Abstract
Modern consumers face a dramatic rise in web-based technological advancements and have trouble making rational and proper decisions when they shop online. When they try to make decisions about products and services, they also feel pressured against time when sorting among all of the unnecessary items in the flood of information available on the web. In this sense, they need to use consumer decision-making creativity (CDMC) to make rational decisions. However, unexplored research questions on this subject remain. First, in what ways do task difficulty and time constraints affect visual attention on exploitative and exploratory activities differently? Second, how does the location of the reference (i.e., hints) influence the level of visual attention to exploitative and exploratory activities depending on affordance theory? Third, how do exploratory and exploitative activities affect CDMC? Eye-tracking experiments were conducted with 70 participants to obtain relevant metrics such as total fixation duration (TFD), fixation count (FC), and visit count (VC) to answer these research questions. Our findings suggest that task difficulty influences exploitative activity, whereas time constraint is related to the exploratory activity. The result of the location of hints aligns with the affordance theory for the exploitative activity. Besides, exploratory activity positively affected CDMC, but exploitative activity did not show any effect.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the concept of web-based product information has been overwhelmingly dominating the manufacturing industry as an essential tool for customer engagement
The regression models of the ET gauged by the three visual attention metrics were adopted with a relevant fitness: adjusted R2 = 0.182, F = 6.122, p < 0.001, for total fixation duration (TFD); adjusted R2 = 0.326, F = 12.145, p < 0.001, for fixation count (FC); adjusted R2 = 0.237, F = 8.139, p < 0.001, for visit count (VC) (Table 2)
Task difficulty predictor showed a positive effect on ET in terms of TFD, FC, and VC visual attention metrics
Summary
The concept of web-based product information has been overwhelmingly dominating the manufacturing industry as an essential tool for customer engagement. The former research mostly emphasized the organization-level creativity that could facilitate insidersâ creativity to enhance firmsâ business competitiveness (Amabile, 1996; Perry-Smith, 2006; Althuizen and Reichel, 2016; Baack et al, 2016), whereas few have investigated the importance of consumer creativity in decision-making (Rosa et al, 2014) Most of these studies employed self-report surveys that could be problematic (Farh and Dobbins, 1989). This study adopted an eye-tracking approach in order to measure customer creativity in the processing of web information of smartphone products that measured such indices as total fixation duration (TFD), fixation count (FC), and visit count (VC), to investigate the way in which consumersâ visual attention is associated with consumer decision-making creativity (CDMC) and the way in which exploitative and exploratory activities differ, depending on time constraints and task difficulty. We addressed three specific research questions in this study: first, how do task difficulty and time constraints affect visual attention differently? Second, how does the location of the reference (i.e., hints) influence the level of visual attention to exploitative and exploratory activities, respectively? Third, does the notion of visual attention affect CDMC?
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
