Post-COVID recovery is often assessed through activity indicators, leaving operating profitability less examined. This study assesses whether activity recovery in European services was accompanied by operating-profitability recovery. Using Eurostat Structural Business Statistics for 16 countries and eight service sectors, we compare 2023 outcomes with 2015–2019 pre-COVID trends using turnover and gross operating rate gaps. Activity-only recovery accounts for 39.2
Annual review features in streaming platforms have become digital rituals, yet their long-term effects remain unclear. Integrating uses and gratifications, self-determination, and social identity theories, this study examines how gamified annual reviews shape social sharing and platform continuance intention among 285 users using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results reveal a dual-edged mechanism: while social motivations drive viral sharing benefits, introspective listening habits inhibit them. Furthermore, while review sharing benefits stimulate short-term viral engagement, they paradoxically reduce long-term platform continuance via a “psychological closure” effect.
Automated services involve embedded uncertainty arising from limited transparency and human assistance. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response framework, this study conceptualizes embedded uncertainty as a contextual condition and examines cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying service usage. Survey results show that motivated consumer innovativeness increases service usage intention and reduces perceived risk. Perceived risk mediates the relationship between motivated consumer innovativeness and usage intention, while technology anxiety strengthens the negative relationship between perceived risk and usage intention. The study contributes by distinguishing embedded uncertainty from consumers’ psychological responses and explaining how cognitive risk evaluation and affective technology anxiety jointly shape automated service usage.
Remote work blurs work–family–leisure boundaries, positioning workations as a hybrid tourism practice. This study examines how work–family conflict and enrichment shape perceived workation value through escape and seeking rewards. Using PLS-SEM with remote workers in Taiwan and Japan, both rewards mediate these relationships. Job motivation potential strengthens the influence of escape rewards but partially weakens seeking rewards. Notably, work–family conflict predicts escape rewards exclusively for individuals with non-relaxation-oriented vacation lifestyles. ANN analysis reveals work–family enrichment as a stronger predictor of workation value than conflict. Overall, this study advances literature by clarifying work–travel motivational dynamics.
We examine the relationship between student-oriented service responsibility in higher education and students’ degree-value judgments, with perceived skill-development support modeled as the link. Survey data from 1,669 Romanian students (1,655 complete SEM cases) show that enabling resources and standards alignment are both positively related to this support, with a numerically larger unstandardized estimate for enabling resources. Skill-development support is related to higher teaching-quality satisfaction, more favorable EU comparability assessments, and weaker foreign-credential advantage beliefs. All six modeled indirect associations have bootstrap confidence intervals excluding zero, consistent with observable support informing degree-value judgments under delayed verification.
