Context Effects of Mobile Consumer Behavior: Test of Affect and Regulatory Focus Theory in Shopping and Investment Decisions

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Consumers increasingly use mobile devices for purchase decisions - mobile commerce sales have been attributed to account for $360bn in the U.S. in 2021. Given the portable nature of mobile devices, consumer decisions most likely are influenced by their current environmental context. In the continuation phase of this project, we propose to analyze two candidate psychological mechanisms that mediate the influence of the environmental context on mobile consumer behavior in situations where consumers pursue specific goals. We propose to investigate how the crowdedness and the weather at consumers’ location may influence consumers’ affective state and/or regulatory focus, ultimately impacting their choices in these domains. Our research will fill an important gap in the literature. While previous research has found both weather and crowdedness to influence mobile consumer behavior, the psychological mechanism(s) behind these effects are unclear. Furthermore, prior work on situational factors influencing consumers’ affective state and/or goal pursuit behavior has mostly been confined to a lab environment, thereby being unable to account for the impact of the environmental variation encountered by mobile consumers. We propose a theoretical framework, and derive hypotheses that we test via a pre-tested experimental paradigm using situationally-immersive videos to manipulate the perceived environmental context of research participants. In addition to a series of online experiments, we also plan to use additional secondary field data. Using primary and secondary data, we will test our hypotheses on the role of environmental context in two domains of mobile consumer behavior with substantial societal importance: (i) mobile shopping and (ii) investment decisions.