During the last 3 decades, the Internet has greatly changed our lives in all aspects, surely including consumer behaviors and patterns. We cannot imagine how to survive without the apps of social media, instant messaging, e-commerce, short/long video, taxi-hailing, food delivery and so on. The global spread of COVID-19 has further accelerated the adoption of online tools in our daily life in order to maintain social distancing.

The internet already created a huge amount of fortune for business practitioners and stock investors. In the last ten years, a number of internet and high technology giants, such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba, replacing the traditional energy and finance corporations, have become the most valuable companies in the world. However, there is still limited understanding on what the social and psychological effects of the internet are to consumers and how it completes, upgrades or even overturns the current consumer theories.

In the last ten years, researchers started to explore the influence of the Internet and high technology on consumer behavior, including social media, online consumer behavior, digital marketing, and others. However, it is still far to be enough because the Internet is developing extremely fast, which could bring novel consumption patterns in a very short time. Therefore, with this Research Topic in Frontiers in Psychology, we aim to bring together researchers from different disciplines, to create a space for exchange and integration of ideas on how the Internet influences consumer behavior so as to inspire new theories and methodologies. We welcome contributions on topics including sharing economy, 5G technology innovation, e-commerce, online social media, and their influences.

The sub-topics of interests include but are not limited to the following:
• Sharing economy and relationship marketing
• New on-line consumption trends
• Challenges of marketing in the development of e-commerce
• Multilevel analysis of trust and distrust in social media
• Motivation and incentive mechanism of consumer participation in social media
• Consumer learning on social media
• The influence of big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, and other new technologies on consumer behavior
• Digital marketing and innovation
• The challenge of marketing in the process of the Internet celebrity economy
• Consumer decision making and social media

We welcome empirical papers that use a range of different data sources, which may include studies that utilize data collected in fieldwork, from lab and field experiments, surveys and high-quality panel data.

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Frontiers in Psychology

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