Investigating the impacts of personality traits on collaborative consumption intention of luxury fashion products among middle-aged women

Abstract

Collaborative consumption (CC) refers to the shared use of products or services in order to save costs and redistribute resources in a more sustainable way among the different agents participating in sharing economies. With the rapid popularity of CC in recent years, more and more academic research has been carried out on CC, but research exploring the impact of personality traits on consumer behavior is largely limited. To our best knowledge, existing research fails to explore CC applied to the luxury apparel context. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the impact of consumer personality traits on their attitudes and intention toward CC of luxury fashion products. This study draws a framework based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) model introducing key personality traits, particularly, materialism, fashion leadership, and need for uniqueness as CC attitude and CC intention predictors. This research uses PLS-SEM technique to analyze the data collected through a questionnaire administered to middle-aged Spanish women. The results indicate that fashion leadership had a positive influence on attitude toward CC and CC intention. Secondly, we found that consumer need for uniqueness significantly influenced attitude but had no significant impact on intention. Materialism on the other hand did not display a significant relationship with either CC attitude or intention. By contrast, attitude towards CC was determined to have a strong positive influence on CC intention. We believe that the findings as well as the proposed research model can be helpful to managers when developing CC based business models and valuable to academics in developing related theories.