Re-understanding the antecedents of functional foods purchase: Mediating effect of purchase attitude and moderating effect of food neophobia

The world market for functional foods has grown dynamically and China is expected to be one of the most promising markets. But little is understood the formation mechanisms of consumers’ purchase attitude and intention toward functional foods in Mainland China. The current study investigates the roles of trust, health consciousness and price in shaping consumers’ purchase intention toward functional foods by focusing on purchase attitude as a mediator and food neophobia as a moderator. Results from the sample of 1144 Chinese suggest that Chinese consumers had moderate purchase intention toward functional foods. Trust in the food system and health consciousness positively affects purchase intention via purchase attitude. Price negatively affects purchase intention; meanwhile, the negative effect could be counteracted by health consciousness. Food neophobia does not directly affect individuals’ purchase attitude or intention, but moderates the relationships between antecedents and them. Consumers with a low level of food neophobia treat higher price as a monetary sacrifice, while their counterparts may regard a higher price as a greater quality signal. The study offers the food industry insights into the development and marketing of functional foods targeted to the Mainland China market.     

‘Do not talk to strangers’: A study on trust in Brazilian ridesharing apps

The emergence of digital platforms based on network algorithms can mediate relationships of trust, boosting sharing economy business models. This study aims to identify the motivations and trust elements of ridesharing apps and analyze the weight of motivation variables in the explanation of trust in the platform service. The survey method was applied to a sample of 485 Brazilian users of a ridesharing app were addressed. Five factors were analyzed to users’ motivation: Perceived sustainability, Security risks, Enjoyment, Platform quality, and Economic reward. Results show that 50.6% of respondents use the service until three times per month (n = 246), while 12,6% use more than four times per week. This study contributes by showing that: (i) five key user motives and two types of trusts are empirically measured and examined for the Brazilian ridesharing market; (ii) the most significant variable that explains trust in platform is “Information providing”, following by platform safety and platform security; (iii) pleasant participation, enjoyment, and cheaper alternative were also significant for the trust in the platform; and (iv) trust in platform is higher than trust in drivers. These contributions could enhance applied solutions for sharing economy platforms and guide academic research on the topic.     

Owner’s Risk Allocation and Contractor’s Role Behavior in a Project: A Parallel-mediation Model

Risk allocation decisions are of critical importance in project management. The present study proposes an explanation for how risk allocation in a contract motivates a contractor to cooperate with a project owner. Theories of risk allocation and trust were used to motivate the research. Using a survey methodology, we collected data concerning 124 construction projects in China. We found that risk allocation influenced the contractor’s role behavior through the contractor’s feeling of being trusted but not the contractor’s trust in the owner. Feeling of being trusted partially mediated the effect of risk allocation on the contractor’s in-role (i.e., contractual) behavior and fully mediated the effect on extra-role behavior. The study introduces a social and psychological view of the impacts of risk allocation to the project and engineering management literature. We contribute to theory by arguing and demonstrating the mediating effect of trust on the relationship between risk allocation and contractor behavior. From a practical standpoint, we conclude that contractual risk allocation has a significant impact on building a trusting relationship between owners and contractors and that contractors who feel trusted perform both contractually mandated actions and actions external to the contract more diligently, resulting in the likelihood of improved outcomes for both parties.     

Exploring public engagement with geothermal energy in southern Italy: A case study

This paper presents the results of an assessment of public views on eventual geothermal energy development in Sicily. The research was carried out under a much wider research project, VIGOR, with the aim to explore the feasibility of geothermal energy utilization in southern Italy. This study has two primary objectives: (1) to explore the views and opinions of local communities regarding the potential of geothermal energy applications; (2) to contribute to the growing literature on public engagement with energy issues. In order to explore public views towards geothermal technologies, we conducted a case study using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Although Italy has enormous geological potential for geothermal energy production, levels of knowledge of this energy source amongst the public are low. The results indicate that the issue is shrouded in uncertainty and that the Sicilian public expresses a diffused lack of trust in decision-making processes. Taken together, these factors are likely to strongly impact eventual further developments in this sector. The results clearly show the need for further societal dialogue supported by a sound communication action strategy as the first stage in a public participation.     

Trust based consensus model for social network in an incomplete linguistic information context

A theoretical framework to consensus building within a networked social group is put forward. This article investigates a trust based estimation and aggregation methods as part of a visual consensus model for multiple criteria group decision making with incomplete linguistic information. A novel trust propagation method is proposed to derive trust relationship from an incomplete connected trust network and the trust score induced order weighted averaging operator is presented to aggregate the orthopairs of trust/distrust values obtained from different trust paths. Then, the concept of relative trust score is defined, whose use is twofold: (1) to estimate the unknown preference values and (2) as a reliable source to determine experts’ weights. A visual feedback process is developed to provide experts with graphical representations of their consensus status within the group as well as to identify the alternatives and preference values that should be reconsidered for changing in the subsequent consensus round. The feedback process also includes a recommendation mechanism to provide advice to those experts that are identified as contributing less to consensus on how to change their identified preference values. It is proved that the implementation of the visual feedback mechanism guarantees the convergence of the consensus reaching process.     

地方政府公共行政中的"塔西佗陷阱"探析

当前,由于各种原因导致地方政府在公共行政中陷入了"塔西佗陷阱". "塔西佗陷阱"的实质是社会公众对政府的政治信任问题. 要提高社会公众对地方政府的政治信任,破解"塔西佗陷阱",不但要确立明晰的产权关系,树立正确的政绩观,还要建立完善的制度体系,依法实行"阳光行政",同时正确引导公共话语、构建服务型政府、加强公职人员诚信建设.     

Trust and distrust on the web: User experiences and website characteristics

The aim of this research is to study the content of trustful and distrustful user experiences on the web to identify website characteristics that enhance trust or cause distrust. We collected users’ reports about critical incidents and quantitative questionnaire data by means of an online survey. Results from N = 221 participants suggest that distrust is mostly an effect of graphical (e.g., complex layout) and structural (e.g., pop-ups) design issues of a website, whereas trust is based on social factors such as reviews or recommendations by friends. The content of a website affects both trust and distrust: privacy issues had an effect on distrust and security signs enhanced trust. Furthermore, we show how trustful and distrustful user experiences differ in terms of perceived honesty, competence, and benevolence. High honesty and competence characterize a trustful experience, whereas a distrustful experience is associated with missing honesty and missing benevolence. We discuss how different website characteristics help to enhance trust or to prevent distrust and how this impacts the allocation of design resources.     

Data fusion and transfer learning empowered granular trust evaluation for Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things (IoT), a huge amount of valuable data is generated by various IoT applications. As the IoT technologies become more complex, the attack methods are more diversified and can cause serious damages. Thus, establishing a secure IoT network based on user trust evaluation to defend against security threats and ensure the reliability of data source of collected data have become urgent issues, in this paper, a Data Fusion and transfer learning empowered granular Trust Evaluation mechanism (DFTE) is proposed to address the above challenges. Specifically, to meet the granularity demands of trust evaluation, time–space empowered fine/coarse grained trust evaluation models are built utilizing deep transfer learning algorithms based on data fusion. Moreover, to prevent privacy leakage and task sabotage, a dynamic reward and punishment mechanism is developed to encourage honest users by dynamically adjusting the scale of reward or punishment and accurately evaluating users’ trusts. The extensive experiments show that: (i) the proposed DFTE achieves high accuracy of trust evaluation under different granular demands through efficient data fusion; (ii) DFTE performs excellently in participation rate and data reliability.     

Understanding trust in ms-commerce: The roles of reported experience,linguistic style,profile photo,emotional, and cognitive trust

This paper examines what influences trust in mobile social commerce environment. Drawing on trust-based acceptance model (i.e. cognitive and emotional trust) and online review features (i.e. profile photo, linguistic style, and reported experience), we examine how these factors affect trust in mobile social commerce. Hypotheses were tested using survey data. The results of our model showed that there are significant influences of profile photo, reported experience, cognitive, and emotional trust towards trust in ms-commerce. This work contributes to existing literature by examining the roles of previous trust in mobile payments and online reviews on trust in mobile social commerce.     

Determinants of consumers’ continuance intention to use social recommender systems: A self-regulation perspective

Social recommender systems have transformed how consumers seek product- or service-related information. Based on Bagozzi's self-regulation framework, this study examines the determinants of consumers' continuance intention to use social recommender systems. We found that appraisal factors (perceived information quality and perceived system quality) are strong predictors of emotional reaction (recommendation satisfaction and trust in recommendation). Particularly, perceived information quality has a significant effect on both recommendation satisfaction and trust in recommendation. However, the positive effect of perceived system quality is only on recommendation satisfaction. Both recommendation satisfaction and trust in recommendation positively affect consumers' continuance intention to use social recommender systems.