Empirical Study of Consumption Behavior of College Students under the Influence of Internet-based Financing Services

Abstract

Consumer behavior, by definition, is concerning with various actions adopted by a person to acquire, use and dispose of consumer goods and services, including the decision-making process that precedes and determines these actions. In real practice, such behavior can be altered with the introduction of various internet-based financing services. Especially for college students, who have relatively weak knowledge of personal finance and insufficient vigilance of excessive consumption, their consumption behavior can be easily manipulated by internet-based financing service providing firms.In this paper, the objective is to determine the dominant factors adopted by internet-based financing service providers to modify the consumption behavior of college students. From 571 college students’ questionnaires, the collected data are subjected to factor and logistic regression analysis to verify what factors are likely to stimulate the willingness of college students to actively employing the internet-based financing services to fulfill their advanced consumption demands. The obtained result indicates the service and convenience factors are likely to influence and alter their consumption behavior, and the corresponding recommendations on how to refine and regulate such market are proposed at the end of this paper.