A causal model of consumer involvement: A new approach with intuitionistic fuzzy automata

Involvement has become an important variable in consumer behavior and marketing research for a long time. The purpose of this study is to develop a model that can explain the complicated relationship between antecedents, consequences, and different types of involvement at the same time to understand the internal state of consumers better. Specifically, this model has to be capable of handling the vague interactions between different types of involvement. We develop this integrated model by the using of the intuitionistic fuzzy automata. We choose the cell phone as the stimulus product in this research. There are 19 antecedents, 5 types of involvement, and 10 consequences in the integrated involvement model. According to the results, we find that the intuitionistic fuzzy automata can deal with the interactions between different types of involvement. Second, the intuitionistic fuzzy automata can observe the relations between antecedents, consequences, and 5 types of involvement at the same time. Besides, we can observe the internal state inside consumers through the intuitionistic fuzzy automata, especially the degree of hesitation when they make decisions.