Proceedings of the 5th Economic & Finance Conference, Miami

CONSUMER INNOVATIVENESS AND INFORMATION SEEKING BEHAVIOR AS OPPOSED TO RISK PERCEPTIONS ON PURCHASES OF HI-TEC

FIGEN ERSOY, NURI CALIK

Abstract:

This study intends to find out the consumer innovativeness and information seeking behavior which are assumed to be negatively correlated with consumer risk perceptions. A survey on 880 respondents who are selected via stratified sampling of which 863 are found eligible to be analyzed. The respondents are required to answer 50 questions of which five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 45 are statements which are designed to reflect the innovativeness and risk perception of the consumers which are two controversial issues... The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 45 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale. The remaining five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Five research hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 45 variables to eight basic components as "Online shopping risks, technology readiness, risk avoidance, physical risk perception, consumer innovativeness, functional risk perception, information seeking behavior, and social risk perception. Cronbach's Alpha for scale reliability is ( = 0.731) and the sample adequacy ratio (KMO ) is 0.835. In addition non-parametric bivariate analysis in terms of Chi-Square is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey are listed.

Keywords: Consumer innovativeness, information seeking behavior, risk perception and risk avoidance, technology-proneness, functional and physical risks.

DOI: 10.20472/EFC.2016.005.006

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