The Influences Of Atmospheric Cues On Consumer Behavioral Intentions: An Affordance Perspective

Online social shopping emerges from the idea of using social networking features to benefit traditional e-commerce activities. Technology-driven shopping environments not only support shopping task completion and self-entertainment, more importantly, these new shopping environments become alternate outlets for consumers to interact with others. This dissertation aims to understand the effects of atmospheric cues on consumers\u27 behavioral intentions in online social shopping environments. This dissertation study proposes and validates a research model that predicts consumers\u27 diverse behavioral intentions (approach and avoidance) toward using online shopping environments due to website atmospheric cues. This research model is constructed based on theoretical perspectives including stimulus-organism-response framework, the technology acceptance model, the theory of affordances, and activity theory. The empirical study used a three-factorial between-subject field experiment approach to validate the research model and hypotheses. A total of 360 valid responses were collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each of the subjects was randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions. Data was analyzed using three-way MANOVA and PLS-SEM techniques. Analysis results largely supported the research model. Three path coefficients surprisingly had different signs from their correlation coefficients, and further mediation analysis indicated that: perceived usefulness fully mediated the effects of perceived utilitarian affordances, perceived sociability of use fully mediated the effects of perceived social affordances, and that perceived usefulness and perceived fun fully mediated the effects of perceived sociability of use on behavioral intentions. This dissertation theoretically contributes to online social shopping research by building a well-grounded research model that integrates several theories from different disciplines. The instrument for measuring perceived affordances provides an operationalized solution to understand interaction mechanism between technology-driven environments and users. Practically, investigating the effects of atmospheric cues and decomposing process-based and outcome-based evaluations suggest different aspects that online merchants can work on to improve consumer experiences

Perceived Sociability of Use and Individual Use of Social Networking Sites - A Field Study of Facebook Use in the Arctic

This paper investigates determinants of individual use of social network sites (SNSs). It introduces a new construct, Perceived Sociability of Use (PSOU), to explain the use of such computer mediated communication applications. Based on a field study of 113 Facebook users it shows that PSOU in the sense of maintaining social contacts is a significant predictor of Perceived Benefits (PB), Perceived Enjoyment (PE), attitude toward use and intention to use. Inspired by Benbasat and Barki, this paper also attempts to answer questions "what makes the system useful", "what makes the system enjoyable to use" and "what makes the system sociable to use". As a consequence it pays special focus on systems characteristics of IT applications as potential predictors of PSOU, PB and PE, introducing seven such designable qualities (user-to-user interactivity, user identifiability, system quality, information quality, usability, user-to-system interactivity, and aesthetics). The results indicate that especially satisfaction with user-to-user interactivity is a significant determinant of PSOU, and that satisfactions with six of these seven designable qualities have significant paths in the proposed nomological network

Understanding Continuance Intention to Use Mobile Fitness Services: The Roles of Technological Characteristics and Network Effects

Mobile fitness platforms are effective in promoting healthy behaviors but these platforms generally suffer from low retention rates. It is necessary to study how to retain users of mobile fitness platforms. Based on customer value theory and Socio-technical approach, this study proposed a theoretical model to study the factors that affect users’ continuance intention to use mobile fitness platforms from a holistic perspective. A total of 320 valid questionnaires were collected to verify the model. The results indicate that utilitarian value and hedonic value are positively related to continuance intention. Social ties are negatively related to continuance intention. Meanwhile, it is found that technological characteristics have significant positive influences on utilitarian value, hedonic value and social ties. Network effects have significant positive influences on hedonic value and social ties. These findings extend our understanding of users’ continued usage of mobile fitness platforms and provide practical implications for mobile fitness service providers

Personality and Social Framing in Privacy Decision-Making: A Study on Cookie Acceptance

Despite their best intentions, people struggle with the realities of privacy protection and will often sacrifice privacy for convenience in their online activities. Individuals show systematic, personality dependent differences in their privacy decision making, which makes it interesting for those who seek to design ‘nudges’ designed to manipulate privacy behaviors. We explore such effects in a cookie decision task. Two hundred and ninety participants were given an incidental website review task that masked the true aim of the study. At the task outset, they were asked whether they wanted to accept a cookie in a message that either contained a social framing ’nudge’ (they were told that either a majority or a minority of users like themselves had accepted the cookie) or contained no information about social norms (control). At the end of the task, participants were asked to complete a range of personality assessments (impulsivity, risk-taking, willingness to self-disclose and sociability). We found social framing to be an effective behavioral nudge, reducing cookie acceptance in the minority social norm condition. Further, we found personality effects such that those scoring highly on risk taking and impulsivity were significantly more likely to accept the cookie. Finally, we found that the application of a social nudge could attenuate the personality effects of impulsivity and risk-taking. We explore the implications for those working in the privacy by-design space

Trust, Social Presence and Customer Loyalty in Social Virtual Worlds

Social virtual worlds (SVWs) have drawn substantial attention in business and academia. This research focuses on how trust affects customer loyalty in the SVW setting. Specifically, this study pinpoints how trust in SVW staff and other users influences the continuous use and purchase behaviour in SVWs. Additionally, we examine the influence of social presence on the two aspects trust and customer loyalty. The research model is tested with PLS using a sample of 2111 Finnish Habbo users. The two facets of trust are important antecedents on customer loyalty, yet differing in their effect. Social presence is a strong determinant of trust but also a direct antecedent of customer loyalty. Together, trust and social presence account for a considerable amount of variance in continuous use and purchase intention

Sociability and Technostress in Online Classes: The Effects on Students’ Emotional Exhaustion During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The move to online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic has led students in high schools to experience new issues because of their constant use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the consequences of constant ICT use is emotional exhaustion, which is raised or limited by different factors. Sociability is one of the factors that might decrease emotional exhaustion in students during online classes, while technostress could further it. Moreover, technostress creators could act as moderators on the effect of sociability on emotional exhaustion. These effects are tested with the help of a study with 592 participants, discovering that the sociability in online classes has an effect on how emotionally exhausted the students are. The antecedent technostress also has an effect on emotional exhaustion, thus furthering it. This paper contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by showing how students are affected by constant ICT use

INTERMITTENT PARTICIPATION: HOW SOCIABILITY AND USABILITY SHAPE MEDIATED MOBILE INTERACTION

Mobile devices are common communication tools, which deeply affect social engagement practices. Smart-mobile devices move beyond voice and textual communication: they enable ubiquitous online connectivity, and bring changes to mediated social interaction. In this paper we bring the results of a study of the meditated social practices of students who use smart mobile devices on a university campus and beyond it. While the common premise is that smart mobile devices enable continuous collaborative interaction, our study shows this interaction is limited than previously believed. Two distinct factors were found to affect mobile interaction: sociability and usability. While sociability entices users to engage in continuous mobile-mediated interaction, usability issues encumber the full embracement of mobile-social applications. The tension between the two creates a new form of interaction - intermittent participation - in which users are constantly attuned to absorb notifications and updates, but rarely respond to them, unless a response is absolutely necessary

CONSUMER USE OF SOCIAL LIVE STREAMING SERVICES: THE INFLUENCE OF CO-EXPERIENCE AND EFFECTANCE ON ENJOYMENT

Social live streaming services (SLSS) have emerged as a new type of hedonic social media. SLSS allow users to watch and broadcast video streams in real-time, fostering sociability through synchronous communication via chat channels. While the extant literature has mostly examined producers’ use of SLSS, the consumer perspective has been underexplored. Prior research has identified perceived enjoyment as consumers’ primary motivation to use hedonic social media. However, it remains unclear how the specific affordances of SLSS affect consumers’ enjoyment. Due to their synchronous nature, SLSS enable consumers to co-experience live streams together and to perceive so-called “effectance” by shaping the content of live streams through their actions. Consequently, research is required on how both co-experience and effectance influence consumers’ enjoyment of SLSS. We empirically address this research gap by applying partial least squares equation modeling on web survey data of 127 consumers of SLSS. Our results show that consumers’ perceived co-experience has a strong positive effect on the enjoyment of their active behavior (chatting) and their passive behavior (watching). Perceived effectance, however, only shows a positive impact on the enjoyment of active behavior, while playing no role for the enjoyment of passive behavior

Virtual Social Network characterization: reference framework for a comparative analysis

Although social network, social media, social networking site, online game and online community are all terms found in the literature, do they actually refer to radically different environments? The paper proposes a generic definition for Virtual Social Networks (VSNs) and it identifies the environments\u27 five essential dimensions. Thanks to a simple reference framework it becomes possible to compare the research work on the different environments and their varied theoretical approaches. The paper is based on both the literature and original research