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Prior research treated entrepreneurs’ actions as purely opportunistic and voluntary, excluding social and economic systems’ influence on entrepreneurial actions. However, the applications of communication strategies, project management and social network are anchored in socioeconomic systems in which the entrepreneurs are rooted. To address the gap, this study aims to articulate – through the prism of institutional theory – how restaurant crowdfunding (CF) success is affected by socioeconomic prosperity according to entrepreneurs’ race and geographic area.

The current study analyzed 2,008 restaurant CF projects launched in the USA through the Kickstarter platform from 2010 to 2020. By conducting one-way analysis of variance and multilevel mixed-effect logistic regression models, this study examined the relative socioeconomic prosperity and CF success according to the race of the restaurant entrepreneurs. The study also examined how socioeconomic prosperity affected CF success and how that relationship was moderated by the entrepreneurs’ level of restaurant experience.

This study finds that relative socioeconomic prosperity and CF success does differ according to race. Also in the CF context, lower socioeconomic prosperity does impede fundraising success. While the level of restaurant experience significantly increased an entrepreneur’s CF success, the impact was not so significant as to overcome the impact of socioeconomic prosperity.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study examines the impact of socioeconomic prosperity on CF project outcomes. By uncovering the significant impact of socioeconomic systems on CF success, this study fills the research gap. Previous studies have generally treated minority entrepreneurs as an aggregated form. The authors’ results extend the literature by including major ethnic groups – whites, African Americans and Asians.

The findings of the current study show restaurant entrepreneurs can raise the likelihood of CF success by doing two things: first, accumulate experience in the restaurant industry; second, use their CF websites to highlight testimonials about the value of that experience. Federal, state and local governments can institute policies to help improve racial minorities’ socioeconomic conditions and thereby promote startups’ fundraising success.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to examine unexplored institutional effect on CF outcomes. It examines how and why socioeconomic factors affect minority entrepreneurs’ funding success. It compares the prosperity and CF success of white, African American and Asian entrepreneurs.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on global health care and the economy. The restaurant industry has been especially hit hard by the statewide “stay-at-home” orders. To get back on track, many of these businesses need capital. A new and effective form of fundraising for business startups is crowdfunding (CF). However, there has been little research on the pandemic impact on CF. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the pandemic-related impact on restaurant CF.

This study extracted all 2,686 restaurant CF projects in the USA from the Kickstarter platform from April 2010 to January 2021. By conducting descriptive analyses and multiple logistic regression models, this study examined the pandemic impact on CF success.

This study finds that, while controlling the effects of other determinants, businesses in the midst of the pandemic are more likely to be successfully funded than businesses unaffected by the pandemic. Findings also reveal that restaurant startups lowered their funding goals and posted more updates/comments/pledge levels during the pandemic, which made projects more likely to be selected as a “Project We Love” and increased the odds of funding success. However, mentioning COVID-19-related information or locating projects in “red zones” are not found to have any significant direct or moderating impact on the funding success.

This study pioneers the research topic restaurant CF and attempts to raise the research attention of small- and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurial financing. Using quantitative methods, it provides a new perspective on pandemic-impact research. Social exchange theory is extended to the context of reward-based CF under crisis. Finally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first investigation of the possible moderating effect of project location on the relationship between restaurant CF characteristics and success.

The findings of this study suggest restaurateurs to be confident about the fundraising of their startup business through reward-based CF, even when located within so-called pandemic red zones, and perform appropriate communication strategies while using the reward-based CF.

This study is one of the earliest to examine the main and moderating effects of the pandemic-related factors on business CF in the hospitality realm. The findings are reference for researchers and restaurateurs on fundraising in a crisis context.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between rapid internationalization and firm value in US restaurant companies. This study also identified the moderating role of available slack, potential slack and recoverable slack on the relationship of rapid internationalization and the firm’s value.

A hierarchical regression analysis with panel fixed effects was used in this study. Samples were drawn from publicly traded US restaurant companies, and span from 1993 to 2016 with 264 firm-year observations was used for the study’s analysis.

Drawing on Penrose’s seminal theory of firm-growth that a firm needs excess resources to grow and that the amount of slack resources directly influences a firm’s international growth, this study found that available slack alleviates the negative impact of rapid international expansion in achieving higher firm value.

This study is one of the few analyses that examined the speed of rapid international expansion in the service context. In addition, this study contributes to existing literature by examining three different slack resources with regards to the speed of international expansion. The findings of this study shed light on restaurant companies whose financial resources are critical for value-adding international expansion.

The research purpose is to conceptualize competitive productivity (CP) in the peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation businesses. This study aims to conceptualize the four driving forces of P2P hosts’ CP and to empirically capture guest-based equity that supports such conceptual hosts’ CP model.

The goal of this paper is to apply Bauman’s Firm competitive productivity (FCP) model to the P2P accommodation business to conceptualize the CP of micro-entrepreneurial hosts. Four areas of the FCP model were reviewed to find how each of them contributes to the P2P hosts’ CP maximization.

Host talent, host resource management, value and host branding were conceptualized as key drivers of P2P hosts’ CP. The study also filled a gap in current literature by empirically analyzing online reviews to successfully capture key guest-based equity as satisfiers contributing to host talent, resource and branding.

Based on the hosts’ CP model, customer-generated resources play a significant role in the managerial implications, so that guest reviews with needs and wants and ratings can be empirically used to strengthen hosts’ CP under specific market circumstances.

This study is the first attempt to conceptualize a P2P host as a micro-entrepreneurial firm in the sharing economy platform for CP. This study looked at how the unique characteristics of the P2P accommodation industry and guest-based equity affect the P2P hosts’ CP.

This study aims to investigate the effect of customers’ multisensory service experience on customer satisfaction with cognitive effort and affective evaluations using big data and business intelligence techniques.

Online customer reviews for all New York City hotels were collected from Tripadvisor.com and analyzed through business intelligence and big data analytics techniques including data mining, text analytics, sentiment analysis and regression analysis.

The current study identifies the relationship between affective evaluations (i.e. positive affect and negative affect) and customer satisfaction. Research findings also find the negative effect of reviewer’s cognitive effort on satisfaction rating. More importantly, this study demonstrates the moderating role of multisensory experience as an innovative marketing tool on the relationship between affect/cognitive evaluation and customer satisfaction in the hospitality setting.

This study is the first study to explore the critical role of sensory marketing on hotel guest experience in the context of hotel customer experience and service innovation, based on big data and business intelligence techniques.

Crowdfunding can be an effective fundraising vehicle to independent restaurants to overcome fundraising limitations due to its small-size and high risk. A few studies have identified contents of communication for successful crowdfunding, yet missing is on how to say. The purpose of this paper is to investigate linguistics styles that are effective in pitches in restaurant crowdfunding.

The study analyzed 500 restaurant crowdfunding projects listed on Kickstarter.com that is one of the most popular crowdfunding platforms with sizable restaurant projects. By text analysis, this study identifies four linguistic categories – concrete, precise, interactive and language with low psychological distancing – from the project descriptions. A binominal linear regression analysis identified effective language styles that increases success of restaurant crowdfunding.

Drawing on the language expectancy theory and uncertainty reduction theory, this study found that project descriptions that are concrete and delivering stories with fewer usage of first person pronouns are likely to succeed in restaurant fundraising. Interactive style was counter-effective while preciseness of language did not affect funding success significantly. Findings further reveal the roles of non-linguistic attributes shown in the project pitches.

Despite the increasing practice of restaurant crowdfunding and good matches with small- and medium-sized restaurants’ needs, scant research has been conducted. Notably absent from the research is work on linguistic styles that are effective in restaurant crowdfunding. This study extends the prior literature by investigating how restaurant entrepreneurs should communicate with potential crowdfunders to make crowdfunding successful in the restaurant context. Simply knowing what are important does not provide holistic help to restaurant entrepreneurs; they also should know how to communicate well.

The findings of this study are important for restaurant entrepreneurs who need to present their projects and communicate effectively with potential investors online. Based on the study’s findings, crowdfunding platforms could enhance their project posting systems by developing algorithm that automatically measures language cues embedded in a project description and providing suggestions to improve persuasiveness of languages to maximize funding success for restaurant projects.

Scant research has been conducted in the restaurant crowdfunding; prior crowdfunding literature has focused on the projects other than restaurants such as technology, design and film. This study is the first that uncovers the role of the linguistic styles for the specific context of restaurant crowdfunding. This study sheds the light on the critical communication strategies used by small-sized restaurant entrepreneurs on crowdfunding platform.

Based on equity theory, this paper investigates if guests write on different review websites because of different internal motivations. Furthermore, it examines the moderating effect of service’ exceeds, neutral, negative, and service recovery–on the relationship between motivations and type of website to write reviews.

To exam if the star ratings of the same hotels were significantly different across hotel, online travel agency, and third-party review websites, this study collected 12,000 star ratings from 40 hotels across the US and conducted t-tests. A survey of 1,600 US travelers was administered to uncover the motivations for writing on different websites/website combinations. Four different scenarios were used to test the moderating effect of service: exceeds, neutral, negative, and service-recovery. These responses were analyzed using backwards stepwise regression.

Star ratings for the same hotel do differ among the three websites; hotel is the highest and third-party is the lowest. There are seven distinct groups of guests. Guests are motivated to write reviews to balance inequitable relationships. They decide which website/website combination best improves the equity relationship. This research indicates that guests’ choice of website is based on different internal motivations. The moderating effect of the service experience was significant.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining different motivations to write online reviews by website. Prior research typically examined one website or aggregated results from multiple websites, ignoring website specific differences. This can help hoteliers to understand why initiatives to promote reviews on certain websites may be unsuccessful.

Government policy mandates information disclosure in financial communications to protect consumer welfare. Unfortunately, low readability can hamper information disclosures’ meaningful benefits to financial decision making. Thus, this experiment tests the product evaluation and decision satisfaction of Korean consumers with less or more subjective knowledge and with or without personal finance education.

A between-subjects experiment examined responses of a nationally representative sample of 400 Korean consumers toward a Korean-language credit card advertisement.

Financial knowledge improves financial product evaluation and decision satisfaction. More readable disclosures improved evaluation and satisfaction among less knowledgeable consumers. Less readable disclosures did not. Consumers without financial education exhibited lower evaluations and decision satisfaction regardless of readability. More knowledgeable consumers and those with financial education performed equally well regardless of disclosure readability.

Financial service providers seeking more accurate evaluations and better decision satisfaction among their customers should use easier-to-read disclosures when targeting consumers with less prior financial knowledge.

One-size-fits-all financial communications are unlikely to achieve public policy or consumer well-being goals. Government-mandated information should be complemented by augmenting financial knowledge and providing personal finance training.

Although almost a quarter of the world’s population lives in East Asia, this is the first examination of readability in disclosures written in East Asian characters rather than a Western alphabet. Previous readability research on Asian-originating financial disclosures has been conducted on English-language texts. This study extends knowledge of readability effects to growing East Asian markets.

The purpose of this study is to identify determinants of involuntary cross-listing (CL) of US restaurant companies on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSE).

The study utilizes a mixed method design with an interview and a pooled logistic regression analysis with panel dataset using the company-clustered standard error to develop and test the hypotheses.

The empirical investigation identified determinants of involuntary CL by examining ten factors, including size, firm growth opportunities, leverage, financial flexibility, international operation, profitability, overall German economic condition, industry growth opportunities, restaurant type, and local operation. The study found three determinants – large size, favorable economic condition in Germany and positive industry growth opportunities – utilizing the sample that covers the entire periods of involuntary CL of US restaurant companies on the FSE.

This paper uncovers the phenomenon of involuntary CL, which many stock exchanges have strategically adopted by simplifying listing requirements for companies already listed in other stock markets, focusing on US restaurant companies. The number of involuntarily cross-listed US restaurant companies greatly increased to 50 percent of domestically listed US restaurant companies while those companies are largely unaware of the phenomenon. The research advances understanding of involuntary CLs, which previously received little attention.