Consumer's Emotional Decision-making: Perspective Of Competitive Arousal Model

The issue that consumers usually make decisions emotionally under pressure caused by external stimuli is always under the spotlight of scholars. However, relevant researches were not systematized due to lacking of theoretical foundation and measure methods. However, there are few in-depth researches on the mechanism of consumers'emotional decision-making or comprehensive researches on the integrate process of the consumers'emotional decision-making. With the development of the competitive arousal decision model that focus on individual's emotion, it becomes feasible to explore the mechanism of the consumers' emotional decision-making; and the accumulation of former researches achievements also makes it possible to carry out comprehensive investigations into the emotional decision-making process. Based on the Competitive Arousal Model, a new decision-making model which focuses on decision-makers' emotion, this paper aimed to conduct a deep and comprehensive research on consumers' emotional decision-making process. We adopted various methods (interview, survey, scenario stimulation experiment) to find out how external factors would affect the consumer's competitive arousal emotion and how this emotion would affect consumers' eventual emotional behavior. This paper is structured by three studies:StudyⅠ:The qualitative analysis of consumers'emotional decision-making process. After interviewing 15 subjects on their emotional consumption experience, we collected 35 cases via critical incident technique. Based on the content analysis result of the cases, we identified that the consumers' emotional decision-making process can be segmented into 3 steps:external stimuli; arousal emotion changing; emotional behaviors, each of which contains some key factors. This study qualitatively explored the consumers' emotional decision-making process, and the result provided content basis for StudyⅡand StudyⅢ.StudyⅡ:The investigation into consumers' competitive arousal emotion dimensions and the development of measurement scale. Based on the results of StudyⅠand through two questionnaires, we defined the dimensions of consumers' competitive arousal emotion and developed the scale. By both qualitative revising (experts group discussion) and quantitative revising (EFA with 194 samples and 139 samples respectively CFA with 139 samples), we ensured the validity and credibility of the dimensions and scale (a>0.9; KMO>0.8; P of x2/df>0.05). Results showed that consumers'competitive arousal emotion was structured by two dimensions:target arousal emotion and environment arousal emotion, and each dimension has 6 measurement items. This study not only made a great contribution to the research of competitive arousal model, but also set a good measurement base for Study III.Study III:The quantitative analysis of the mechanism of consumers's emotional decision-making from the perspective of competitive arousal model. Via scenario stimulation experiment, we tested the 139 participants'reaction under 2×2 orthogonal design stimulation scenarios with controlled external stimuli. We conducted regression analysis by choosing target stimuli and environment stimuli as external factors; target arousal emotion and environment arousal emotion as internal factors; impulsive buying, overbidding and happiness as dependent variables. We found that impulsive buying and happiness would be triggered by target stimuli and target arousal emotion was the mediator, while overbidding would be triggered by environment stimuli and was partially mediated by environment arousal emotion. This study proved that consumers'competitive arousal emotion played an important role in the consumers'emotional decision-making process, and some conclusions were counter-intuition, which offered clue for future researches.The conclusions were meaningful both theoretically and practically. For the scholars, they would regard the results as an important supplement to both emotional decision-making researches and competitive arousal model researches. For the consumers, they can avoid unnecessary lose by adopting some suggestion provided by this research. For the businessmen, they can take more effective marketing tactics according to the outcome of this research.