Two essays on consumer behaviors about emerging consumption habits

Abstract

With the evolvement of technology and society, people nowadays develop new consumption habits. In this dissertation, I examine two independent phenomena focusing on emerging consumers’ behaviors when they interact with novel marketing tactics and their social companions, respectively. In the first essay, I focus on a novel price promotion, a trivial-priced coupon. Price promotions are well-adopted tools for marketers. With the development of electronic payment, marketers have developed new price promotion tactics. In this research, I focus on trivial-priced coupons, which require consumers to pay a trivial price to acquire the coupon, to examine the effectiveness of trivial-priced coupons. Across two field experiments and three lab experiments, I demonstrate that trivial-priced coupons (vs. comparable free coupons) increase consumers’ perceived coupon deal value by facilitating cost-benefit analysis, which in turn increases coupon conversion behaviors. I also identify that when consumers are guided to focus on the actual saving, the impact of trivial-priced coupons (vs. free coupons) on conversion rate is attenuated. This research contributes to the literature on price promotion by examining a novel type of price promotion. Most importantly, this research guides marketers to design price promotions more effectively. In the second essay, I focus on how social context could influence gift-giving behavior. Previous research on gift-giving has mainly focused on dyadic relationships, which involve only one giver and one recipient. This research focuses on gift-giving in polyadic relationships, where there are multiple givers and one recipient, such as a group of people celebrating the birthday of a mutual friend. Behaviors like these are ubiquitous in daily life and have become more prevalent due to the use of gift registries, which allow multiple givers to contribute to a single recipient. Through one field experiment and seven lab experiments, current work has identified that: 1) givers are less willing to give group gifts than recipients prefer to receive them, across a variety of product contexts; 2) the discrepancy between givers and recipients in preference for group gifts is driven by givers' heightened concerns about interpersonal invisibility; and 3) the discrepancy occurs due to givers' reluctance to group gifts. The research also identifies two boundary conditions and one actionable intervention to attenuate givers’ reluctance to group gifts. This study contributes to the literature on gift-giving and social influence, identifies a novel antecedent for interpersonal invisibility concerns, and provides insights for both consumers and marketers of gift registries.