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Although the metaverse is still in the early stages of development and implementation, it has the potential to revolutionize the way how businesses can interact with customers through both the virtual and real world. In particular, service industries are already exploring the opportunity to utilize the metaverse to provide more immersive, interactive and engaging customer experiences. However, the holistic overview of the future applications, opportunities, and challenges of a metaverse in the context of service industries from academic and expert perspectives is limited. By employing a multi-perspective approach, this study looks into these unexplored aspects of the metaverse in the context of service industries through informed and multifaceted narratives by leading academics and experts from cross-disciplinary backgrounds from media and communication, education, hospitality, financial services, retail, tourism and healthcare. The main opportunities identified include the development of new experiences, the introduction of novel inter-world interactions, and new business-consumer relations within the metaverse. The key challenges covered include current technological boundaries, limitations of the experiences in the metaverse, health issues, and data privacy, security, and legal issues. The paper concludes with formulating future research agendas and presenting contributions to literature and implications for practice. • It explores future applications, opportunities, challenges, and research agenda of the metaverse in service industries. • Opportunities include new experiences development, novel inter-world interactions, and new business-consumer relations. • Key Challenges are technological boundaries, limited experiences, health, data privacy, security, and legal issues. • The paper concludes with formulating future research agendas and presenting contributions to literature and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the study of offline prosocial behavior has a long tradition, much less information is available about how these behaviors manifest and change in the digital environment, and little is known about their background. This paper evaluates differences by age and gender in a variety of attitudes and beliefs during adolescence and studies their influence on the online prosocial behavior emitted and received. A cross-sectional study was performed with 1299 participants aged between 14 and 20 from the Region of Madrid (Spain). The Spanish adaptation of the Online Prosocial Behavior Scale and a selection of items from various studies on attitudes and beliefs regarding altruism, direct and indirect reciprocity, social responsibility, and the perception of the subjective norm were administered. The results suggest that female adolescents maintain higher altruism, social responsibility, and indirect reciprocity than males, and that the older age group (18–20 years old) has higher scores in altruism, social responsibility, and direct reciprocity. Together with altruism, the subjective norm, social responsibility, and indirect reciprocity positively influence the online prosocial behavior emitted by adolescents. Indirect reciprocity, the subjective norm and altruism also influence the feeling of receiving online prosocial behaviors from others. Knowing the extent to which adolescents hold prosocial beliefs and which of these beliefs may favor prosocial online behaviors can be beneficial when promoting such beliefs and fostering more positive online conduct, as well as lessening cyberbullying, online hate and any other manifestation of aggressive behavior online. • Social networks constitute a space for the socialization of prosocial behavior in adolescence. • Beliefs about altruism, social responsibility, and indirect reciprocity favor the emission of online prosocial behavior. • Beliefs about altruism and indirect reciprocity favor greater perception of receiving prosocial behaviors online. • The prosocial subjective norm favors both the emission and reception of online prosocial behaviors. • Direct reciprocity does not seem to influence the emission and reception of online prosocial behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]