The effects of hope and anxiety in driving consumer intentions to adopt new product solutions

New products are often associated with uncertainty. On the one hand consumers may hope that innovative offerings will produce goal-congruent outcomes, while on the other hand, they may be anxious about the possibility that the product will result in goal-incongruent ones. In four studies, I demonstrate the intriguing finding that anxiety about a new product boosts (rather than reduces) the positive effect of hope on adoption intentions. This effect is observed when using different populations of consumers from around the globe, when using products and services, and in contexts that involve different types of consumption goals – i.e., functional, aesthetic, experiential and social goals. I test defensive pessimism and confidence in achieving goal-congruent outcomes as a serial mediation process explaining this effect. The proposed mechanism remains significant, even after accounting for alternative explanations including pain/gain inferences and motivated reasoning. This thesis highlights the crucial role of hope and anxiety in driving consumer intentions to adopt new product solutions and offers important insights that may have implications for both research and practice.Open Acces

Signal Amplification Assisted by Multiple Sideband Interference in 1D Waveguide QED Systems

This study theoretically investigates signal amplification resulting from multiple Rabi sideband coherence in a one-dimensional waveguide quantum electrodynamical system. Specifically, we explore the behavior of a transmon while strongly driven by a coherent microwave field through a semi-infinite waveguide. To understand the underlying mechanisms of amplification, we develop a theory that explicitly takes into account multiple dressed sidebands under a strong driving field, and analyze the reflection amplitude of the probe signal. Our findings show that amplification can be related to either population inversion or multiple sideband constructive interference in some cases without population inversion. We further examine the effect of qubit dephasing during the amplification process