Scrutiny of food packaging environmental impacts has led to a variety of sustainability directives, but has largely focused on the direct impacts of materials. A growing awareness of the impacts of food waste warrants a recalibration of packaging environmental assessment to include the indirect...

Dietary behavioral choices have a strong effect on the environmental impact associated with the food system. Here, we consider the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with production of food that is lost at the retail and consumer level, as well as the potential effects on GHG emissions of...

Online word-of-mouth studies generally assume that a product’s average rating is the primary force shaping consumers’ purchase decisions and driving sales. Similarly, practitioners place more emphasis on average ratings by displaying them at more salient places than individual reviews. In...

People are increasingly searching for health information from online sources such as question-and-answer (Q&A) services. The health information obtained this way can have significant impacts on people’s health decisions and lives, but what constitutes a helpful answer in the medical domain...

A common assumption in prior research and practice is that more helpful online reviews will exert a greater impact on consumer attitudes and purchase decisions. We suggest that this assumption may not hold for reviews expressing anger. Building on Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, we...

Online social networks are increasingly being used to conduct commercial activities, and many online social networking platforms allow users to sell products to their online connections. Although extensive research has been conducted on the interactions among buyers within a social network,...

Customer service employees are generally advised to express positive emotion in their interactions with customers. The rise and maturity of artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational agents, also known as chatbots, beg the question: should AI agents be equipped with the ability to...

While monetary rewards have been widely used by online platforms to motivate user-generated content (UGC) contributions, users may not demonstrate the expected behaviors. Unintended consequences, exemplified by unchanged or reduced UGC contributions, may occur. Through two natural experiments,...

In the online word-of-mouth literature, research has consistently shown that negative reviews have a greater impact on product sales than positive reviews. While this negativity effect is well documented at the product level, there is less consensus on whether negative or positive reviews are...

This paper explores effects of the emotions embedded in a seller review on its perceived helpfulness to readers. Drawing on frameworks in the emotion and cognitive processing literatures, we propose that over and above a well-known negativity bias, the impact of discrete emotions in a review...