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This study aims to propose mindfulness as a key factor in merchants’ adoption of mobile payments through the trust and perceived value pathways in an unorganized sector.

Data were collected physically via a structured questionnaire from a random sample of 350 merchants from the unorganized retail sector in India. Partial least squares-based structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Mindfulness plays a key role in the formation of trust and perceived value, which further influences merchants’ intentions to adopt mobile payments. Furthermore, moderating effects of technology anxiety and skepticism were also observed.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to illustrate mindfulness in merchants of the unorganized sector in adopting mobile payments to influence the adoption intentions of mobile payments in emerging markets.

This interview study examines Hungarian journalists' and copywriters' expectations of generative AI’s impact on their professions and factors influencing these views during a period of hype.

While acknowledging the specialized knowledge of journalists and copywriters relative to the general public, the study employs the sociology of expectations framework to interpret their anticipations not as objective forecasts of the future, but rather as phenomena shaped by diverse influences. The research comprises 30 semi-structured interviews conducted in spring 2023 to explore these expectations and their contributing factors.

Results reveal ChatGPT’s media coverage as pivotal, encouraging the professionals interviewed to experiment with AI, reassess their roles, and cause a shift in their job expectations. At the same time, this shift was limited. Skepticism about hyperbolic media formulations, their own experiences with ChatGPT and projecting its constraints into the future, contextual factors, and optimism bias contributed to moderating their expectations. They perceived AI as an enhancer of efficiency and quality, not as a radical disruptor. Copywriters were more open to integrating AI in their work, than journalists.

The results underscore the importance of further research to explore subjective experiences associated with technological change, particularly considering their complex social, psychological, and cultural influences.

The study uniquely contributes to the sociology of expectations by highlighting how a complex interplay of factors can shape professionals' anticipation of the impact of AI on their careers, including optimism bias and media hype.

This study aims to examine own-race bias (ORB) in prospective person memory (PPM) and explore whether the effects of ORB were moderated by two factors that are salient to real-world missing person appeals (MPAs): the number of appeals an individual encounters and the frequency in which these appeals are encountered.

A mixed experimental design was used whereby 269 Caucasian participants studied MPAs (4 or 8 appeals) for various frequencies (once or three times), which featured both white and non-white missing individuals. Participants then completed a PPM sorting task that required them to identify missing individuals as a secondary objective.

ORB was not observed for prospective person memory performance, although participants did demonstrate a greater conservative bias for appeals involving different ethnicities. The main effect of number and frequency of appeals on PPM was significant, however, these variables did not moderate ORB.

The current study has limitations that should be taken into consideration. There was an underrepresentation of non-white ethnicities within the sample which limits the ability to determine if ORB effects vary across ethnicities. Additionally, experimental simulations of missing person identifications still lack ecological validity and thus future innovative methods are required to study missing person identifications more realistically.

This study demonstrates that PPM performance may not be influenced by ORB effects overall as found within previous generic memory tasks, although the influence of the number and frequency of appeals presented continues to demonstrate the need to improve MPAs to maximise public facial recognition and identification of missing persons.

In social media context, service failures become public domain, making them visible to vast audiences of customers who are virtually present. Thus, this study aims to discuss the roles of service failure type and management response on observers’ perceived helpfulness.

The authors conducted econometric analyses on a dataset incorporating 107,984 reviews and 34,641 management responses to negative reviews.

The results reveal that, for process failures, specifying a form of action (initiatives for solving the problem) is associated with more perceived helpfulness of reviews than accounts (explanation) or acknowledgments (recognition and acceptance), while responding to an outcome failure by providing an account is associated with increased perceived helpfulness of reviews.

For process failures, managers should make every effort to convince observers through specific actions that similar failures are less likely to occur in the future. For outcome failures, managers should strive to provide clear and fast explanations of the failure causes to restore observers’ evaluation of the firm’s capabilities.

The authors’ work extends sparse insights on observers and sheds new light on the effect of service failure type and response strategy on observers’ actual behaviors. The interplay between service failure type and response strategy provides guidance on how to use management responses to influence potential customers.