This study examines whether firm-initiated generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) communications are associated with firm value in UK-listed tourism, travel, and hospitality (TTH) firms. The final sample includes 177 firms from 2018 to 2024, comprising 68 firms with verified WeChat official accounts and 109 firms retained with zero-valued communication measures. From 105,429 archived posts, we develop a bilingual annotation scheme and supervised deep-learning classifiers to identify GenAI communication and distinguish implementation-salient disclosures from generic mentions. Our preferred measures are share-normalized, capturing both GenAI communication intensity and implementation emphasis relative to total posting activity. Firm- and year-fixed-effects results show that implementation-weighted GenAI communication is positively associated with Tobin's Q and operating performance. Digital innovation partially mediates this relationship, while industry dynamism and complexity strengthen it, but munificence does not. The study contributes a tourism-specific measure of GenAI capability signaling and clarifies the value relevance of implementation-oriented communication in service-intensive digital contexts.
Agentic artificial intelligence is moving digital retail from recommendation toward autonomous consumer representation. This research develops agentic retail representation capability as the perceived capacity to acquire retail intelligence, adapt choice strategies, preserve consumer goals, and execute bounded actions. The study includes a qualitative pretest, two scale validation samples, three experiments, and an independent category validation study, comprising 4680 quantitative participants and 210 qualitative respondents. Studies 1A and 1B assess four reflective dimensions combined as a formative composite. Study 2 finds higher delegation intention under a bundled capability intervention and statistical indirect associations through perceived diagnosticity and algorithm trust. Study 3 identifies expertise dependent responses across assortments jointly varying in size, priority information coverage, and displayed prices, preventing attribution to complexity alone. Study 4 finds stronger capability related trust under a bundled transparency intervention and higher authorization rates within an experimental shopping task. Study 5 examines measurement transportability and correspondence with independently coded agent activity. These findings concern perceived capability, measured reliance, and task authorization rather than verified commercial purchases. The contribution distinguishes functional capacity from reliance judgments and permission decisions while specifying the limits of measured mediation and bundled interventions. Retail applications require further validation with real payments, delivery, returns, and repeated consumer use.
Retailer authenticity is treated as a commercial asset, yet its relevance may depend on identity conversion. This longitudinal study separates retailer-controlled evidence from customers' higher-order authenticity judgments and from the self-definitional response that follows. Retailer transparency supplies informational evidence concerning disclosure, clarity, accuracy, and candor, whereas frontline brand enactment supplies behavioral evidence that employees embody the retailer's professed identity. Three waves of matched survey data from 10,214 loyalty customers nested in 208 stores in China are linked to a 12-month archival comparable-sales-growth window beginning during the closing month of Time 3. Multilevel longitudinal structural equation modeling indicates temporally ordered positive associations from Time 1 transparency and frontline brand enactment to Time 2 authenticity, from Time 2 authenticity to Time 3 customer-company identification, and from store-level identification to follow-up sales growth. The direct authenticity-growth association is not reliable after identification is modeled. The authenticity-identification association is stronger at higher prestige, recorded frontline interaction frequency, and brand familiarity, consistent with proposed conditions of cue diagnosticity and identity relevance. The study's central contribution is an evidence-judgment-identity-performance account: the observed pattern links authenticity with commercial performance through identification, without establishing that this is its only pathway or that a direct premium is absent. The field design establishes temporal order and covariation, not random assignment or causal identification.
Retailers increasingly deploy generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to handle complaints, yet evidence remains limited on when these agents restore purchasing rather than merely improve immediate evaluations. We develop a configuration model in which recovery agent identity (GenAI versus human) is separated from recovery agent empowerment, defined as authority to complete a remedy during the encounter. Across a qualitative study, two pretests, two randomised experiments, and two secondary-data studies in United Kingdom retailing, we examine perceived recovery justice, customer effort reduction, and trust restoration as mechanisms linking recovery configurations to subsequent behaviour. The experiments capture an incentivised purchase choice, whereas the field studies observe repeat purchase, spending, time to next purchase, and churn. GenAI was not inherently superior to a human agent. Its advantage emerged when it had visible and executable authority to issue refunds, replacements, delivery upgrades, or account credits. Empowered GenAI improved justice, reduced effort, and restored trust, and generated the strongest purchase outcomes. Failure severity weakened this advantage, while customer relationship strength amplified both the penalty for low-empowerment GenAI and the reward for empowered GenAI. The study contributes an authority-identity decoupling perspective: customers respond not only to who communicates, but also to whether the recovery architecture gives that agent the data access, decision rights, and operational capability required to act. The findings support selective empowerment for routine failures and accountable hybrid escalation for severe or data-constrained cases.
This study explains when eco-certification creates firm value in hospitality and why similar certification programmes generate different outcomes across institutional settings. Using a balanced panel of 50 listed hospitality firms from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Egypt (2015-2025; 550 firm-year observations), the study combines staggered difference-in-differences estimation with implementation-alignment analyses. Results show that eco-certification intensity increases both firm value and green innovation, while green innovation transmits most of the valuation effect. Additional analyses identify a certification-translation gap, whereby firms with extensive certification coverage but limited innovation receive significantly lower valuation benefits. Certification effects are nonlinear and delayed, becoming stronger only after certification reaches meaningful portfolio breadth. Regulatory stringency and environmental norms mainly stimulate implementation, whereas sustainable finance depth and governance quality facilitate and capitalise innovation. The study reconceptualises ecocertification as a translation-governance mechanism whose value depends on implementation alignment, scale, timing, and institutional support.
