How social crowding impacts mobile shopping: A perspective from information processing

Abstract

This research investigates how social crowding affects mobile purchase behavior through a scenario-based questionnaire, field research, and eye-tracking experiment, from the perspective of information processing. We find that social crowding reduces consumers’ purchase intentions, mediated by focused attention. This impact is more pronounced for search products compared to experience products, highlighting the moderating role of product type. Eye-tracking results show that under high social crowding, total fixation counts decrease only for search products and mediate the effect of social crowding on mobile consumption, supporting the idea that reduced focused attention impedes information processing and lowers purchase intentions across product types.