Three essays on the effects of mobile-based social IT artifacts on consumer emotion, identity, and self-control

Abstract

The proliferation of social information technology (IT) artifacts (e.g., social networks and IT-driven social advertising) that affect the manner by which consumers communicate with one another and purchase goods and services has led to a paradigm shift across nearly all industries. Such IT-driven innovations currently empower both retailers and consumers by enhancing economic welfare and reducing coordination costs and market inefficiencies. Nevertheless, such benefits come at a cost. Our society has witnessed the swift emergence of overdependence on mobile technologies, which has arisen as a serious social issue that results in mobile addiction and productivity loss. To understand how mobile- based social artifacts influence consumer behaviors, we undertook three separate studies aimed at looking into the effects of such artifacts on consumer emotion, identity, and self-control. The first study explored how numerous image components (e.g., emotional and informational appeal and visual and semantic complexity) of social advertisements for fashion products influence consumers’ search and purchase intentions. On the basis of simultaneous equation modeling that involved the use of machine learning technology for image analysis, we addressed consumers’ changes in attitudes toward advertising images across different situations (e.g., click-throughs and conversions), as well as individuals’ heterogeneous characteristics. The second study tackled an emerging issue in e-commerce, that is, the role of site-specific registration as a relationship-specific asset and as a source of switching costs and entry barriers. Analyzing a unique panel dataset on consumers’ behaviors over 500 retailer sites, we empirically demonstrated how a retailer’s adoption of social login systems affects consumer conduct (e.g., cart abandonment, cross-browsing, and cross-purchasing). The third study delved into social app addiction and the effectiveness of diverse precommitment mechanisms as self-regulation measures against mobile temptation. Drawing on the precommitment framework, we provided empirical insights into the methods through which individuals can control excessive indulgence in smartphone use. This examination was based on a combination of self-control mechanisms (rules and incentives) and functional structures (temporal and spatial).