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Mobile app localization-based advertising: Effects of spatial and social-cultural distances on consumer behavior

2025· article· en· W4410909141 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Information Management · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicConsumer Retail Behavior Studies
Canadian institutionsConcordia UniversityRoyal Bank of CanadaBishop's University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research CouncilSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsAdvertisingMobile appsComputer scienceSociologyBusinessWorld Wide Web

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article studies how and why localized mobile applications shape consumer responses toward mobile advertising in the context of ridesharing. Drawing from construal level theory and extant research on cultural customization of website design, we hypothesize that consumers respond more favorably when the app’s design closely matches their immediate social-cultural surroundings, compared to designs that are culturally distant. We conducted a laboratory experiment with a custom-built ridesharing app that manipulated spatial and social-cultural distances in a controlled setting. Findings show that exposure to localized mobile ads on apps that reflect the consumer’s immediate social-cultural environment (near social-cultural distance) enhances app usage intentions and purchasing intentions compared to apps with culturally distant designs. The preference for apps with local design intensifies when the advertised location is closer to the immediate location. We also find that app atmospherics (informativeness, entertainment, and effectiveness) mediate the positive effects of social-cultural distance in application design on consumer reactions in conditions of a low spatial distance to the promoted destination. Considering atmospherics offers a new explanation for why a local application design affects consumer reactions positively, beyond accounts made by construal level theory. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings, offer managerial insights for developers and designers of geo-localized applications, and outline the study’s limitations along with directions for future research.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.793
Threshold uncertainty score0.402

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.253 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it