Rui Chen

Although e‐commerce platforms widely implement gamification designs, the potential negative effects on consumers and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. To address this gap, this study employs a two‐stage mixed‐methods approach to uncover the influence mechanisms of gamification design flaws. In Study 1, we collected 24,749 consumer comments describing negative experiences with gamified shopping festivals. By combining BERTopic modeling with a human‐LLM collaboration, we identified seven latent concepts. Further analysis grounded in psychological reactance theory and affective events theory indicated that four gamification design flaws, namely narrative rhythm disruption, game interaction complexity, reward value distortion, and gameplay replaceability, affect consumers' continuous purchase intention through perceived manipulation and frustration. In Study 2, we collected survey responses from 398 consumers who participated in the gamified shopping festivals and used PLS‐SEM to test the proposed hypotheses. This research deepens understanding of the adverse side of gamification, contributes to theoretical perspectives on the mechanisms of gamification design flaws, and provides novel insights for optimizing gamification in e‐commerce platforms.

The open architecture of virtual idols allows users to deeply engage in the design and creation of the idols’ works and even their character profiles, achieving a production-oriented value co-creation that goes beyond mere consumption. However, existing literature has not paid sufficient attention to this context-specific, deep-level value co-creation behavior. Based on the Push–Pull–Mooring theory, this study explores the leading factors that drive production-oriented value co-creation in the context of virtual idols. In Study 1, we conducted exploratory text mining on 14,991 user comments regarding four well-known virtual idols using the latent Dirichlet allocation method, identifying six key themes. By combining machine-based text mining results with manual coding, we constructed a preliminary theoretical framework for user value co-creation. In Study 2, drawing on the Push–Pull–Mooring theory, we analyze the mechanisms linking various themes and construct a structural equation model to test the driving pathways of production-oriented value co-creation behavior. The results indicate that emotional compensation acts as a push factor; cross-dimensional entertainment value, anthropomorphism, and multidimensional interactivity act as pull factors; while technological affordance and community identification act as mooring factors. Additionally, the competitive model indicates that the trends observed in the configuration of prerequisites for production-oriented and consumption-oriented value co-creation are consistent with the progressive interpretation, with the former being associated with a stronger set of motivations. The findings of this study regarding the mechanisms that facilitate production value co-creation provide actionable recommendations for virtual idol marketing.

AI-generated reviews have become a core tool for hotel booking platforms in assisting user decision-making, yet existing research has not systematically explored the emotional tendencies of GAI reviews or the potential mechanisms by which temporal disclosure influences user decisions. This study integrates the Information Adoption Model (IAM) and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), incorporates the affordance perspective of GAI, employs a 2 × 2 experimental design (temporal disclosure × review valence), analyzes sample data from 649 travelers, and conducts empirical analysis using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results demonstrate that temporal disclosure significantly enhances cognitive involvement; the effect of review valence on cognitive involvement is moderated by GAI affordance—high GAI affordance mitigates the inhibitory impact of positive reviews on cognitive involvement; empathy toward GAI information does not directly reduce psychological distance to hotels but operates indirectly through full mediation via psychological distance to GAI; psychological distance to GAI also indirectly influences booking intent via full mediation through psychological distance to the hotel. This study elucidates the mechanisms linking the emotional characteristics of AI-generated reviews with the impact of temporal disclosure on traveler decision-making, supplements theoretical frameworks for consumer decision-making in AI contexts, expands the IAM for AI applications, and provides empirical evidence and practical recommendations for optimizing GAI review presentation strategies on booking platforms.

The rapid rise of LinaBell has been a carnival driven by online user participation. It not only reflects the active agency and creative initiative of audiences in participatory culture but also advances the development of participatory texts, transforming the relationship between producers and recipients from opposition to collaboration. Throughout this process, both parties benefit and fulfill their respective needs. Creators generate higher commercial value with lower production costs, while recipients experience immersive and interactive aesthetic enjoyment through their engagement. The success of LinaBell popularity is also related to the unique form of fan culture in China. Furthermore, it ingeniously addresses the long-standing copyright issues that have hindered user participation in creative processes. However, it is important to acknowledge that this type of storyless intellectual property (IP) has both advantages and limitations.

In most movies, the "imaginary audience" is already hidden in the structure at the beginning of the creation, and the acceptance of the audience means the finalization of the movie art. The overall purpose of this paper is to explore the audience's acceptance of the cross-cultural movie Everything Everywhere All at Once based on cultural adaptation theory and communication adaptation theory. We have to cautiously reflect on whether the ecology of the movie market is undergoing restructuring nowadays, and whether the audience's receptive psychology is changing. Is there a change in the audience's receptive psychology? How can social, psychological, and cultural issues be properly internalized into the core expression of a film? This study collects more than 200,000 words of textual materials from mainstream media channels such as Douban.com, B-station, and Time.com for qualitative research, and utilizes the rooted theory approach to explore the psychological behavioral mechanism of audience's acceptance of cross-cultural films represented by Everything Everywhere All at Once and to construct a theoretical model of the psychology of acceptance in a cross-cultural context. It is found that cultural adaptation and communication adaptation theories have once again emphasized their complex structure and new discourse field in the new cross-cultural movie reception situation. This study expands the applicability of these two theories in the new socio-cultural context of China.

Black Myth-Wukong is an electronic game adapted from the Chinese novel Journey to the West. The game exhibits distinct cross-cultural characteristics in its dissemination process. We believe that individual schema differences can influence users’ cross-cultural acceptance behaviors. Utilizing comment data collected from the internet, we conducted a programmatic grounded approach to study and process the data. Our research revealed that users’ schema differences can lead to individuals developing different cultural psychologies, including cultural identification, cultural resonance, and so on. These cultural psychologies may ultimately impact the cross-cultural dissemination of artistic works.

This research is entitled Representation of Chinese Culture in Wish Dragon Movie. Using semiotic analysis according to Roland Barthes. Semiotic analysis is used to analyze the signs that represent culture in the film Wish Dragon. This study aims to find the existence of a sign and then find out how Chinese culture is represented through the film Wish Dragon Movie by examining the meaning of denotation, connotation and myth according to Roland Barthes' semiotic model. In addition to finding out how the foreign audience acceptance to the Wish Dragon film and how the foreign audience understands the Chinese culture in this film, the researcher using audience comments in the most popular rated movies website to analyze.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in users’ knowledge anxiety, which has been further intensified by the diversity of information platforms and the emphasis on digital personal branding. While previous research has examined the relationship between digital personal branding and negative emotions, little is known about the mechanisms behind negative reactions to digital personal branding from non-direct factors or users’ spontaneous negative emotions. To address this gap, this study draws on cognitive appraisal theory (CAT) and social identity theory (SIT) to explore the relationships between users’ knowledge anxiety, cognitive processing biases, and brand avoidance, and the impacts of herding behavior and attachment anxiety on these relationships. A sample of 530 consumers completed an online survey, and the data were analyzed using a partial least squares path model. The results revealed that user knowledge anxiety directly and indirectly influenced brand avoidance behavior through cognitive processing bias, and attachment anxiety moderated the path between cognitive processing bias and user knowledge anxiety. However, herding behavior was not found to be significant in online knowledge sharing communities.

For a long time, Chinese audiences have not had a high opinion of hybrid Chinese and Western movies. However, the unanimous praise for Turning Red in China se ems to have reversed this situation. In order to verify whether the attitudinal behavior of Chinese audiences toward the film’s hybridization of Chinese and Western cultures has changed, this study collected textual materials reflecting the Chinese audience’s receptive attitudes toward the film: Douban reviews, short reviews, questionnaires and Mtime.com reviews. Through a grounded study of 664,312 words, a total of 16 initial categories and four main categories were obtained. Finally, a cognitive–emotional–attitudinal mechanism model was formed to explain the audience’s receptive behavior process. The study found that Chinese audiences’ positive reception of Turning Red comes more from the fact that the film touches on personal emotions and focuses on a series of issues such as growing up, family, and gender, with intergenerational conflict as the core. The audience achieves self-projection and empathy while watching the film, rather than recognizing the Chinese culture presented therein. On this basis, the research further found that the internal structure of the current cultural hybridity has not changed greatly. The reason audiences do not give a high evaluation of cultural hybridity films lies in the lack of conscious distinction between the hybridity culture and the local culture. At the same time, in terms of cross-cultural creation, we should abandon the blind pursuit of cultural symbols, take root in cultural soil and then pay attention to more specific problems. This study reveals that the key factor affecting the audience’s receptive behavior toward cultural hybridity films is not necessarily the performance of local culture, which is of great significance for establishing new evaluation criteria.