Keeping Up with the Joneses: Instagram Use and its Influence on Conspicuous Consumption

So far research in the area of social networking sites (SNS) has drawn surprisingly little attention to users’ conspicuous consumption (CC), even though the constant rise of younger people’s debts seems to go hand in hand with the rise of SNS. To fill this research gap, we conducted two studies based on social comparison and normative influence theory. In a preliminary study, we show that Instagram use is positively related to users’ CC. In the main study, using a sample of 283 German Instagram users, we find possible explanations for this association. While norms on Instagram seem not to account for the link between Instagram use and CC, our results suggest a mediating effect of envy. We contribute to the literature by providing insights on SNS use and CC while offering first explanations for its potentially harmful economic outcomes. Acknowledgment This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) under grant no. 16DII116 (“Deutsches Internet-Institut”)

The role of Benign Envy on Consumption - A Cross-Cultural Comparison in Social Networking Environment

Objectives This thesis aims to investigate benign envy and purchase intentions of social media users in different cultures. To achieve this, Finnish and Vietnamese of all ages, who engaged in social media usage were sampled. As they represent the less and more collectivist sides of consumers, the difference in collectivism is employed to examine the variations in purchase intentions across cultures. Summary Despite being known for its negative impacts on personal and social well-being, envy possesses a subtype called benign envy, which constructively affects sales and economic development. Additionally, compared to malicious envy, benign envy is more common in social media settings. As the number of social media users increases substantially, this positive side of envy becomes a promising aspect for businesses to exploit. Previous studies connect benign envy with the motivation to obtain the same virtue or goods owned by the advantaged party. It is thus hypothesized that this pattern remains valid in online contexts. Moreover, because the intensity of benign envy and the need to conform with social norms are positively correlated to collectivism, collectivist nations are expected to have higher purchase intentions than individualists. 206 participants were engaged through a questionnaire to draw answers for these propositions. While the results support the first argument, they reject the second one since the impacts of envy and collectivism on purchase intentions are independent. Conclusions It could be concluded from this research that benign envy, regardless of offline or online settings, enhances the incentive to obtain the good of the comparable other. Nevertheless, collectivism does not have a significant role in this relationship. Social comparison, on the contrary, could increase envy-related consumption

Three Research Essays on Human Behaviors in Social Media

Social Media (SM) has grown to be one of the most popular Internet technologies for individual users and has fostered a global community. For instance, recent statistics reveal that monthly active users of Facebook are almost 1.5 billion by Mar 2015. At the same time, 20% of internet users in the US are expected to have Twitter accounts. This figure has grown from 15.2% in 2012, and is expected to rise to 24.2% by 2018 (Twitter 2015). People like spending their time on SM to track the latest news, seek knowledge, update personal status, and connect with friends. It is possible that being exposed to others’ positive information on SM could generate darker emotions, such as envy. Extant literature suggests that envy significantly influences human behaviors and life satisfaction (Krasnova et al. 2013). This dissertation, consisting of three essays, studies the effects of SM on human behaviors. Chapter 2 investigates how others’ positive information arouses envy and influences user behaviors from different angles. Chapter 3 focuses on how espoused national cultures reshape online benign envy and impact SM usage. Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between social media and envy with textual analysis techniques. Chapter 5 provides a summary and overall conclusion to this work. Chapter 2- Envy and How it can Influence SM Use Users tend to disclose the positive side of their lives on SM. Such information can be perceived in an extremely positive light in the eyes of their connections, which could leads to envy. In the current study, we develop a theoretical framework that elaborates the mechanism through which online envy is generated and consequently influences SM usage. We specify that online users experience two types of envy: malicious and benign envy, which have distinct impacts on IS use. Specifically, malicious envy plays a mitigating role and benign envy serves as an enhancer of SM use. Our findings provide valuable implications for both academic researchers and IS practitioners. Chapter 3 – Benign Envy, Social Media, and Culture Although envy universally exits in human society, its influence on human behaviors varies by cultural contexts. As shown in chapter 2, benign envy is a more salient factor in the social media context. In the current essay, we focus on investigating how different espoused national cultural values affect this relationship between online benign envy and consequent behaviors. We also developed a benign envy and IT usage model, which integrates four espoused national cultural values. We conceptualized several main constructs and then theoretically justified the relationships between them. As expected, if people experience benign envy when using SM, they are more likely to continue their use. Moreover, different espoused national culture values work as independent and moderating variables along with the envy procedures. People who hold different levels of culture behave distinctly. The study found that people who espouse a greater level of collectivism were be more likely to compare with other peers in order to evaluate their self-social status; people who espouse higher levels of uncertainty avoidance were more likely to experience benign envy; and the relationship between perceived enhancement and use intention was stronger for individuals with higher levels of espoused masculinity. However, espoused power distance values were not significantly moderating the relationship between perceived enjoyment and intended behavior in the current context (general SM). This study provided some theoretical and practical implications. Chapter 4 – Tweet, Favorite, Status, and Envy Many social media studies have demonstrated that aggregating social information could provide valuable insight into sociological, economical, healthcare, and other critical fields. Among these studies, Twitter has been one of the most popular social platforms that researchers value. It has a greater potential for academics to observe and explore critical social behaviors, such as envy, which could lead to avoidance of using certain IT platforms, emotional depression, and even worse, suicide. With text mining techniques, massive numbers of tweets can be collected, classified, and analyzed. The envy literature has largely theorized on the motivations of envy. However, in the IS context, envy related research is very limited, and the empirical tests are confounded by limited data. In order to address these gaps, we collected envy related tweets from Twitter and classified them into the two types (benign and malicious) of envy relying on text mining techniques with sentiment analysis (positive to negative). Based on the data set, we further analyzed the patterns of online envy. Additionally, by using logistic regression, the impacts of certain social media usage behaviors were tested on differentiating online envy. Our work included both qualitative observation and quantitative analysis, along with the evaluation of regression output

College-Aged users behavioral strategies to reduce envy on social networking sites:A cross-cultural investigation

Social networking sites (SNSs) are central to social interaction and information sharing in the digital age. However, consuming social information on SNSs invites social upward comparisons with highly socially desirable profile representations, which easily elicits envy in users and leads to unfavorable behaviors on SNSs. This in turn can erode the subjective well-being of users and the sustainability of the SNS platform. Therefore, this paper seeks to develop a better theoretical understanding of how users respond to envy on SNSs. We review literature on envy in offline interactions to derive three behavioral strategies to reduce envy, which we then transfer to the SNS context (self-enhancement, gossiping, and discontinuous intention). Further, we propose a research model and examine how culture, specifically individualism-collectivism, affects the relationship between envy on an SNS and the three strategies. We empirically test the variance-based structural equation model through survey data collected of Facebook users from Germany and Hong Kong. Our findings provide first insights into the link between envy on SNSs, related behavioral strategies and the moderating role of individualism for self-enhancement

How Do You Handle It? An Investigation of Facebook Affordances and Envy

Facebook and other social network sites (SNSs) provide over one billion users with affordances not realized in traditional interpersonal interactions. With a single online post (a comment, a picture, a like, a tag, a status update, etc.), SNS users across the planet can instantly share personal information with their entire network of friends. Some of these posts stimulate feelings of envy on the part of the reader, though the envious feelings (and the reactions to envy) may be different than those felt by individuals who learn of enviable news through traditional ( real world ) interactions. Under certain conditions, envious feelings experienced while visiting a SNS have been shown to be linked to depression and a lower sense of wellbeing. Our research reviews relevant literature on envy and social media affordances and builds a theory which relates the impact of SNS affordances to envious feelings. We present propositions to guide future research efforts that may seek to investigate the direct causes, moderators, and dispositional and situational factors that lead to feelings of SNS envy and its outcomes

Drivers and Consequences of Frustration When Using Social Networking Services: A Quantitative Analysis of Facebook Users

In this study drivers and consequences of frustration, a negative emotion when using information technology (IT), are theorized and empirically evaluated in a social networking services (SNS) usage context. For example, when users are frustrated by using SNS they might stop using these services. As the number of users mainly determines the value of SNS this paper focuses on frustration while using SNS. It is assumed that both technology and social aspects of SNS usage determine whether users feel frustrated. Empirical evidence can be provided that perceived enjoyment, envy, information overload, and social overload are antecedents of the sentiment frustration. It is also argued that frustration while using SNS will lead to dissatisfaction and discontinued usage. Based on the empirical evidence for this cohesion the paper discusses its theoretical contribution in terms of that discontinuous usage behavior is a coping strategy applied by users to minimize the frustration sentiment

When You Share, You Should Care: Examining the Role of Perspective-Taking on Social Networking Sites

Despite good intentions of users who share updates on SNSs, there is mounting evidence that recipients of SNS content frequently perceive shared information as inappropriate, annoying, envy-inducing, and excessive. To examine this apparent gap, we draw on the communication theory and the perceptual congruence model to analyze perceptual differences with the help of dyadic data analysis. Our findings based on 90 sender-recipient pairs show significant percep-tual differences between senders and corresponding recipients of content, with senders attach-ing greater value to their content and scoring both hedonic and utilitarian attributes higher. Additionally, we demonstrate the presence of “false consensus effect” in the SNS environment, meaning that senders anticipate perceptions of recipients to be more similar to their own, than they actually are. Our results provide evidence that sender’s accuracy in predicting recipient’s perceptions contributes to favorable outcomes for both parties, including recipient’s satisfaction with the SNS relationship and positive feedback, desirable for senders. This highlights the im-portance of perspective-taking ability among senders of content. Implications for stakeholders in research and practice are discussed

Two Essays on Consumer Envy

Consumer envy, which is a two-faceted emotion (benign versus malicious), could change consumer behavior in different ways. Although research on envy is abundant in the psychology field, little attention has been paid to envy in marketing research. This dissertation composes of two essays. Based on Social Comparison Theory (SCT), these two essays examine the envy mechanism in driving consumer behavior using different contexts (social media behavior and counterfeit luxury consumption). Essay one examines the relationship between envy and consumer’s intention to conduct different social networking sites (SNSs) activities. To test the hypothesized relationships, four experiments were conducted. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 together find that while benign envious consumers are more likely to conduct positive interactive SNSs activities, malicious envious consumers are more likely to conduct negative interactive SNSs activities. Also, benign envious consumers are more likely to conduct self-improvement SNSs activities (competition and evaluation) than malicious envious consumers. Moreover, Experiment 2 finds that the selfefficacy motive fully mediates the relationship between benign envy and consumers’ intentions to conduct competitive SNSs activities. Experiment 4 explores the relationship between the envier’s status and different types of envy and the moderating effect of envied person’s status. It finds that high-power member is more likely to generate envy and the relationships are weakened when the envied person is a high-power member. Essay two explores why consumers turn to purchase counterfeits instead of authentic luxury products. Using three different types of luxury products and different samples in three experiments, a series of eight hypotheses are tested. Using limited-edition Nike shoes as the research context, Experiment 1 shows that malicious envious people have a higher intention to buy authentic luxury products than benign enviers. Using Louis Vuitton bag as the research context, Experiment 2 demonstrates that malicious enviers have a higher intention to buy counterfeits than benign enviers. Also, when counterfeit is popular in real life, malicious enviers have a higher intention to buy counterfeits than benign enviers. Last, Experiment 3 uses “ROLEX watch” as the research context and demonstrates that benign enviers have a higher intention to buy counterfeits than malicious enviers

UNDERSTANDING POST ADOPTION SWITCHING BEHAVIOR FOR MOBILE INSTANT MESSAGING APPLICATION IN CHINA: BASED ON MIGRATION THEORY

Post adoptive IT use is a hot research stream in information systems field, including continuance behaviours and switching behaviours. While there are a great number of studies on users’ intentions or behaviors for diversified information systems, previous post adoptive IT studies pay relatively less attention on users’ switching behaviors. Hence, we know little about this phenomenon and triggers on users’ switching behaviors. This research identifies the features of users IT switching behaviors and examines what trigger their switching intentions and actual behaviors in the context of mobile instant messaging (MIM) application in China. A model of MIM switching behaviors is developed based on Curran and Saguy’s (2001) research on how networks of obligation, trust and relative deprivation affect human’s migration decision and process. Besides these three triggers, we also introduce dissatisfaction and curiosity into our model according to prior IS studies on switching behaviors. A survey research method will be adopted to test this model. Overall, our study may theoretically contribute to further understand users’ IT switching behaviors and yield some practical implications for designers and managers in MIM providers and their products propaganda

Although I am stressed, I still use IT! Theorizing the decisive impact of strain and addiction of social network site users in post-acceptance theory

This paper examines the decisive roles of strain and addiction in post-acceptance behavior of social networking sites’ users. Therefore, we focus in a first step on the formation of discontinuous usage intentions by theorizing strain, addiction, and satisfaction as direct influencing factor that causes and/or inhibits them. In a second step, the influence of these variables on the intention-behavior relation is focused. We theorize that addiction as well as the ratio between satisfaction and strain moderate whether users transfer discontinuous usage intentions into non-usage behavior. To validate the subsequent research model we propose a longitudinal research setting and present initial results, whereupon satisfaction and strain – but not addiction – causes discontinuous usage intentions. We discuss our expected contributions by revealing that satisfaction, strain, and addiction influence whether a technology is used continuously; however, their influence on intentions and actual behaviors differs