Purpose: What if the thrill of a mysterious box could quietly lead to addictive patterns and further mental health? This study uncovers the mechanism of how mysterious box consumption leads to addiction and subsequent negative mental health issues. Methodology: This study adopted the quantitative method, with a total of 395 respondents participating who engage in mysterious box consumption. Findings: The study reveals three main findings. First, mysterious box retention can generate three levels of attachments, including delight, advocacy, and addiction. Second, mysterious box shopping addiction further leads to several negative mental health issues, including stress and depression. Most interestingly, consumers with emotional instability will negatively moderate the relationships between mysterious box addiction and other negative mental health issues. Originality/Value: The results of this paper will enrich current literature by revealing the mechanism of mysterious box consumption at the individual level. This product is covered as a branded entertainment and trendiness product, yet it has gambling characteristics and addictive mechanisms without substances that are worth concern. At the organizational level, companies can adjust the adoption level of the mysterious box in their marketing activities to be more ethical and moral.
This study investigates the factors influencing impulse buying in live streaming commerce using the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model. As a rapidly growing e-commerce trend, live streaming commerce offers unique opportunities and challenges for both marketers and consumers. This study hypothesized that attractiveness, social presence, and promotional incentive (stimuli) enhance perceived enjoyment (organism), which in turn drives impulse buying (response). Self-control was examined both as a direct predictor of impulse buying and as a moderator between perceived enjoyment and impulse buying. Data collected from respondents were evaluated using PLS-SEM. It is observed that all three stimuli positively impact perceived enjoyment, which significantly influences impulse buying. Self-control negatively affects impulse buying but does not have a moderating effect on the link between perceived enjoyment and impulse buying. These results offer actionable insights for marketers in the context of live streaming commerce. It is important to balance promotional strategies with consumer awareness to promote rational purchasing decisions.
This study examines how top-ranked, communication-oriented YouTube creators express emotion across three East Asian platform contexts: South Korea, Mainland China, and Taiwan. Drawing on meta-feeling theory, self-construal and display-rule frameworks, and research on digital creator communication, we analyze 1,669 utterances from 60 videos (15 creators × 4 videos), combining multilingual coding of nine emotion categories by two independent coders with video-level mixed-effects modeling. Affect-bearing expression is highest in the Taiwanese sample, while the Korean and Mainland samples are lower and do not differ significantly from each other (region effect χ²(2) = 14.0, p < .001) ; the difference is not driven by individual creators (ICC ≈ .00) and is stable under leave-one-creator re-estimation. The regions also differ in the kind of emotion expressed (χ²(16) = 56.6, p < .001; Cramér’s V = .37): the Korean sample is Joy-dominant, the Taiwanese sample relational-inquisitive, and the Mainland sample the most evenly distributed. Leave-one-genre-out analyses show that no single content sub-genre produces the regional contrast, although genre, being nested within region, cannot be fully excluded. The findings characterize the sampled top creators rather than wider creator populations, and the study contributes a reproducible procedure for measuring emotional expression across languages. Keywords: meta-feeling; emotional expression; YouTube creators; East Asian digital media; cross-regional comparison; parasocial communication; qualitative content analysis
In the context of digital transformation and globalization, cross-border e-commerce has become one of the key drivers of international trade, especially in developing markets like Vietnam. By conducting a survey of 356 people in Vietnam, this research aims to investigate factors affecting consumers' cross-border e-commerce purchase intention. Through a combined theoretical model including Social Identity Theory (SIT), Information Acceptance Model (IAM), and Hierarchy of Effects Model (HOE), this study explores the role of country of origin, product involvement, consumer ethnocentrism, online review quality, brand image, perceived product quality, and consumer attitudes. Ultimately, 11 out of 13 hypotheses are accepted through PLS-SEM testing. The results show that factors such as country of origin, product involvement, online review quality, and brand image have positive impacts on perceived product quality, consumer attitudes, and cross-border e-commerce purchase intention. Moreover, perceived quality and consumer attitudes play mediating roles in the model. In contrast, ethnocentrism does not show an influence. These findings offer valuable implications for businesses, policymakers, and platforms to optimize consumer engagement and trust in the context of cross-border e-commerce. To enhance the review system, marketing strategy, and legal framework for safe and efficient cross-border transactions, this paper also proposes practical recommendations.
The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce has transformed consumer interactions with digital platforms through algorithmic recommendation systems. However, their complexity and opacity raise concerns about transparency and trust. This study examines how explainable AI-driven recommendation quality influences purchase intention, focusing on perceived personalization and consumer trust. Using a quantitative, cross-sectional design, data were collected from 99 active e-commerce users through a structured questionnaire and analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and bootstrapping. The measurement model demonstrated satisfactory reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Results show that explainable AI-driven recommendation quality significantly influences perceived personalization (β = 0.434, p < 0.001) and consumer trust (β = 0.297, p = 0.002). Perceived personalization significantly enhances consumer trust (β = 0.371, p < 0.001), while consumer trust positively affects purchase intention (β = 0.588, p < 0.001). Significant indirect effects were also identified, including a serial indirect effect through perceived personalization and consumer trust (β = 0.095, p = 0.002). The findings highlight explainability as an important mechanism shaping consumer perceptions, trust, and purchase intention in e-commerce. Keywords: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), AI-Driven Recommendation Systems, Perceived Personalization, Consumer Trust, Purchase Intention, E-Commerce, PLS-SEM
