Digital piracy as a continuing problem significantly impacts various stakeholders, including consumers, enterprises, and countries. This study develops a three-level mechanism of determinants of ...consumer digital piracy behavior, with personal risk as an individual factor, susceptibility to interpersonal influence as an inter-personal factor, and moral intensity as a broad societal factor. Further, it explores the role of rationalization and future piracy intent as outcomes of past piracy behaviors. The authors use survey data from four countries in the European Union to test the system of structural relationships. With an exception of the effect of consumers' susceptibility to interpersonal influence on piracy behavior, the conceptual model receives remarkably consistent support across the four countries. Specifically, perception of personal risk and moral intensity negatively affected the reported piracy behavior in all four countries. The results further support the negative influence of moral intensity and the positive influence of past digital piracy behavior on consumers' use of rationalization. Lastly, personal risk, rationalization, and past digital piracy behavior directly influenced consumers' intention to engage in digital piracy in the future. The study also discusses implications of the findings and identifies areas of future research.
Previous pay-what-you-want pricing research has focused primarily on services in brick-and-mortar settings wherein buyers decide on a price to pay after experiencing the service. Research on this ...pricing approach in online settings is rare and limited to products, such as digital music. This paper explores the effects of pay-what-you-want pricing on the Internet and extends the scope of investigation to tangible products purchased before consumption. Building on theories in communications and pricing, the authors identify and empirically test two factors that interact with brand familiarity to positively influence online shoppers' responses to pay-what-you-want pricing: a virtual product experience and a seller-supplied anchor price. The results further indicate that consumers' online purchase intentions are influenced primarily by their perceived product knowledge, while perceived quality influences their pay-what-you-want prices.
•Virtual product experience improves response to online PWYW for unknown brand.•Unknown brand should not provide external anchor price for online PWYW.•A known brand should offer external anchor price for online PWYW.•Online PWYW purchase intent is driven directly by perceived product knowledge.•Online PWYW price is driven by product knowledge through perceived quality.
This paper presents the results of a survey of customers of an Internet clothing retailer examining how consumers’ preferences to shop and buy on the Internet rather than at bricks-and-mortar stores ...differ depending on their compulsive buying tendencies. Using shopping motivations such as seeking product and information variety, the ability to buy unobserved, avoiding social interactions, and experiencing positive feelings during shopping and buying, we find a positive linear relationship between a tendency to buy compulsively and Internet shopping and buying motivations. The research demonstrates that the items used to measure these motivations can also be used to identify buyers who have a tendency to buy compulsively. The paper also offers important retailing, managerial and public policy implications of the findings.
Research suggests that sustainability may not be sufficient to yield a competitive advantage. Building on the resource-based view, this research evaluates three questions: (1) Can using ...sustainability as a differentiator lead to consumers choosing sustainable products? (2) Does product sustainability appeal more to environmentally concerned consumers? (3) Does product sustainability appeal more when paired with innovation? To test the hypotheses, an online survey of 344 US respondents was conducted. Consumers were given a hypothetical budget for an office chair and asked to choose between two products at a time. Hypotheses were tested with frequency and Chi-square tests and logistic regression. Findings indicate that the innovative product was preferred over the undifferentiated one, but the sustainable product was preferred over both innovative and undifferentiated products. The sustainability–innovativeness bundle was not preferred over the sustainable product. Environmental concern increased preference for the sustainable product over the innovative product, but not over the undifferentiated one. These findings suggest that sustainability is a stronger differentiator than innovation, but that bundling both features does not further enhance product choice. Attitude toward the environment may not predict behavior. Instead, preference for the sustainable product may originate in variety-seeking behavior, with sustainability seen as an innovation.
This research replicates Gupta and Cooper's (1992) study on consumers' discounting of discounts for different brand reputations in a bricks-and-mortar shopping channel and extends the investigation ...to an online environment. We determine that although discounting of discounts is on average stronger online, it has remained remarkably stable over time and across retail channels. Promotion thresholds are zero regardless of retail channel and brand reputation. Further, consumers perceive a discount to exist even without advertised promotions.
We model the effect of online information search across mobile (smartphone and tablet) and nonmobile (personal computer PC, both desktop and laptop) platforms on frequency of purchasing per online ...shopping session. Using clickstream data from a multinational retailer, we find that device modality drives purchase frequency, likely due to the differential ease of use of PCs, tablets, and smartphones. In particular, frequency of completed orders is highest when information search and purchase completion are highly convenient, such as when shopping via tablet. We also determine that information search in the form of reading online product reviews has no effect on mobile platforms, while it does on other platforms. These findings contribute to information search theory, suggesting that information search increases purchase likelihood when it is goal directed, extensive, and easy to conduct. Thus, the broad role of digital advertising should be to make the information search process easier and more convenient for consumers to stimulate purchases. These findings help digital advertisers understand information search patterns across device modalities. Implications for digital advertisers on electronic commerce (e-commerce) platforms are offered.
This research examines how consumers’ efforts as a nonmonetary sacrifice influence their price and promotion fairness perceptions in the context of price promotions. Multiple studies using different ...price promotion tactics demonstrate that consumers’ perceived level of effort to obtain a reduced price negatively influences their fairness perceptions when they deny the promoted price. Exploring the underlying mechanisms of this effect, we show that the amount of effort consumers exert to obtain a promoted price leads to their feeling of deservingness and entitlement. When the promoted price is denied, this feeling of entitlement is violated, causing unfairness perceptions to occur. The research demonstrates that, in addition to retailers’ actions such as price changes, consumers’ actions, in the form of their effort input, are also an important determinant of fairness perceptions.
This paper examines the antecedents and consequences of perceived price-matching policy fairness. Among the antecedents, we study the effects of the refund depth if a lower competitive price is ...identified, the degree that the retail product assortment is available at competing retailers, and the consumers’ inference as to the retailer's motive for the price-matching policy. Product assortment uniqueness is identified as a key driver of fairness perceptions, both directly and indirectly through inferred motive. The three experiments show that consumers’ perceptions of the fairness of a store's pricing policy influence their price fairness perceptions, consequently influencing their retail shopping intentions.
Although there is much research on the topic of collecting, no attempt to separate collecting from compulsive collecting has been made. In this research, we conceptualize and develop a measure of ...compulsive collecting. The research offers important theoretical and empirical contributions as well as public policy implications.
The practice of preferential treatment (i.e., treating and serving some customers better than other customers) is popular but involves both philosophical controversies and empirical inconsistencies. ...This research systematically examines characteristics of preferential treatment, its impacts on emotions and cognitions, and the underlying mechanisms of these effects.
