Study On Decision-making Of Chinese Consumers' Online Purchase Based On Prospect Theory

As the increasing scale of online shopping,cyber economy has become an important part of China's economy.Decision-making of online purchase has become one of the hotspots of the scholars' research.Compared with traditional offline purchase,there is a separation between online consumers and goods in both time and space.How do online consumers make decisions by giving their own judgment through the information that is already available on the online shopping site?At the same time,do consumers show a different purchase preference when the business gives different information statements of essentially the same promotion?This study will start from the paradigm model of the bounded rationality of decision-makers--the Prospect Theory,and set up a prospective value decision model of bounded rational purchase decision behavior for the individual consumers by means of the value function and the weighting function.In addition,combine with the derivative of the Prospect Theory--the Framing Effects to analysis the problems above-mentioned in depth.In this study,a virtual online purchase situation is constructed by using the quasi-experimental research method,the environmental variables for decision-making are given and other variables are controlled according to the rules of the experiment.The data of consumers' online purchase intention is collected by questionnaire survey and analyzed by analysis of variance(ANOVA)and regression analysis in order to discuss the relationship between the prospect value and the consumers' online purchase intention.Meanwhile a 2(Risky Choice Framing Effects:definite description,risky description)×2(Attribute Framing Effects:positive description,negative description)×2(Goal Framing Effects:“avoid behavior”goal-oriented description,"approach behavior" goal-oriented description)between-subject experimental design is used to build 8 groups of different experimental situations and the regression analysis is used to explore the role of language description under different framing effects in the relationship between the prospect value and the online purchase intention.The study reached the following main conclusions:the online purchase intention of consumers is influenced by the prospect value of each store perceived by consumers.The larger the prospect value is,the stronger the online purchase intention of consumers is.At the same time,the impact of the prospect value on the consumer's online purchase intention is regulated by the Framing Effects.More specifically:under the Risky Choice Framing Effects,the definite description can promote the transformation of prospect value to the online purchase intention more than the risky description;under the Goal Framing Effects,the"avoid behavior" goal-oriented description can promote the transformation of prospect value to the online purchase intention more than the "approach behavior" goal-oriented description;while under the Attribute Framing Effects,the positive and negative language descriptions have no significant moderating effect on the conversion of prospect value to consumers'online purchase intention.The theoretical contributions of this study are as follows:(1)This study explores the online shopping decision-making behavior of Chinese consumers based on the Prospect Theory from the perspective of bounded rationality,and achieves a transformation from an entirely rational research perspective to a bounded rational research perspective,which is more consistent with actual situation.(2)The bounded rational decision-making process of individual consumers from the micro level is explored to establish different reference points for different individuals,and personalized decision model is calculated with the Prospect Theory,and the prospect value that is depended on to make decisions by individuals is obtained,ultimately the purchase decision of each individual can be maked.The practical significance of this study is to make online retailers understand the psychological characteristics and behavioral characteristics of online consumers fully and accurately,and to provide theoretical guidance for them when they formulate marketing strategies or promotion plans.