Decision making aid in mobile environment by behavioral characteristic

Abstract

Despite the explosive growth of mobile environment and the rapidly increasing number of consumers who use location based search, we cannot find how consumers make purchase decisions in such situation. An unique characteristic of mobile environment is that they allow retails to create marketing context with location. A desirable recommendation from a consumer perspective is the implementation of sophisticated decision aid to assist consumers in their purchase decisions by providing the recommendation mechanism to their individual preferences.The availability of such decision aid, which we refer to as context based processes for consumers, may lead to a transformation of the way in which consumers search for product information and make purchase decisions. While making purchase decisions, consumers are often unable to evaluate all available alternatives in great depth and thus, they tend to use two-stage processes to reach their decisions.At the first stage, consumers typically screen a large set of available products and identify a subset of the most promising alternatives. Subsequently, they evaluate the latter in more depth, perform relative comparisons across products on important attributes and make a purchase decision. Given the different tasks to be performed in such two-stage processes, context based processes that provide support to consumers in the following respects are particularly valuable: (1) the initial screening of available products to determine which ones are worth considering further, (2) the in-depth comparison of selected products before making the actual purchase decision. The decision aid also includes multi-attribute product choices based on expert (same as bell captain) behavioral characteristic.This paper shows the nature of the effects that the context based decision aid may have on consumer decision making in mobile environment and the effects of two decision aid functions which designed to assist consumers in performing one of the above tasks on purchase decision making in mobile environment.