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Based on 1,087,248 individual online reviews for 2007–2020 collected from the websites of AutoHome and Sohu Auto using the Python method, rating, volume, variance, and many other characteristics of online reviews are generated for 808 automobile products sold in mainland China. Using the observational learning (OL) framework to establish the relationship between automotive consumers’ purchasing behaviours and the display of online reviews, the econometric results reveal that, at the aggregate level, automotive consumers seem to respond more significantly to the volume/variance of online reviews (i.e. hedonic cues) rather than the average rating (i.e. utilitarian cues) for producing adequate OL. However, at the sub-categorical level, consumers are more likely to produce adequate OL regarding ratings representing utilitarian attributes while effects of most of the variance (i.e. hedonic cues) are limited. These findings imply that consumers are more likely to perceive automobile products as ‘more hedonic and less utilitarian’, but an overly complicated online review system forces consumers to simplify the OL process that prioritizes utilitarian attributes, as hedonic information is difficult to be understood. This study provides theoretical and empirical insights about how consumers respond differently to various online review characteristics for products with no clear boundary in a hedonic/utilitarian distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored how and when sensation seeking influences consumers' automobile insurance purchasing behavior by taking risk perception as a mediator and gender as a moderator. We collected data from 413 participants who purchased automobile liability insurance in China and employed the SPSS PROCESS macro for moderated mediation analysis. Our results revealed that sensation seeking had an indirect effect on insurance coverage purchasing behavior through risk perception, and that this mediating effect was moderated by gender. Men with higher (vs. lower) sensation seeking were more likely to have a lower risk perception and tended to purchase less insurance coverage. However, the indirect effect of sensation seeking was not significant among women. Our findings provide insight into the psychological mechanisms that influence consumers' automobile insurance purchasing behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores consumer ethnocentrism, consumer knowledge of countries of origin of automobiles, and the relationship between these and consumers' preferences and purchases of vehicles. Consumer ethnocentrism varies significantly within the U.S. population, resulting in groups that are not ethnocentric, moderately ethnocentric, and highly ethnocentric. While ethnocentrism is a significant factor in perceptions, attitudes, and purchase intentions, consumers have limited knowledge of where vehicles are made. Consumers rely primarily on country of brand rather than country of origin, and their attitudes and purchases reflect those brand perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In marketing domain, emotion is an important research topic as it unveils the hidden aspects of consumer psychology that shape consumer behavior. The paper aims to find out whether emotional state of buyers in the pre-purchase stage has influence over the information search process and investigate the predictive power of emotional state over the selection of the evaluation procedures by automobile buyers. It is found that pre-purchase emotional state of automobile consumers has a significant impact on the information search process, and positive pre-purchase emotional state motivates consumers to focus on favorable information (positive review, appealing ads) received during the search process and engage in Heuristic Processing, whereas negative pre-purchase emotional state drives consumers' attention towards unfavorable information (negative reviews, bad experiences of others) and dive into systematic processing. The study will be of help to car marketers in devising marketing communication strategies so as to create an appealing image in the minds of potential consumers and to stand out amidst competition. In addition, it also provides insight into the emotional dimension of consumers' mind, which will aid car marketers in taking well-thought-out marketing decisions to influence consumers' way of processing information while they make final purchase decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durable goods firms often create product lineups to provide a clear upgrading path as consumers make replacement decisions. Consumers can upgrade a little (i.e., spend a bit more than last time) or a lot (i.e., spend substantially more). However, the factors affecting the degree of such vertical "moving up" have received limited scholarly attention. In particular, little is known about how trade-in characteristics and the marginal costs–benefits of the new purchase influence the degree of upgrade. The authors use 320,000 Cash for Clunkers automobile transactions to provide the first examination of how mental accounting surpluses from trade-in ownership time and trade-in windfall, in addition to brand loyalty, affect the degree of upgrade. The authors find that trade-in ownership time and brand loyalty enhance the replacement's degree of upgrade. However, trade-in windfall size has a negative effect, revealing the downside of this common promotional practice. Two experiments and additional dealer data indicate that this finding is robust to different economic conditions. Thus, these findings provide valuable new guidance for durable goods firms to facilitate the degree to which consumers upgrade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, new energy automobiles have developed rapidly and become the choice of more and more consumers. At the same time, a vast number of online reviews of automobiles with inferred consumer preferences emerge on platforms. There is an urgent need to mine useful information from online reviews to support consumer purchase decisions. In this study, we propose a multi-criteria product recommendation method that considers consumer' preferences and risk psychology estimated from online reviews. Firstly, a sentiment analysis method is developed to mine product performance under different attributes from text reviews. Secondly, a preference model with unknown preference parameters is predefined based on the multi-attribute value theory to represent consumers' value systems for purchase decision. On this basis, we propose a preference disaggregation analysis method that combines the prospect theory. Consumers' specific preference models are estimated from online reviews, which are then utilized to measure product performance and generate product recommendations. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by a case study of new energy automobile ranking from Autohome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main features of open-world games is the non-linear process, the existence of multiple ways to achieve goals, the noticeable presence of cultural elements, the impact of the game space on world-famous cities, and the significant use of artificial intelligence. This research after examining the concept of "open world" in digital games and the development of this design model by using of case study and participant observation, with a critical and skeptical look at the realization of the game world of "Grand Theft Auto V and online version", especially in the context of the existence of multiple paths, seeks to achieve the main goals. The results of this study indicate that the open world of the game "Grand Theft Auto" is limited and enclosed by the design of the structure, storylines, characters, scenarios, rewards, punishments, racial discrimination, and sexual preferences. Despite the definition of normal and common professions and jobs in the game environment, such as buying and selling automobiles, investing in the stock market, medicine, working in the transportation system, and store management, the main goals are only through the income from membership in mafia groups, extensive trade in materials. Drugs and organized robberies are attainable, and roleplaying in the position of the police is also associated with many obstacles and challenges, limited powers, few initiatives, a high degree of difficulty, and little attraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is no longer a small car market, but Indians are in love with Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs). SUVs have been rapidly expanding in the global automobile industry due to their ruggedness and aggressive designs with dynamic consumer perceptions. In the past few years, the Indian automobile industry has grown enormously, contributing 7.1% to the country's GDP and 49% to the manufacturing GDP. This paper explores how SUVs are perceived in developing nations in the context of economic and social diversity in order to extract existing knowledge and also understand consumers' buying behavior and brand choice in the SUV segment in automobile industry. The current study, through a literature review, finds that a majority of the studies focused on consumers' purchase decision in the automobile industry as a whole. In the present study, consumer buying decision is associated with rational brand choice in the SUV segment. Additional reviews of literature on the automobile industry, including two-wheelers, three-wheelers, Multi Utility Vehicles (MUVs), sedans, and hatchbacks, are carried out. Finally, the foremost barriers and challenges faced by SUV car owners are identified and presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Households demand automobiles for several purposes such as personal use, saving or boosting their status. In order to achieve this objective and meet the automobile needs of individuals, individuals prefer to buy first or secondhand automobiles. The aim of this study is to determine the socioeconomic factors which are effective on purchasing first or secondhand automobiles by the households. The scope of the study, data set belonging to 1058 households who have purchased secondhand automobiles and 144 households who have purchased first hand automobiles included in the B Micro Data Set of 2018 Household Budget Research by the TurkStat (Turkish Statistical Institute) was used. The study was estimated using the Ordered Logit model. According to the model estimation results, income, household type and automobile ownership was found to be effective in first hand automobile purchasing and marital status, house and automobile ownership and working status of the head of the family was found to be effective in the second hand automobile purchasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The study seeks to provide an integrated view of ethnocentrism among Indian consumers and to ascertain the relationship between consumer ethnocentrism, demographic antecedents, consumers' product judgement, and their willingness to buy. Design/Methodology/Approach: The scale used to measure consumer ethnocentrism was a standardised 17-item Consumer Ethnocentric Tendency Scale (CETSCALE), developed by Shimp and Sharma (1987). Product judgement and willingness to buy were measured on a standardised 12-item scale developed by Wood and Darling (1993). Findings: The study has revealed that Indian consumers are moderately ethnocentric when automobiles are taken into consideration. The demographic factors including gender, educational qualification, and occupation showed a significant relationship with consumer ethnocentrism. The relationship between consumer ethnocentrism and product judgement was also found to be significant, but the same was not established between product judgement and their willingness to buy. Limitations: The study was confined to automobile products in Uttarakhand. Hence, the results may not be generalised across the other goods categories. Practical Implications: The information provided by the study on consumers' demographic antecedents and their relationship with ethnocentric tendencies can be used by international and domestic automobile companies to formulate appropriate marketing strategies. Originality/Value: The findings of the study determining the level of ethnocentrism among the customers will be helpful in the formulation of marketing policies and strategies determining how to project the product at the national and international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Doxa Comunicación is the property of Fundacion Universitaria San Pablo - CEU and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The consumers make a purchase of several types of goods as well as services which have the capacity of fulfilling their expectations. The consumers form the biggest economic group in any country. Nearly all the economic activities are carried on keeping the consumers in mind. Hence, it is rightly said that all types of business activities should be carried out with the main aim of satisfying the consumers. All the aforesaid facts apply to all types of business including the automobiles sector. The current study has been carried out with the aim of exploring the influence or the effect of the awareness of the consumers on their buying behavior regarding the purchase of automobiles. The study has been done among the consumers who purchase automobiles in Chennai. The respondents for the study are selected through S and the sample size of the study is 100. The data needed for the study has been collected through a questionnaire and the analytical part of the study is done with the help of regression. The findings of the analysis show that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies on customer participation in value co-creation have shed more light on the involvement of the customer in creating unique experiences. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of price fairness on satisfaction and loyalty in a value co-creation context in the automobile industry. Data were collected from 532 customers of automobile buyers in 30 dealer shops in Ghana through a self-administered questionnaire. The study was analysed using SmartPLS 3.0. The main point of our findings is that price fairness not only influences satisfaction and loyalty but also has a significant and positive moderation. As the purchase of automobile is a major decision for customers, price becomes a key determinant in influencing their satisfaction and loyalty. Companies must be fair in terms of the pricing of their products as this goes a long way to affect their satisfaction and future re-purchases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper researches the effect of social media marketing on buying behavior of consumers in automobile industry. This paper discusses SMM from the perspective of the consumers and their perception. It also examines the factors considered and explore the affiliation among these factors and demographics. Design/Methodology: For this exploration, an organized survey study is done to gather information from 283 respondents who are the occupants of Delhi and additionally the clients of Social Media. The focal point of the investigation are all those consumers who are either owner of the cars or intending to buy a car in Delhi. Multivariate technique like Factor analysis, ANOVA & Regression analysis is done to analyse the data. Findings: The factor analysis resulted in 7 factors which influences respondents in their purchasing decision. The factors identified are: Information Gathering (IG), Opinion Seeking & Sharing (OSS), Individual Engagement (IE), Advertisement Content (AC), Information Source (IS), Information Evaluation (IEV) & Final Decision (FD). The findings of ANOVA showed that the importance of these factors do vary across different demographic variables. The analysis states that there is significant difference in perception towards social media marketing and consumer buying behaviour related to automobile buying behavior across different gender level of respondents. Additionally, through regression analysis it was also found that SMM has an impact on CBB. Limitations: Data is collected through the questionnaire only in Delhi and hence the findings cannot be generalized for the whole country. Respondents are constrained with time and willingness otherwise the sample could be larger than the present one. The factors identified provide only a glimpse of the factors which could be affecting consumer perception and behaviour. There is a strong possibility of many exogenous variables which might be affecting and playing role in this relationship of variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report summarizes the entrants in the 2018 ISMS Gary Lilien Marketing Science Practice Prize Competition, designed to identify, encourage, recognize, and reward the application of impactful marketing science to industry and noncommercial settings. These applications aim to showcase innovative and impactful examples of applications demonstrating the best of rigor and relevance that our profession produces. The winner described an application of econometric and experimental techniques at the French-based retailer of body, face, fragrances, and home products, L'Occitane, aimed to optimize budget allocation between online and off-line marketing expenditure across six countries. The other three finalists include a decision support aid to assist members of the United Services Automobile Association (a not-for-profit organization to assist military service personnel select and finance their automobile purchases) choose vehicles that balance their individual tastes and preferences with their financial circumstances, a business-to-business pricing decision support aid for use by the sales force of Hadco Metal Trading to avoid loss of margin by undercharging and loss of business by overcharging, and a methodology to test online advertisements cost-effectively by generating "ghost ads" as a way of minimizing control group costs in a reliable and valid way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we reveal a complete picture of ownership-related expenses and construct a decision model which helps decision maker to make the best choice when purchasing an automobile. The decision model helps the customers to understand what a car will cost beyond its purchase price when customers consider out-of-pocket expenses like fuel, repair, and insurance. Moreover, decision maker's preferences need to be elicited thowever, elicitation of these preferences is difficult when preferential dependencies exist or possible number of uncertainties is high. Therefore, we approximate representative joint probability distributions of a decision maker with partial information. We use a database of sedan models of all automobile brands and run a simulation to analyze the total cost of ownership of driving a car for 5 years. We found that even more expensive car could save more money over the first 5 years of ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach, this paper compares the price of each car model in a segment of the personal car market with the best possible price in view of the technology available given its particular combination of characteristics. In this approach, a car model is defined as price efficient if it offers customers the highest value per dollar spent for that set of characteristics. Likewise, a car model is inefficient if there is some other car model with a lower price having equivalent or higher quality, whereby a measure of the price efficiency is determined by the price reduction needed to make a car model efficient. The data set covers 141 different year 2002 car models, as appeared in Consumer Reports magazine. The vehicles that are listed by Edmunds.com as consumers' most wanted are compared with those at the top of our efficiency list. It is found that the majority of cars at the top of our list are also listed as most wanted by Edmunds.com. Evidently, consumers who usually make decisions based on price and quality information will naturally employ a heuristic such as "buy car models at the top of price efficiency list' if this list is made available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When consumers decide to upgrade to a new or better product, they often trade in their currently owned or used product for the new one. The authors examine whether such trade-in behavior, in which consumers must negotiate the price for both the new and the used product, affects their willingness-to-pay price for the new good. Drawing on research on mental accounting, the authors reason that when consumers engage in a transaction involving a trade-in (i.e., when they act as both buyer and seller simultaneously), they place more importance on getting a good value for the used product than on getting a good price for the new product. As a result, such consumers exhibit a higher willingness-to-pay price for the new product than consumers who just buy the new product alone. The results from a series of laboratory experiments provide systematic support for this hypothesis. Finally, the authors lend external validity to their results by confirming the hypothesis using real-world transaction data from the automobile market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using three cohorts of data from field surveys of new car buyers in 1990, 2000, and 2002, this study seeks to determine how the Internet fits into patterns of information search for recent car buyers. We believe that our study provides the most complete analysis to date of how the Internet is being integrated with other product information sources. Specifically, we find that the Internet substitutes for time spent at the dealer and time spent in negotiating prices. We also find that it substitutes for print third-party sources. Manufacturer/dealer Internet sources are the most widely used and appear to substitute the most for traditional sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consumer's preference for an offering can be influenced by the preferences of others in many ways, ranging from social identification and inclusion to the benefits of network externalities. In this article, the authors introduce a Bayesian spatial autoregressive discrete-choice model to study the preference interdependence among individual consumers. The autoregressive specification can reflect patterns of heterogeneity in which influence propagates within and across networks. These patterns cannot be modeled with standard random-effect specifications and can be difficult to capture with covariates in a linear model. The authors illustrate their model of interdependent preferences with data on automobile purchases and show that preferences for Japanese-made cars are related to geographically and demographically defined networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from surveys of automobile buyers collected in 1990 and 2000 in a natural experiment setting, the authors study the determinants of use of the Internet as a source of information on automobiles, its impact on the use of other sources, and its impact on total search effort. The results indicate that the Internet draws attention in approximately the same proportion from other sources. The results also show that those who use the Internet to search for automobiles are younger and more educated and search more in general. However, the analysis also indicates that they would have searched even more if the Internet had not been present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to identify the relation between Human Values and behavior in order to judge automobile purchases in Brazil and the United States of America. North Americans (N=461) and Brazilians (N=570) filled out the Portrait Values Questionnaire in its refined version, PVQ-R (Schwartz et al., 2012), the List of Values (Kahle & Kennedy, 1988) and the Judgment and Meaning Scale (Allen, 2000). Using stepwise regressions to determine which Human Value relates better with each type of judgment and attribution of meaning, two structural models were built comparing the influence of each value in each type of judgment both in the United States of America and Brazil. The results showed that in both countries the Human Values have a higher correlation with judgment than the List of Values and can predict the types of judgment and attribution of meaning the subjects use to evaluate automobile purchase, however, the structures are similar but not equal, indicating that cultural influences can alter how the evaluation is processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Advances in Scientific & Applied Accounting is the property of Associacao Nacional de Programas de Pos-graduacao em Ciencias Contabeis and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)