID times and as a societal response to the evolving sociopolitical landscape in Hong Kong, using the program as a case study.

Using ethnographic immersion, participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the study examines how the program sought to overcome the challenges students were facing during the pandemic through Chinese martial arts instruction and the teaching of traditional Chinese values.

The findings of this study reveal that the objectives of the Chinese martial arts Outreach Program not only centered on students’ immediate personal well-being but also entailed broader goals of advancing national education. The program’s design, which integrated sports and national education, emerged as a response to the pandemic and the sociopolitical transformations in Hong Kong, particularly following the implementation of the National Security Law.

The findings will deepen the understanding of how sport has been politicized as a means to respond to the societal changes in Hong Kong, especially after the pandemic.

Amid the increasing water risks faced by firms, external investors are becoming more interested in corporate water disclosure and research on its drivers has become prominent. This paper aims to investigate the impact of water resource tax (WRT) on water disclosure and other related drivers.

This study uses the WRT policy as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the difference-in-differences method.

The results indicate that WRT policy significantly stimulates water disclosure. Improving green innovation and strengthening internal control are potential channels through which WRT works. Moreover, WRT’s effect is more pronounced in firms that face high institutional pressures and have better internal resource support.

The findings suggest that water-sensitive firms should disclose water information to acquire resources from external stakeholders to support their green transition. It also provides implications for governments to incorporate other external forces in shaping the direction and intensity of WRT and consider the resource constraints of small and private firms in green transformation.

This study is of assistance in promoting water environmental protection in areas experiencing water stress and provides an opportunity for external stakeholders (external investors, nongovernmental organizations, governments, consumers, suppliers, communities and media) to advocate the water disclosure of firms with high water risks.

The attempt is novel in the context of considering the water regulation risks and the demands of external stakeholders. It provides new insights into the factors influencing water disclosure from the perspective of political stakeholders.

Despite the potential of mobile health applications in reducing barriers to accessing health information and facilities, the adoption and usage of such applications were low among low-income populations. This study aims to examine the use of mobile technology for health management and the perceived barriers of the use of mobile applications for health management among low-income working adults in Hong Kong.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 working adults aged 25–45 from low-income families. The interviewees were asked about their perceptions of their health, their perceptions about and use of mobile health applications and they were asked to describe their ideal mobile health management app.

Interviewees often suffer from physical pain and many face relationship difficulties. They seek out health information actively on the internet, often using a mobile phone. However, their use of wearables and health mobile applications is limited. The perceived barriers of using mobile health applications included perceived difficulties in downloading and registering, privacy concerns and a lack of awareness of the health apps available. They prefer internet searching to a dedicated app. Their ideal health applications should be video based with real-life narratives. They were concerned about the credibility of the health information provided and preferred apps that engage professional and authoritative sources.

The study was based on a convenience sample recruited through a nonprofit organization. It has the limitation of generalizing the results for the target population. Future studies can use survey methodology to test a theoretical model linking perceived barriers and intention to use mobile health technology. Studies using experimental design can investigate perceived ease of use and perceived benefits of different mobile health app designs.

These findings can inform the government’s health department and health organizations in designing appropriate mobile health applications that target those with limited financial and time resources.

There is a lack of studies that explore perceived barriers of adoption of mobile health technology in developed societies. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the one of the first qualitative studies conducted in Hong Kong among low-income working adults about their health conditions and usage of mobile health technology.

The combination of previously unassociated terms in a metaphor can helpfully illustrate particular characteristics of a person, phenomenon or practice. However, it can also obfuscate because the focus on some elements may come at the expense of others. The metaphor of the landscape is somewhat ubiquitous in academic literature, and this paper is specifically interested in the ‘higher education landscape’, which is widely used in scholarly – as well as media and policy – writing. By applying thematic analysis to a sample of publications which invoke the term, this paper comprises what Haslanger calls a descriptive and ameliorative approach to investigate both how and why this metaphor is used. By considering these publications cumulatively, we can identify that the higher education landscape enables scholars to simultaneously acknowledge higher education's temporal, social and political positioning, its state of what can feel like permanent and wide-ranging flux, and its diverse cast of interrelated actors. In this way, it serves as a useful and evocative container metaphor for higher education's activities and constituents and the interrelationships and tensions between them. At the same time, its somewhat indiscriminate and indeterminate use can conflate and mask the detail and nature of these dynamics, and it is possible to discern in its application a collective sense of nervousness and uncertainty about higher education more generally.

This study provides a bibliometric analysis of business literature on the interlinks of fintech, climate risks, and sustainable finance. Fintech growth promotes national environmental efficiency and green finance by decreasing carbon intensity toward the net-zero target. National fintech growth moderates the impact of environmental, social, and governance investment on bank efficiency. Fintech mitigates the loan bankruptcy risk imposed by climate risks with strict mortgage lending decisions due to climate concerns. Fintech applications in banking systems optimize financing costs and increase the accessibility of money for firms, decreasing corporate greenwashing behaviors and promoting green innovation. The existing literature leaves room for future studies on fintech to promote climate finance with important policies for climate action toward Sustainable Development Goals.

This research investigates mobile security awareness among university students in Hong Kong, who increasingly rely on mobile devices for their daily activities and academic needs. This research seeks to inform targeted educational strategies and policies to enhance mobile security practices among young adults, particularly in regions similar to Hong Kong, where mobile usage is extensively integrated into everyday life.

Utilizing an online survey, this research assessed the mobile security awareness of 407 university students from Hong Kong. The Mann-Whitney U-test and other statistical methods were employed to analyze differences in security awareness based on demographic factors such as IT background, gender, educational level and participation in mobile security courses.

The research revealed a generally high level of mobile security awareness compared to similar research in other regions. It also highlighted that despite no significant difference in awareness between genders, students from IT-related fields or those who participated in mobile security courses exhibit higher awareness levels. These findings underscore the impact of focused education and training on enhancing mobile security awareness.

This research contributes to the limited but growing body of literature on mobile security awareness from the end-user perspective, particularly among university students in the Asia Pacific region. It offers valuable insights for governments, educators and corporate policymakers worldwide, providing a basis for integrating mobile security education into broader academic and professional training programs.

The purpose of this study is to empirically explore the impact of government subsidies for the digital economy on corporate innovation. It aims to determine whether these subsidies promote innovation, and to examine the specific ways in which they inspire corporate innovation.

This study selects Chinese A-share listed companies during the period from 2007 to 2019 as the research object. It employs panel data to empirically examine the impact of government subsidies in the digital economy on corporate innovation.

The findings reveal that government subsidies for the digital economy effectively promote corporate innovation. They significantly increase the number and share of invention patents and improve the quality of corporate innovation. Moreover, it is noted that the positive impact is largely confined to non-state-owned enterprises, small firms and those in highly competitive markets.

The contribution of this paper lies in focusing on government subsidies in the digital economy, which is distinct from the general government subsidies in a broad sense.