ABSTRACT
In order to sell unmarketable products and alleviate farmers' economic difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, public-interest livestreaming for farmers with the property of altruism has been emerging as a new way of mobile commerce and has attracted a huge amount of attention among Chinese consumers. In this paper, based on the theory of reasoned action, we intend to explore the influencing factors from the levels of the platform, product, and consumer that affect consumers' attitudes and purchase intentions towards agricultural products via public-interest livestreaming. We have collected 475 valid responses from Chinese consumers (especially from youth) who experienced the public-interest livestreaming for farmers and then constructed a structural equation model using the partial least-squares method. The results show that consumers' attitudes towards agricultural products have a significant positive impact on their purchase intentions with respect to livestreaming. Perceived interactivity, perceived endorsement, product familiarity, subjective norms, altruistic value, and the livestream shopping experience all significantly positively affected consumers' attitudes toward the agricultural products in the mobile livestreaming. Moreover, subjective norms can also directly impact consumers' purchase intentions. We can see that the proposed influencing factors from the platform, product, and consumer levels provide a better explanation of the attitudes and purchase intentions, respectively. This paper aims to expand the empirical research on the purchase intentions of agricultural products and then to provide insights into the phenomenon of public-interest livestreaming during COVID-19, which can assist farmers in addressing the dilemma caused by the epidemic and promote rural economic development by mobile commerce. Additionally, the insights from this case study in China can also be extended to other countries where farmers have suffered from the impact of COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
By iheriting online natural properties, anonymous social media (ASM) applications have become popular and have attracted large amounts of mobile users (e.g., the youth) who can construct new identities for role-play and show themselves in anonymous ways. In order to investigate the influencing factors toward usage intention (UI) and platform swinging (PS) behavior among anonymous social applications, we choose one of the most active ASM App "Soul" as the example in China and then conducte a semi-structured interview with 23 valid Soul users using qualitative methods. The results show that the factors, i.e., perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived privacy riskiness, perceived anonymity, subjective norms, emotional attachments, and perceived interactivity, indeed affect UI among Soul users via online communication. Moreover, we find that PS behavior is ubiquitous among interviewees and mainly depends on diversified needs, which consist of nine dimensions including different position and function among apps, usage comparison, friend migration, etc. Nearly 80% of interviewees believe that there exists a relationship between UI and PS, which can be described as a inverted U-shaped curve, i.e., the higher or lower UI, the less probability of PS. For the individuals' social media usage behavior, a closed loop "Attitude-Intention-Behavior" is summarized. By conducting qualitative research, we intend to provide some insights and deepen the understanding of UI among ASM users in daily life.
ABSTRACT
The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has greatly threatened the global health system and triggered the public health emergency. In order to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare and prevention information have been delivered through omni-media channels (e.g., television, radio, social platform, etc.). As a traditional outlet, the short message service (SMS) can timely provide abundant anti-epidemic alerts to mobile users. In this paper, we aim to investigate mobile users' attitudes toward COVID-19 public-interest SMS sent from government authorities and then explore the insight from messaging texts collected between January and April 2020 in China. In general, respondents show a positive attitude towards content and the necessity of public-interest SMS during the pandemic. However, we find that gender and age differences not only affect content evaluation, but also influence reading and forwarding behaviors. For the necessity of SMS, it shows significant difference between the 18-25-year-old and over 40-year-old group, with the middle and elder group showing serious attitudes and giving higher remarks than the youth due to the habits of media usage. However no significant difference is presented between females and males. In terms of content, the category of topics and releasing institutions are analyzed, respectively. Due to the centralized responses and coordination of prevention and control in China, the messages from COVID-19 disposal organizations (e.g., municipal steering group and provincial CDC) account for more than 70% among four cities.