Purpose: Previous research studies assume that influential consumers (“influentials”), who play a powerful role in the marketplace, are persuasive (or not) based on innate, static personality traits. By contrast, this paper proposes an emergence-based view of influentials. Grounded in...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how and when a reputation for corporate social responsibility (CSR) can deter dysfunctional consumer behaviors (DCBs) such as shoplifting or negative word-of-mouth (WOM) in response to firm failures. The authors predict that congruency of the CSR...