Online Consumers’ Attribute Non-Attendance Behavior: Effects of Information Provision

ABSTRACT

In online shopping, e-consumers often choose one among many websites on which to place their orders. The choice depends on key attributes such as trust labels. Presence of such a label shows that the website has been independently certified for online security and privacy. However, consumers may not search for websites with security and privacy seals if they do not know the importance of trust certificates. This behavior of ignoring attributes is called attribute non-attendance. Consumers’ attention to attributes can be increased through provision of information. We investigate the attribute non-attendance switching behavior when information on attributes is provided. Studies have modeled the impact of providing attribute information through changes in preference parameters. We show that an alternative approach is to model the impact via changes in attendance probabilities. We propose that an attribute’s attendance probability post-information depends on its attendance pattern pre-information. Applied to webshop choice data, we find that the proposed model gives a better fit compared with standard approaches. Providing information on attributes led to increases in consumers’ attention to the concerned attributes. Additionally, we found that consumer characteristics affect the shifts in attribute attendance behavior. We show that when assessing effects of providing information, considering the effect on attributes’ attention is important. We provide evidence that availing information on key attributes can give brands a competitive advantage.

KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:

• Attribute non-attendance behavior
• discrete choice experiments
• online sales
• consumer attitudes
• online information
• website design
• website attributes

Acknowledgments

We thank Jora Steenackers and Lieselotte Fonderie who, under the supervision of Michel Meulders, designed and collected the data for the webshop preferences study for their M.Sc. theses. We also thank the Editor-in-Chief, Vladimir Zwass, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments during the review process.

Leonard Maaya was funded by project G0C7317N of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO Flanders), Belgium.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leonard Maaya

Leonard Maaya ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Economics and Business of KU Leuven, Belgium. He earned an M.Sc. in biostatistics from the University of Hasselt, Belgium. His research interests are in health and health economics, and choice modeling. He has published in the journals Clinical Infectious Diseases and Sustainability.

Michel Meulders

Michel Meulders ([email protected]) is an associate professor in the Faculty of Economics and Business of KU Leuven. He earned a Ph.D. in psychology from KU Leuven. His research is mainly methodological and focuses on modeling choice behavior and three-way data. He has published in such journals as Journal of Statistical Software, Psychometrika, Journal of Educational and Behavioural Statistics, and British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology.

Martina Vandebroek

Martina Vandebroek ([email protected]) is a professor in the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven. She earned a Ph.D. in actuarial sciences from KU Leuven. She is interested in the design of experiments, discrete choice experiments, and multivariate statistics. She has published in Transportation Research B, Journal of Choice Modelling, Marketing Science, and International Journal of Research in Marketing, among other journals.