Signaling Quality with Return Insurance: Theory and Empirical Evidence

This paper examines an innovative return policy, return insurance, emerging on various shopping platforms such as Taobao.com and JD.com. Return insurance is underwritten by an insurer and can be purchased by either a retailer or a consumer. Under such insurance, the insurer partially compensates consumers for their hassle costs associated with product return. We analyze the informational roles of return insurance when product quality is the retailer’s private information, consumers infer quality from the retailer’s price and insurance adoption, and the insurer strategically chooses insurance premiums. We show that return insurance can be an effective signal of high quality. When consumers have little confidence about high quality and expect a significant gap between high and low qualities, a high-quality retailer can be differentiated from a low-quality retailer solely through its adoption of return insurance. We confirm, both analytically and empirically with a data set consisting of more than 10,000 sellers on JD.com, that return insurance is more likely adopted by higher-quality sellers under information asymmetry. Furthermore, we find that the presence of the third party (i.e., the insurer) leads to double marginalization in signaling, which strengthens a signal’s differentiating power and sometimes renders return insurance a preferred signal, in comparison with free return, whereby retailers directly compensate for consumers’ return hassles. As an effective and costly signal of quality, return insurance may also improve consumer surplus and reduce product returns. Its profit advantage to the insurer is most pronounced under significant quality uncertainty. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

The Role of Cause Involvement and Assortment Size on Decision Difficulty via Communal Relationships

Social enterprises aim to achieve both social and economic goals by reaching broader consumer segments through extensive assortments, but research into how this product proliferation strategy affects consumer response is scarce. In the current research we examine how consumers judge social enterprises providing large product assortments. Three experiments show that choice overload (i.e., having a decision difficulty when faced with many options) can be reversed among target consumers of social enterprises—specifically those whose involvement in a social cause is high. Because more-involved consumers view large assortments of cause-related products as an indicator of the company’s commitment to addressing social issues, they identify with the company and thereby form communal relationships. Thus, the consumers’ focus shifts from comparing options to helping the company, leading to reduced decision difficulty. The findings contribute to existing research on assortment size and the understanding of the information consumers use to evaluate the company’s commitment to social causes.

State control over the distribution of information harmful to children: analysis of case law

This article analyzes the representation of state regulatory bodies on distribution of harmful information and measures aimed at minimization harm caused by information to children's health and development. Examination is conducted on the arguments of the law enforcement officers and the court contained in the texts of court ruling, viewed as implementation of formal social control over distribution of information and expression of formal position with regards to social conflict. Attention is given to the analysis of positions of the state authorities on the effects of risk, understanding of social danger of these effects, and governmental decision on the essence of a social conflict. The groups of harmful content and the dynamics of their identification are determined. The author reveals and classifies the motives of the distributor of harmful information and the motives of information consumers. A significant excess of the actual audience of consumers of harmful information over the audience designated by the distributor (i.e. addressee) is observed. The conclusion is made on the position of the actors of formal social control in relation to risks, their identification, mitigation, prevention and forecasting, validity of the arguments of the law enforcement and the court. Failure to establish responsibility of the actor is one of the key difficulties. The author outlines the prospects for improving the mechanism of ensuring information security of the children, as well as underlines the need for revising the principles and approaches towards interpretation of harm.

Online Health Information Consumers’ Learning across Health-Related Search Tasks from the Perspective of Retrieval Platform Switching (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Online health information retrieval has been a top choice for acquiring health information and knowledge by millions worldwide. OBJECTIVE This study aims to investigate consumers’ modification of retrieval platform switch paths across health-related search tasks and learning via such a change. METHODS A lab user experiment was designed to obtain data on consumers’ health information search behavior. Participants accomplished health-related information search tasks. Screen movements were recorded by EV screen-recording software. The participants underwent in-depth interviews immediately after finishing the tasks. Screen recordings and interview data were both coded and analyzed. RESULTS Three types of learning, including the similar transfer learning, optimizing learning, and SERP-guided learning were identified based on five change patterns of retrieval platform switch paths adopted by health information consumers from task 1 to task 2. Health information consumers’ retrieval platform switch based on information usefulness evaluation. And they accessed different amounts and types of health knowledge from different retrieval platforms. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that health information consumers exhibit learning both through retrieval platform switching and the knowledge they consume during the search process. This facilitates the assessment of a certain retrieval platform’s usefulness by measuring the amount and types of health knowledge in each search result. This study also contributes to the enhancement of consumers’ health information retrieval abilities, and to helping optimize health information retrieval platforms by increasing their exposure to consumers and increasing the matching degree between knowledge types and consumer needs.

Application of the social service Wiki in the educational process of University

Examined is the application of social service with aim of education at university. At present, education in the university often takes place in a mixed format, with the active use of distance technologies. This context increasingly raises the question of using new methods and techniques that could make the educational process more effective and interesting for students. Under these conditions, teachers have increasingly begun to turn their attention to the Web 2.0 technologies, which represent a qualitatively new approach to the construction of the educational process. This article deals with the social service Wiki, which is more often used in the educational process of the university. From the teaching point of view, the Wiki service allows creating conditions for students when they have to analyze large amounts of information, select the most important, summarize and draw conclusions. It also allows students to critically review articles and collaboratively correct or improve them. The use of the Wiki service in the educational process is of great importance for students as well because its interactivity transforms them from pure information consumers into active users. This article presents examples of using the social service Wiki in the educational process of Penza State Technological University within the framework of the disciplines “Foreign language (German)” and “Methods of teaching and education”.

Classifications, Changes, and Challenges of Online Health Information Seekers during COVID-19

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore consumers’ experiences before and during the COVID-19 outbreak to improve public health by providing effective consumer health information. Methods: Interviews were conducted with 20 health information consumers who were 18 or older until data saturation was reached. The selected participants were among users of the Korean National Health Insurance Service (NHIS). The data were collected before the COVID-19 outbreak (September 2014) and during the COVID-19 outbreak (October 2020) to describe experiences and changes before and during the pandemic. Data were analyzed according to the qualitative content analysis method. Results: As a result, 3 main domains and 10 subdomains were derived from classifications, changes, and challenges of online health information seekers. Conclusions: The findings of this study guide the understanding of health information seekers for the development of consumer-tailored health information systems.

Marketing Clues on the Label Raise the Purchase Intention of Genetically Modified Food

As more and more genetically modified foods (GMFs) must be labeled, adding more information to increase the willingness to buy genetically modified food has become the focus of scholars and enterprises. Most current studies have confirmed that the consumer attitudes and purchase intention toward GMFs are not good. This study aims to match consumers’ different information-processing mechanisms by adding marketing information clues and regulating their purchase intentions by contradictory attitudes towards GMFs. According to the interest demands of GMFs, the marketing clue information was divided into functional information and environmental information. Through two studies, we find that consumers are more inclined to environmental information than heuristic. Functional information is more attractive to males, and the young generation prefers ecological information. Consumers with high ambivalence towards genetically modified foods are more inclined to choose environmental attribute information.

TED talks: multimodal communicative affordances for EPS/ELF dissemination

Talks have been of interest for researchers who have compared different modes of scientific speeches such as traditional formal lectures, conferences and storyboarding technology, entertainment, and design (TED) talks. This article aims at exploring effective approaches to knowledge dissemination for non-native speakers in English Public Speaking (EPS) scenarios, a current challenge for international university students or academics, who need to adapt the format of the lecture or conference to a more persuasive and engaging public speech. TED Talks allow information consumers either in real time halls or in ubiquitous online performances to listen to well-explained verbal ideas that connect nonverbal language and emotions with the international audience. The hypothesis, therefore, is that TED Talks can serve as models of multimodal dissemination pitches to English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) speakers, who can be trained to improve their speech performance and convey their scientific notions and results successfully. After analysing the 10 most popular TED Talks, the findings suggest a set of strategies and techniques that can be useful for non-native learners in English Public Speaking contexts or for users of English as a Lingua Franca in their dissemination talks. The results provide some common pedagogical affordances for ELF dissemination talks, considering multimodal and nonverbal communication.

The Problem of Reliability of Information in the Global Network

The reliability of information in the global information space is one of the most important problems of globalization. The credibility of various information resources is currently being studied and considered in different ways. In some cases, the problem of the reliability of information can be assessed as harmful and dangerous. This article, looks at the problem of information reliability in a general theoretical context. Efforts are also made to classify information arrays and categorize information consumers. The “general picture” of the results of a sociological survey of 100 students shows that the problem is significant. In many cases, young people are not “interested” in the reliability of the information, and in some cases they resign themselves to this situation.