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Although our society provides a wide range of educational services, it has as yet shown little interest in the education of administrators, especially those at the higher levels. One of the few institutions to concern itself with education in this area is the Australian Institute of Management. However, the Institute finds that although almost all Australian executives favour more training, few agree on what form the training should take. In a pilot study 100 senior executives were asked to indicate their opinions on the level of formal education desirable for managers. Most favoured some education above secondary level and listed top and middle management as being most in need of further education. There was little agreement, however, on the functional areas most needing further education.

This chapter is building conceptual background of psychological risk for international tourists. Drawing on Place Attachment Theory, Moral Disengagement Theory, Followership Theory, Job Demands-Resources, Acculturation Theory and Goal Progress Theory of Rumination, this chapter proposes a framework of psychological risks with six psychological risks that tourists could encounter in foreign destination: destination detachment risk, moral disengagement risk, risk of false risk assessment, burnout risk, risk of loneliness and risk of rumination. High destination detachment could lead tourists to behave less environmentally friendly, while high moral disengagement could lead tourists to behave less ethically friendly. Followership to the influencers in social media could lead tourists to engage in risk-taking behaviours and false risk assessment, leading to burnout risk, risk of loneliness and risk of rumination, where negative autobiographical memory is created and forming memory-related distress when they arrive homes. Place detachment and moral disengagement risk local environmental and social health, while burnout, loneliness and rumination pose risks for the tourists' psychological health. Several studies propose suggestions for the destination manager and tourists to manage the risk effectively and adequately, including place attachment and moral engagement campaign, careful travel planning and social support.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel recommendation method using online reviews with emotional preferences for facilitating online purchase decisions. This leads to better use of information-rich online reviews for providing users with personalized recommendations.

A novel method is developed for producing personalized recommendations in online purchase decision-making. Such a method fuses the belief structure and the Shapley function together to effectively deal with the emotional preferences in online reviews and adequately tackle the interaction existent between product criteria with the use of a modified combination rule for making better online recommendations for making online purchase decisions.

An example is presented for demonstrating the applicability of the method for facilitating online purchase. The results show that the recommendation using the proposed method can effectively improve customer satisfaction with better purchase decisions.

The proposed method can better utilize online reviews for satisfying personalized needs of consumers. The use of such a method can optimize interface design, refine customer needs, reduce recommendation errors and provide personalized recommendations.

The proposed method adequately considers the characteristics of online reviews and the personalized needs of customers for providing customers with appropriate recommendations. It can help businesses better manage online reviews for improving customer satisfaction and create greater value for both businesses and customers.

Enterprises' multichannel operations provide various avenues for customer interaction; however, existing literature investigating customer-to-customer interaction (CCI) mainly focuses on a single channel. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the spillover effect of CCI and potential underlying mediating mechanisms in different information channels.

Three between-subjects experiments with 946 participants were employed to empirically validate the proposed hypotheses in the context of an experiential product and a material product.

Results suggest the clear spillover effect of CCI, indicating that positive CCI improves focal customers' satisfaction and purchase intention, whereas negative CCI reduces focal customers' satisfaction and purchase intention. Moreover, CCI's spillover effect varies based on the CCI channel. Offline CCI has a stronger positive spillover effect than online CCI. Contrarily, online CCI has a stronger negative spillover effect than offline CCI. Customer experience and trust are demonstrated to have mediating roles in this process.

This study is the first to comprehensively understand and compare the CCI spillover effect of the two information channels. The findings add to the existing knowledge of information processing in the psychological mechanisms influencing the belief in addition to providing insights for companies engaged in multichannel operations management across different channels.

Online gamers form communities and offer game makers various revenue sources. Gamers' continual revenue contributions should depend on their commitment to gaming communities (CGC), where they rely heavily on communication media that carry rich information or provide enhanced media richness. However, no study has yet examined how to use the four elements of media richness to fuel gamers' CGC, revealing a research gap. Seeking to fill this gap, this study constructs a research framework and formulates hypotheses based on media richness theory (MRT).

This study obtained responses from 1,971 online gamers and applied structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses.

This study finds that the four media richness elements have selective impacts on network convergence and interdependence that result in CGC. Moreover, compared with interdependence, network convergence has a stronger impact on CGC.

The findings offer online game makers insights that will enable them to design the communication functions in games to support the formation of strongly connected gamer communities. Moreover, the findings advance MRT by showing its ability to explain the formation of online gaming communities.

This paper investigates the usage and trust of Chinese social media in the travel planning process (pre-trip, during-trip and post-trip) of Chinese tourists.

Through a combination of structured online survey (n = 406) and follow-up interviews, the research identifies the diversification of the demand-and-supply patterns of social media users in China, as well as the allocation of functions of social media as tools before, during and after travel.

Social media users are diverse in terms of their adoption of social media, use behaviour and scope; the levels of trust and influence; and their ultimate travel decisions and actions. Correlations between the level of trust, influence of social media and the intended changes in travel decisions are observed. Destination marketers and tourism industries should observe and adapt to the needs of social media users and potential tourist markets by understanding more about user segmentation between platforms or apps and conducting marketing campaigns on social media platforms to attract a higher number of visitors.

This paper demonstrated the case of social media usage in mainland China, which has been regarded as one of the fastest growing and influential tourist-generating markets and social media expansions in the world. This study further addressed the knowledge gap by correlating social media usage and travel planning process of Chinese tourists. The research findings suggested diversification of the demand-and-supply pattern of social media users in China, as well as the use of social media as tools before, during and after travel. Users were diversified in terms of their adoption of social media, use behaviour, scope, the levels of trust, influence and the ultimate travel decisions.

Destination marketing organizations should note that some overseas social media platforms that are not accessible in China like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook and Instagram are still valued by some Chinese tourists, especially during-trip period in journeys to Western countries. Some tactics for specific user segments should be carefully observed. When promoting specific tourism products to Chinese tourists, it is necessary to understand the user segmentation between platforms or apps.

Social media is a powerful tool for tourism development and sustainability in creating smart tourists and destinations worldwide. In China, the use of social media has stimulated the development of both information and communication technology and tourism.

Social media provides a convenient way to popularise first aid knowledge amongst the general public. So far, little is known about the factors influencing individuals’ adoption of first aid knowledge on social media. Drawing on the information adoption model (IAM), this study investigates the joint effects of cognitive factors (e.g. perceived information usefulness (PIU)), affective factors (e.g. arousal (AR)) and social factors (e.g. descriptive norms (DN)) on first aid knowledge adoption (KA) and examines their antecedent cues from the perspective of information characteristics.

The data were collected from 375 social media users, and the structural equation model was adopted to analyse the results.

The results indicate that PIU, AR and DN all have positive direct effects on first aid KA. Additionally, the study highlights the positive synergistic effect of AR and PIU. Furthermore, the study suggests that AR is determined by message vividness (MV) and emotional tone (ET), whilst DN are determined by peer endorsement (PEE) and expert endorsement (EXE).

Our research is groundbreaking as it delves into the adoption of first aid knowledge through social media, thus pushing the boundaries of existing information adoption literature. Additionally, our study enhances the IAM by incorporating emotional and social elements and provides valuable insights for promoting the spread of first aid knowledge via social media.

Flow, or total concentration with intrinsic enjoyment, has been recognized as being able to enhance online gamer loyalty. However, some gamers who experience flow do not exhibit strong loyalty, posing the vital research question asking for whom flow would not enhance loyalty. Limited knowledge on this issue may lead game providers to assume that flow is influential in strengthening loyalty among all gamers, thus leading to suboptimal resource allocation and reduced effectiveness in retaining gamers. The purpose of the paper is to examine how gaming experience and gaming intensity moderate the impact of flow on online gamer loyalty.

In the paper, the hypotheses were tested using responses from 273 gamers.

The findings show that flow and gaming experience positively impact gamer loyalty. Gaming experience reduces the positive relationship between flow and gamer loyalty. However, gaming intensity does not reduce.

Game providers should focus on creating a flow experience to strengthen the loyalty of gamers with short-gaming experience. However, game providers should devise other means to strengthen loyalty among gamers with long-gaming experience.

The study challenged the assumption of flow theory, i.e. that flow always determines loyalty. Instead, the paper offers a moderator – gaming experience – which sets a boundary condition for this theory. Flow works well only among gamers with relatively short-gaming experience. The study also extended the literature on gaming experience by uniquely indicating its attenuating effect on the relation between flow and loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the occurrence of terms to identify the relevant topics and then to investigate the area (based on topics) of hospitality services that is highly associated with relationship quality. This research represents an opportunity to fill the gap in the current literature, and clarify the understanding of guests’ affective states by evaluating all aspects of their relationship with a hotel.

This research focuses on natural opinions upon which machine-learning algorithms can be executed: text summarization, sentiment analysis and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Our data set contains 47,172 reviews of 33 hotels located in Las Vegas, and registered with Yelp. A component-based structural equation modeling (partial least squares (PLS)) is applied, with a dual – exploratory and predictive – purpose.

To maintain a truly loyal relationship and to achieve competitive success, hospitality managers must take into account both tangible and intangible features when allocating their marketing efforts to satisfaction-, trust- and commitment-based cues. On the other hand, the application of the PLS predict algorithm demonstrates the predictive performance (out-of-sample prediction) of our model that supports its ability to predict new and accurate values for individual cases when further samples are added.

LDA and PLS produce relevant informative summaries of corpora, and confirm and address more specifically the results of the previous literature concerning relationship quality. Our results are more reliable and accurate (providing insights not indicated in guests’ ratings into how hotels can improve their services) than prior statistical results based on limited sample data and on numerical satisfaction ratings alone.

Online games are popular applications of Internet technology, with over 2.8 billion users worldwide. Many players engage in team gameplay, indicating that online games are suitable media through which players connect with their friends. However, past studies have not examined the ability of games to assist players in connecting with their friends, indicating a gap. To fill this gap, the authors propose a new concept, the friend-connecting affordance, which is the ability of an online game to enable players to contact friends within the game.

The authors built a model to explain how games' friend-connecting affordances influence game loyalty. The authors gathered responses from 1,347 online players and used structural equation modeling to test the model.

The authors found that friend-connecting affordances and team participation influence game loyalty. Gaming intensity and gaming history can moderate the impact of friend-connecting affordances.

This new affordance can be realized through various game elements, offering unique and actionable insights to game makers. The authors also compared the friend-connecting affordances among a number of popular online games, providing insights specific to each game and increasing the practical value of the findings.