In the field of media ecology, defined as the study of media as environments, media and medium, and ecology and environment are key terms, while information, although commonly employed, is generally used without reference to a specific definition. This article examines the mostly implicit assumptions about and understandings of the term information in the context of the field of media ecology. ...

This research provides evidence for the generality of the Muhammad Ali effect (Allison, Messick, & Goethals, 1989), demonstrating that Dutch participants believe that the trait honesty is more descriptive of the self than of others, whereas the trait intelligence is believed to be equally descriptive of the self and others. Congruent with proposed explanations for the Muhammad Ali effect, parti...

This paper brings mechanism design to conflict resolution. We determine when and how unmediated communication and mediation reduce the ex ante probability of conflict in a game of conflict with asymmetric information. Mediation improves upon unmediated communication when the intensity of conflict is high, or when asymmetric information is significant. The mediator improves upon unmediated commu...

How does a vendor’s explanation to negative online consumer reviews influence consumers’ trust in the vendor? Little understanding is available in either service recovery literature or ecommerce literature. In the online environment, a vendor’s response to customer complaints is often posted on a website and examined broadly by consumers including complainants and potential consumers. This is d...

We propose that separating rewards into categories can increase motivation, even when those categories are meaningless. Across six experiments, people were more motivated to obtain one reward from one category and another reward from another category than they were to obtain two rewards from a pool that included all items from either reward category. As a result, they worked longer when potenti...

The main purpose of this paper is to look at the incorporation of gender and the informal sector within a general equilibrium framework for India. Moreover, we clarify some important links between a gender aware informal sector based social accounting matrix (SAM) and general equilibrium models such as the computable general equilibrium (CGE) models including as a special case the fixed price m...

Estimating the mechanisms that connect explanatory variables with the explained variable, also known as “mediation analysis,” is central to a variety of social science fields, especially psychology, and increasingly fields like epidemiology. Recent work on the statistical methodology behind mediation analysis points to limitations in earlier methods. We implement in Stata computational approach...

The purpose of this study is to find the factors that enhance member participation in business-to-customer virtual communities. Although there are many factors influencing member participation, this study limits its independent variables to those of managing strategy and information system quality. In addition to finding their direct impacts, this study identifies indirect effects through two m...

This study extends a stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) model to include impulse-buying behavior, which plays a vital role in electronic shopping but has not gained much attention in e-commerce research. Grounding our research in environmental psychology, we test the effects of virtual atmospheric cues on online impulse-buying behavior and spending, via a consumer survey. The study applies elab...