Business Commons^™

B2b Ewom On Alibaba: Signaling Through Online Reviews In Platform-Based Social Exchange, Zsófia Tóth, Mona Mrad, Omar S. Itani, Jun Luo, Martin J. Liu

Marketing Faculty Publications and Presentations

Highlights

• The study explores buyers' signaling of observable and unobservable supplier characteristics on the Alibaba e-platform.

• Key B2B eWOM themes that the study identifies are: product/service quality, human touch, responsiveness, and resilience.

• Findings demonstrate that human touch is vital in B2B e-platform environments too, not only in physical reality.

• Buyers' signals aim at suppliers as well as at prospective buyers and implicitly buyers send signals about themselves too.

• Signaling Theory is applied to address the signaling process, while Social Exchange Theory informs relevant cost-benefit assessments.

Abstract

This study investigates the contemporary role of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in business exchanges through …

Seeing Destinations Through Vlogs: Implications For Leveraging Customer Engagement Behavior To Increase Travel Intention, Yusi Cheng, Wei Wei, Lu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Purpose: This study aims to understand customers' watching experience with travel vlogs and its impacts on one of the most prominent manifestations of customer engagement behaviors (CEBs) – word-of-mouth (WOM) – and their travel intention. Drawing upon the theory of resonance, this study incorporated both cognitive and emotional aspects of travel vlog watching experience. Design/methodology/approach: Online survey data were collected from 352 participants who have watched travel vlogs over the past 12 months. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was performed for hypotheses testing. Findings: The study results reveal positive impacts of source credibility, inspiration, escapism and self-congruence on …