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The purposes of this study are to examine how parents implement discussion-based parental mediation (i.e. active mediation) to influence the way children understand advertising on television, computers and smartphones and to investigate factors associated with parental mediation practices.

A survey was conducted with parents in Singapore whose children were watching television, using computers with internet access and using smartphones.

The degree to which parents engage in active mediation of advertising is similar across different media. Active mediation of advertising is more a function of parents’ attitudes toward advertising directed to children, parents’ concerns about media influence on their children and parental self-efficacy rather than the age of their children.

The survey was conducted in a single country and did not examine the consequences of parental mediation of advertising. Future research should consider cross-cultural perspectives and investigate the outcomes of parental mediation.

For advertising practitioners, this study argues that it is important to understand how parents view different forms of advertising. For media educators and policy makers, this study suggests that various parental factors should be considered to develop effective guidelines for parents.

This study adds novel insights to the literature on consumer socialization by investigating how parents – the primary socialization agents in children’s development of consumption-related behaviors – help children understand advertising across different media.

This study aims to examine young social media users’ differential acceptance of data-driven ad personalization depending on the types of personal data used, and to propose and test the Privacy and Trust Equilibrium (PATE) model, a new conceptual model developed to explain the intertwined nature of the competing influences of platform-related factors (privacy concern, trust, and privacy fatigue) on acceptance of ad personalization.

A survey of 440 Instagram users aged 18–24 in Australia was conducted to examine the relationships between the three factors of the PATE model and acceptance of ad personalization utilizing overt vs covert data collection methods.

This study shows the highest level of acceptance for personalization using overtly collected data and the lowest for covert data. The results also support the PATE model, revealing the competing dynamics of how the platform-related factors shape consumers’ acceptance of data-driven ad personalization. Privacy concern discourages Instagram users from accepting personalized ads, while trust encourages them. When the pushing influence of privacy concern and the pulling influence of trust form equilibrium, generating cognitive dissonance, privacy fatigue seems to play a significant role in resolving the dissonance, leading to increased acceptance.

This study advances the understanding of how concurrent push–pull-resigning factors affect young consumers’ acceptance of data-driven ad personalization practices, expanding the scope of research on data-driven personalized advertising and privacy.

This study investigates how different parental mediation strategies (active versus restrictive) and teen Douyin users' privacy risk perceptions are associated with their privacy management behaviors.

An online survey with teen Douyin users (N = 500) was administered in mainland China.

Perceived privacy risk leads teenagers to implement stricter privacy management strategies. However, different types of parental mediation have different impacts on teens' privacy management behaviors. Discussion-based active mediation is positively correlated with privacy disclosure and privacy boundary linkage, while rule-based restrictive mediation is positively associated with privacy boundary control. In addition, active mediation encourages teens to use their own judgment about privacy risks when deciding how much personal information to disclose and with whom they want to share their information. Conversely, restrictive mediation results in teens making decisions about disclosing private information without taking their own risk assessments into account.

Video-sharing social media platforms like TikTok and Douyin have become a cultural trend among teen social media users. However, loss of privacy is a potentially serious downside of using such platforms. Despite the platforms' popularity among this age group, little is known about the ways teens manage their privacy on such social media platforms. By examining how teens' privacy risk perception and parental intervention shape three different aspects of privacy boundary management (i.e. privacy disclosure, privacy boundary linkage, and privacy boundary control), this study provides a comprehensive understanding of teen Douyin users' privacy management.

This study aims to investigate pharmaceutical company-sponsored disease information websites that are created and operated by pharmaceutical companies. Without clear indication of the site ownership, these websites look like non-advertising health information websites. Consumers’ responses to pharmaceutical company-sponsored disease information websites were examined in comparison to their responses to typical direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug brand websites.

A field experiment was conducted with a representative sample of US adults. Study subjects were randomly assigned to one of three live websites: pharmaceutical company-sponsored disease information website; DTC brand website with a high level of trust cues; and DTC brand website with a low level of trust cues. After viewing the assigned websites, participants completed an online questionnaire. The questionnaire included measurements for perceived website trust, attitude toward the website, intention to use information, perceived importance of prescription drug information, perceived health, prescription drug use, disposition to trust, prior experience with the website and demographic information.

The pharmaceutical company-sponsored disease information website generated higher website trust and more positive attitude and information use intention than the DTC drug brand websites. The results suggest that company-sponsored disease information websites may present some ethical issues related to website identity information transparency, which seems to inhibit consumers’ persuasion knowledge activation and proper coping responses. Because such websites look like non-advertising health information websites, consumers tend to evaluate them more positively and place higher trust in them than typical DTC drug brand websites with clear advertiser identification.

This is the first study examining pharmaceutical company-sponsored disease information websites, a relatively new form of covert DTC online advertising with potential ethical concerns due to the site identity transparency issues. This study’s findings suggest that consumers are likely to be more trusting and receptive of information presented in websites taking the form of a non-advertising health information website than in DTC brand websites.

This paper aims to investigate factors affecting small business owner/managers' adoption of country‐specific business websites.

A survey questionnaire was sent to a selected sample of 300 small businesses in the Northwest of England. In total, 55 responded with complete and usable answers, representing a response rate of 18.33 per cent.

The results indicate that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use positively affect the adoption of country‐specific business websites. Furthermore, perceived company image in a foreign market and perceived transaction benefits were found to be significant antecedents of the perceived usefulness of country‐specific business websites.

The research sample is relatively small, and limited to small businesses located in the Northwest region of the UK. Emergent results are not necessarily representative of the wider small business population of the UK.

The results of this research study would be of benefit to owner/managers who intend to expand into international niche markets by adopting country‐specific business websites.

This paper extends the theoretical framework of the website acceptance model (WAM) in the context of small businesses, by distinguishing two factors that influence the perceived usefulness of having a country‐specific website.