Negative online reviews are a ubiquitous problem that affects every online seller at some point. It can lead to prospective consumers’ distrust and decrease future purchase intention. Therefore, formulating a proper response is essential for minimizing these negative effects. Based on the ability–motivation paradigm and stability attribution, we find that apology works better when the alleged cause is relatively unstable (e.g., competence-based negative review) and when the seller has a high ability to change. However, when the alleged cause is relatively stable (e.g., integrity-based negative review) or when the seller has a low ability to change, we show that it is better for the seller to defend its reputation. In addition, we demonstrate that a remedial action plan in the seller's response can reinforce the motivation to change communicated through apology. Thus, coupled with a remedial action plan, apology works better than defending one's reputation, regardless of the negative online review type.

Many franchisors employ regional clustering as an expansion strategy and benefit from it financially in its early stage. However, the positive effect of regional clustering tends to reach its maximum at a certain point, and franchisors may be forced to slow down expansion because of the escalating intra-brand competition within the cluster. What governance mechanisms should firms employ to mitigate the negative effects of regional clustering and reap more financial benefits from it? Building upon agency theory and emerging literature on regional clustering in marketing, we postulate that the density of regional clustering of franchised outlets has an inverted U-shaped impact on franchisor financial performance. To mitigate the negative effects of regional clustering, we hypothesize that franchisors can employ more flexible contracts that allow franchisees to engage in local innovation. In addition, the services provided by the franchisor help enhance the competitiveness of the franchise system and serve as a buffer for the negative effect of regional clustering. The results from an analysis of 84 franchise systems over a 10-year period (2003-2012) have largely supported our hypothesis. Hence, our findings offer actionable managerial insights on how firms may minimize the negative effects of regional clustering by deploying governance mechanisms properly. (C) 2019 New York University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

跨国经营的品牌往往因为贸易壁垒和文化差异难以走进东道国消费者心智(如,信任和购买).本文基于文化认同视角,提出了一个跨国品牌通过母国文化定位策略(身份化的和情感化的)促进东道国消费者品牌信任和购买意愿的预测模型.来自大样本数据的实证检验结果显示,跨国经营的品牌可以借助其所蕴含的母国文化资源开发身份化定位和情感化定位策略来锚定东道国消费者心智,促进东道国消费者的品牌信任和购买意愿.其中,借助母国的地域特征和价值观念实施身份化定位和借助母国的文化符号、地域特征和价值观念实施情感化定位,都可以促进东道国消费者的品牌信任.相对于情感化定位,母国文化的身份化定位对东道国消费者的品牌信任具有更大的影响.而母国经济发展水平、品牌产品类型与母国经济形态匹配性等环境因素则对母国文化定位策略驱动东道国消费者的品牌信任具有不同程度的调节效应.这些结论对于跨国经营的品牌基于母国文化资源开发国际化定位策略具有管理启示.

The effectiveness of contracts in terms of cooperative efficiency and relational outcomes in interorganizational relationships has become critical in today's volatile markets. However, extant research on the effect of contracts on trust has found inconsistent results, possibility because of its overwhelming focus on an economic fitness perspective at the expense of a social fitness perspective. Drawing insights from institutional theory, we focus on legitimacy building in interfirm contract design, investigate how contract legitimacies (i.e., regulative, normative, and cognitive) influence the effectiveness of interfirm contract design, and further explore the moderating effects of influence strategies that are applied in the process of contract implementation. Using longitudinal field survey data and archival data, this study finds that the three types of contract legitimacy play different roles in influencing compliance and trust and that noncoercive influence strategies can improve the effectiveness of regulative and normative legitimacy better than coercive influence strategies on trust. The findings offer new theoretical and managerial insights into the role of institutional environments in the effectiveness of contract design in manufacturer–distributor relationships.

Channel relationships with dependence asymmetry, which are especially harmful to partners with dependence disadvantage, abound in developing markets. To help these dependence-disadvantaged parties find feasible solutions for dependence balancing, this study examines network embeddedness and its differential role in enforcing the counterpart’s relationship-specific investments (RSIs), thus leading to improved channel performance for both partners. Based on the political economy framework, we posit that a dependence-disadvantaged partner’s embeddedness in business and government networks entices its partner to commit more RSIs, which in turn improve its channel performance; conversely, such an effect is weaker for the dependence-advantaged partner. We also predict that under high dependence asymmetry, a dependence-disadvantaged partner’s embeddedness in the business network will exert a smaller effect, but its embeddedness in the government network will exert a larger effect. We collected dyadic survey data of buyer–supplier pairs in consumer product industries in China. In general, the results provide support for our predictions. The findings provide theoretical and managerial implications for partners in asymmetric channel relationships in developing markets.

Despite a rich tradition in studying contract-trust nexus, the mutual relationship between these two modes of governance remains equivocal. Adopting a dual-functional and relationship-phase-contingent view of contracts, we theorize that firms' perception of the chief function of contracts varies throughout the relationship life cycle, which results in a relationship-phase-contingent contract-trust nexus. We tested our hypotheses with data collected from the supplier-retailer dyads using quasi-longitudinal analysis. The results indicate that contracts substitute goodwill trust in the exploration phase because of the significantly negative effect of the safeguarding function, whereas in the expansion phase, contracts complement goodwill trust because the positive effect of the coordination function dominates. In the maturity phase, because the effects of the two functions on goodwill trust are both significant, with neither of them dominating the total effect, the net effect of contracts on goodwill trust becomes insignificant. Overall, we provide new insights into when and how contracts complement or substitute goodwill trust throughout the relationship life cycle.

Our study, which integrates the literature on IT (information technology)-enabled interactions and resource management in interfirm relationships, explores the underlying paths through which IT-enabled formal and informal interactions affect cooperation performance from a resource matching perspective. Specifically, we suppose that firms could improve interfirm resource transparency via frequent IT- enabled interactions, which could further improve firms’ capabilities to match resources with each other. Via data from 280 manufacturing firms in China, we found that IT-enabled formal interaction can improve interfirm resource matching capability via enhancing both direct and indirect resource transparency. IT- enabled informal interaction can improve interfirm resource matching capability through increasing indirect resource transparency, but has no impact on direct resource transparency. The enhanced resource matching capabilities could further promote the cooperation performance. Overall, this study provides a better understanding of the role of IT- enabled interactions in interfirm cooperation, and provides guidance for firms to improve capabilities to match resources with each other by IT-enabled interactions.

创业者的媒体合法性与获得风险投资之间的关系是创业管理领域研究的热点问题,但现有研究对于建立媒体合法性需要何种战略以及媒体合法性影响获得风险投资的边界条件仍不够深入和全面.论文构建了创业者的媒体声誉、合法性战略、媒体合法性和获得风险投资之间的关系模型,并在媒体合法性和获得风险投资关系之间引入了风险投资者对媒体信任程度的调节作用.运用多元回归模型对217家互联网创业企业的数据研究发现:先前媒体声誉越高的创业者越倾向于采用合法性遵从战略;遵从战略能够帮助创业者建立更高的媒体合法性;媒体合法性越高,创业者将获得更多的风险投资;风险投资者对媒体的信任程度会正向调节媒体合法性对获得风险投资的影响.

Moving beyond the prevalent notion that relational trust is cultivated through repeated transactions, we argue that relational trust can also be engendered by a partner's contract design capability revealed in the contracting process preceding relationship formation. We conceptualize contract design capability as a dual-dimensional construct, comprising safeguarding capability and coordination capability, which enables firms to design effective contracts befitting transaction attributes. The survey and the scenario-based experiment data, collected from information technology service industry in China, show that both dimensions of a firm's revealed contract design capability can function to engender trust, including goodwill trust and competence trust. Additionally, when the firm's dependence advantage increases, the effects of its revealed contract design capability on goodwill trust decrease but those on competence trust increase. Overall, this paper enriches the trust literature by ascertaining whether and how relational trust can be generated in the pre-formation phase of interfirm relationships.

Prior research has yet to explore the endogenous nature of the contract itself that may affect contract enforcement. Drawing insights from the institutional theory, we investigate the how three types of contract legitimacy (i.e., regulative legitimacy, normative legitimacy, and cognitive legitimacy) influence the effectiveness of interfirm contract enforcement, and the moderating effects of influence strategies. We examine the effectiveness of contract enforcement not only taking account of the behavioral results of compliance, but also internal perception of channel dyadic trust. Using a longitudinal field survey data and archival data, we find three types of legitimacy play different roles in influencing compliance and trust. Cultural- cognitive legitimacy is the most effective one for the trust building, and non-coercive influence strategies can improve the effectiveness of three-type legitimacy better than coercive influence strategies. This paper contributes to the institutional literatures by investigating the effectiveness of legitimacy building of marketing channel contracts, and further explores the interaction effect of legitimacy building strategies and the exercise of influence strategies.

Prior research on interorganizational trust (IOT) has drawn on multiple theories across disciplines, resulting in mixed findings. This meta-analysis combines the three major theories of IOT, namely, transaction cost economics, social embeddedness theory, and resource dependence theory, to retheorize about these IOT relationships. Specifically, we consolidate 168 tests of IOT across theories and corroborate the additive predictive validity of each of the three theories and their combined explanations on IOT development. In particular, by combining IOT theories, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between relationship duration and IOT; we also find an intertemporal link among the three IOT theories, and relationship duration as the spanning factor functions to moderate the IOT relationships across theories. These findings serve to reconcile prior conflicting findings and shed new light on IOT development. We conclude our meta-analysis by providing directions for future research.

As a result of the increasing public attention to environmental crises, corporate environmental actions and their effects are a current research hotspot. This study examines how two types of corporate environmental actions (symbolic and substantial environmental actions) influence consumers’ perceptions of environmental legitimacy and subsequent purchase intentions. Using experimental method, this study finds that (1) substantial environmental action induces significantly higher perceptions of environmental legitimacy than symbolic environmental action, (2) this effect can be attenuated by corporate environmental reputation, and (3) consumer-based environmental legitimacy has a significantly positive effect on consumers’ purchase intentions. These findings have interesting implications for both researchers and practitioners involved in green marketing.

This introduction provides an overview of the papers in this special issue, which highlights the contributions the authors from both marketing and management have endeavored to make to the relevant literature. Also this introduction pinpoints the possible directions and specific topics the scholars from both areas can explore in the future to be mutually informed regarding supplier-buyer relationship management.

With the aid of information technology, consumers have increasingly engaged in social interaction in online brand communities. How can these strangers make friends online? Drawing on embeddedness theory and media richness theory, we examine the antecedents and intermediate mechanisms of online friendship. We theorize that online brand community interactivity aided by instant messaging technology is the main driving force of online friendship, whereas social presence and a sense of yuan (a Chinese concept describing predetermined relations) mediate online friendship development. Online friendship in turn enhances consumer online brand community commitment. We test our conceptual model with a sample of consumers from Chinese online sporting goods forums. The results support our hypotheses and inform online brand community research and practice.

Most literature suggests that consumers are happier when they spend their money on experience, rather than material purchases, on the premise that consumers may evaluate material possessions largely on the basis of their functional utility and ability to fulfill basic human needs; experiential consumption reportedly fulfills mainly psychological needs. The present research addresses material purchases that fulfill not only functional but also psychological needs (e.g., status purchase). The results reveal that consumers with high self-discrepancy are more apt to derive happiness from material status purchases than those with low self-discrepancy (Experiments 1 and 2); this effect is mediated by the motives for goal pursuit (Experiment 3), as triggered by the desire to narrow the gap between the actual self and an ideal self. Copyright (C) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As multinational enterprises (MNEs) increasingly source from suppliers in emerging markets, a particular challenge is how to manage their relationships with suppliers within potentially deleterious institutional environments. A large body of research has investigated supply chain management from multiple theoretical viewpoints, mostly from transaction cost economics and relational exchange perspective (Carey et al., 2011). From these perspectives, companies can use both formal governance mechanisms such as contracts, control, and monitoring as well as informal governance mechanisms such as trust, socialization, and relational norms to manage the relationships with their suppliers (Cao and Lumineau, 2015; Li et al., 2010; Villena et al., 2011). However, most extant studies on supply chain management have overlooked the role of institutional environments in which companies cooperate with their suppliers (Zhou et al., 2014). As emerging markets have experienced massive changes in their economic, social, and political institutions, institutional characteristics greatly shape the efficacy of supply chain management strategies. For example, signing a detailed contract may not be helpful in emerging markets where legal institutions are yet to be developed. Transaction cost economics was originated from institutional contexts with a long tradition of contract laws and strong legal regimes. Yet such strong legal institutions do not automatically appear in emerging markets (Handley and Angst, 2015). Indeed, the lack of strong legal institutions represents one of the most severe challenges for businesses operating in emerging markets (Peng, 2003). Related, the instability of political regime also challenges supply chain management practices in emerging markets. When strong political and legal institutions are absent, informal institutions based on personal connections and social network play a pivotal role, because social networks provide access to scarce resources and offer legitimacy status (Yang et al., 2012). However, the inherent restraint of social networks is the limited number of personal ties that an individual can possess. Because personal relationships are difficult to build and costly to maintain, they may not be able to catch up with rapid growing exchange scale in emerging markets (Peng, 2003). So how could companies manage their relationships with suppliers in emerging markets, which are characterized by political, legal, and social challenges? To address this fascinating issue, this special issue serves as an exemplar for integrating the unique characteristics of emerging economies in conceptual development and empirical assessment. What makes emerging economies a unique context to study supply chain management? Emerging markets are “low-income, rapid growth countries using economic liberalization as their primary engine of growth” (Hoskisson et al., 2000), where institutions are undergoing fundamental and continuous changes. The most unique features that seriously challenge effective supply chain management are institutional voids, including shallow capital markets, deficient legal systems, lack of independent accounting intermediaries, and etc. (Khanna and Palepu, 1997). In large emerging markets, institutional voids also influence regional economic development, leading to subnational variations within the same country (Zhou and Poppo, 2010). Accordingly, companies must develop alternative operations management strategies and adjust their strategic decisions to overcome institutional voids. The call for papers generated 50 submissions, among which six manuscripts were finally accepted after three or four rounds of review. These six papers include survey research, case studies, and archival data research, and use samples of Chinese firms, Indian companies, and American firms that outsource in emerging markets. They also address explicitly the methodological issues (e.g., endogeneity and common method bias) indicated by the recent JOM Editorial (Guide and Ketokivi, 2015). How to deal with role hazard between buyers and suppliers caused by sub-national institutional distance? How do social management capabilities help multinational buyers and their emerging market suppliers respond to stakeholder pressures, address regulatory gaps, and improve social performance? How does institutional deficiency affect contractual inefficiency and consequently ties utilization of emerging market firms? How do outsourcing, in-house offshoring, and sales to emerging markets affect product recalls and inventory performance? How do buyer-supplier compatibility and institutional environment affect product co-development between buyers and suppliers? How to reduce local supplier opportunism in China when facing regulatory uncertainty? Collectively, these papers provide fresh insights into how institutional environments in emerging markets affect operation management strategies and how companies develop supply chain management strategies to deal with institutional voids. In Dong, Ju, and Fang's article, the authors introduce an important notion, role hazard, which represents a critical yet understudied relational coordination problem. Their study shows that subnational institutional distance leads to role ambiguity and conflict, two important facets of role hazards between buyers and suppliers, which in turn jeopardize supply chain performance. To mitigate such problem, supply chain partners could share information and adapt to the changing environments continuously. These findings provide a novel perspective on how supply chain partners foster relational coordination by reducing role hazards caused by subnational institutional distance in emerging markets. Huq, Chowdhury, and Klassen use multiple case studies from before and after the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh to develop an understanding of the skills, practices, relationships and processes (collectively referred as social management capabilities) that help firms in emerging markets to improve their performance on human safety & welfare, and social & community development. Specifically, they attempt to address two research questions: What are the social management capabilities needed by multinational buyers and their emerging market suppliers to improve social performance and respond to stakeholder pressures? How do external factors and shocks affect the development and evolution of these capabilities in emerging markets? Their findings provide novel insights on how multinational buyers and local suppliers achieve social performance in emerging markets. Shou, Zheng, and Zhu address another critical issue in emerging markets: contractual ineffectiveness, the difficulty of using contracts to safeguard and coordinate transactions between supply chain partners. The authors show that legal enforceability and information transparency lead to contractual inefficiency, which in turn promotes a firm's efforts to seek political and business ties. They also find that efficiency pressure and equity pressures differentially moderate the relationships between contractual inefficiency and pursuit of social ties. These results provide important implications on the alternative and dynamic use of contracts and social ties in supply chain management in emerging markets. Steven and Britto study three different forms of emerging market penetration (i.e., outsourcing, in-house offshoring, and sales to emerging markets) and their associations with product recalls. They find that outsourcing penetration increases recalls whereas sales penetration reduces recalls. Although they cannot find a direct relationship between in-house offshoring and recalls, they show that in-house offshoring is able to mitigate the positive relationship between outsourcing and recalls. They further investigate how emerging markets' characteristics (e.g., institutional immaturity) moderate these relationships. Their results provide a finer understanding of the complex relationships among different forms of emerging market penetration and product recalls. Wang, Li, and Chang focus on how buyer-supplier compatibility influences product co-development between buyers and suppliers in China. They find that while knowledge commonality has an inverted U-shaped relationship with product co-development, goal compatibility has a positive effect on product co-development. Moreover, mutual learning partially mediates the effects of buyer-supplier compatibility on product co-development. They further consider how formal and informal institutional environments (i.e., government intervention and guanxi importance) moderate the relationship between mutual learning and product co-development differently. Their research provides important theoretical and managerial implications for buyer-supplier collaboration in emerging markets. Wang, Zhang, Wang, and Sheng examine contracts and trust as two alternative governance modes in curtailing opportunism in China. They argue that the effects of these two governance strategies in reducing opportunism depend on two institution-related factors: regulatory uncertainty and relationship structure in the Chinese markets. The authors show that contracts are more effective in deterring supplier opportunism when regulatory uncertainty is high. In addition, contracts help curtail opportunism more in domestic, compared with international, buyer–supplier relationships, whereas trust is more effective in restricting supplier opportunism in international relationships than in domestic ones. Taken together, these articles indicate that institutional environments play a critical role in supply chain management in emerging markets. Equally important, firms in emerging market can develop their own operations management strategies and capabilities to overcome institutional voids and enhance supply chain performance. These articles illustrate the fundamental challenges brought by institutional voids and provide fresh perspectives on effective supply chain management in emerging markets. Whereas these articles advance this line of research significantly, they only represent an initial effort to address a highly complicated issue. Looking forward, we would like to encourage more research to take the unique characteristics of emerging markets into consideration. Among the six papers in this special issue, two consider the overall institutional environments such as subnational institutional distance and institutional immaturity, the other three examine legal institutions such as regulatory gaps, legal enforceability, and regulatory uncertainty, whereas only one touches upon social institutions (i.e., guanxi importance). However, institutional environments include a variety of formal and informal factors. Formal factors consist of property rights protection, government interference, policy changes, etc., and informal factors include ideology, cultural values and norms. For example, the lack of intellectual property protection causes serious problems for supply chain management in emerging markets. How could multinational buyers outsource the manufacturing to local suppliers and at the same time protect themselves from illegal copying? Also, emerging market governments tend to interfere with market operations heavily. How would such government intervention affect operations management? How could emerging markets firms take advantage of such government intervention to foster their supply chain performance? How would policy changes affect supply chain management? Inadequate institutional arrangements such as weak legal systems and regulations in emerging markets render firms a disadvantageous position in which they lack the institutional assurance for their decisions and operations. However, informal institutions such as cultural values and norms may complement and/or substitute the formal institutions in providing a regulated business environment in emerging markets. For example, social ties are shown to enhance performance because of their cultural legitimacy and resource implications in China. How could emerging market firms maneuver the cultural values to form cohesive social ties for long-term cooperation? How could firms take advantage of social ties to form cooperative business circles to enhance governance effectiveness? Given the cultural differences across nations, how could multinational firms form governance that spans cultural relationships across borders? Moreover, emerging markets often lack key resources such as financial capital, reliable market information, mature factor market, etc. The shortage of financial capital makes firms unlikely to invest substantially in R&D; accordingly, if buyers need special expertise from suppliers to co-develop their products, how could they solve such problem? How does such challenge affect product and process innovation in supply chain management? On the other hand, without reliable market information, it is difficult for firms to accurately forecast the future demand of their products and adjust their production accordingly. How do firms cooperate with their supply chain partners to overcome this difficulty? Or how can supply chain partners take advantage of this difficulty to reap more benefits in emerging markets? Overall, this special issue offers new directions for future research to explore more deeply the interplay of institutional environments and operations management strategies in emerging markets. Future research should contextualize the unique institutional features of emerging markets to generate novel and deep insights that extend extant operation management literature. Such insights are of great importance for academia, practitioners, and policy makers in emerging markets. Reviewers We deeply appreciate the previous Editor in Chief, Tom Choi, and the current Editors in Chief, Dan Guide and Mikko Ketokivi, for their support to this special issue. We would also like to thank the reviewers, who provided us timely and constructive comments to facilitate the review process.

A sound follower base is a prerequisite for the survival of a brand micro-blog. Thus, determining how to enhance followers' continuance intentions to follow is critical. We integrated the value-based adoption mode and social identity theory to test a conceptual model. The proposed model identified three sets of blog utilities (information, social, and service) affecting followers' continuance intention through perceived value and brand micro-blog identification. Using a Chinese sample drawn from the Sina micro-blog, we sought to clarify why followers continue to follow a brand micro-blog. The concluding section discusses our findings in terms of implications for theory and practice.