Online Purchasing and its Determinants: An Experimental Approach

Abstract

With the rapid and worldwide emergence of electronic commerce in terms of both number of users and volume, the importance of an in-depth understanding of consumers’ attitudes toward online purchasing has been increasing. There is a broad literature on this topic mainly based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) that is extended by including other factors such as trust and risk. This study brings a new angle to the existing literature by measuring risk factor in a laboratory experiment by employing an improved version of a widely used method in experimental economics. Risk preferences are measured for 64 university students who then answer a questionnaire about online purchasing. We propose a comprehensive model based on TAM and employ partial least squares approach to analyze the data. We find that experimentally elicited risk preference measure and variables of hedonic aspect of TAM have significant effects while trust, other risk measures and variables of utilitarian aspect of TAM have no significant effect on online shopping behavior. We finally discuss the implications and limitations of our study and provide some future study suggestions.