Consumer Variety Seeking Research Articles

When electric vehicles bump into sharing economy: Consumer's variety seeking in the sustainable transportation

The development of electric vehicles incurs the consumer's variety seeking in the sharing economy. In addition to being passengers on the sharing platform, customers can rent electric vehicles from the rental company as ride-hailing drivers, rather than purchasing from the manufacturing firm. In this article, we set up a game-theoretic model to study the customer's variety-seeking behavior in the new frenemy partnership and solve the equilibrium pricing strategy and quality decision for the rental company and the sharing platform. The numerical experiments show that the rental company's price is less influenced by the valuation heterogeneity, but the sharing platform's price is the opposite. Given some real-world examples of product ownership and product usage in sustainable transportation, we discuss the consumer's variety seeking and the company/platform's pricing strategy from both the passenger and driver sides.

The Effect of Variety Seeking, Dissatisfaction, and Service Quality Toward Brand Switching on Netflix Streaming Service

Research Aims: This study aims to investigate the factors influencing brand switching behavior among streaming service subscribers in Indonesia, specifically focusing on the impact of consumer variety-seeking, dissatisfaction, and service quality on the decline of Netflix subscriptions.
 Design/Methodology/Approach: Conducted as a quantitative research endeavor, this study employs multiple linear regression analysis through the utilization of SPSS software. The research sample comprises 220 former Netflix subscribers who have transitioned to other streaming services. By examining the relationships between consumer variety-seeking, dissatisfaction, service quality, and brand switching, the study seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of the dynamics influencing subscriber preferences in the competitive streaming landscape.
 Research Findings: The findings of this study reveal compelling insights into the key drivers behind brand switching among streaming service subscribers in Indonesia. Consumer variety-seeking behavior, dissatisfaction with Netflix services, and perceived service quality emerge as significant factors contributing to the observed decline in Netflix subscriptions. The study underscores the importance of these variables in shaping consumer decisions and preferences in the increasingly competitive streaming market.
 Theoretical Contribution/Originality: This research contributes to the existing literature by shedding light on the intricate interplay between consumer behavior and brand switching in the context of streaming services. The study's originality lies in its exploration of the unique factors, namely variety-seeking, dissatisfaction, and service quality, influencing the migration of subscribers from one platform to another. By uncovering these dynamics, the research provides valuable theoretical insights that can inform both academia and industry stakeholders, offering a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities within the evolving landscape of streaming services in Indonesia.

When Variety Seeking Meets Unexpectedness: Incorporating Variety-Seeking Behaviors into Design of Unexpected Recommender Systems

In this paper, we study the consumers’ variety-seeking behavior in recommender system applications and propose a comprehensive framework to measure such behavior based on past consumption records. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through user questionnaire studies conducted at Alibaba, where our constructed variety-seeking measures match well with consumers’ self-reported levels of their variety-seeking behaviors. We subsequently present a recommendation framework that combines the identified variety-seeking levels with unexpected recommender systems in the data mining literature to address consumers’ heterogenous desire for product variety, in which we provide more unexpected product recommendations to variety-seeking consumers and vice versa. Through off-line experiments on three different recommendation scenarios and a large-scale online controlled experiment at a major video-streaming platform, we demonstrate that those models following our recommendation framework significantly increase various business performance metrics and generate tangible economic impact for the company. Our findings lead to important managerial implications to better understand consumers’ variety-seeking behaviors and design recommender systems. As a result, the best performing model in our proposed frameworks is deployed by the company to serve all consumers on the video-streaming platform.

Too Time-Crunched to Seek Variety: The Influence of Parenting Motivation on Consumer Variety Seeking

Parenting motivation, the inspiration and drive to take care of one's children, is a powerful instinct for facilitating human reproduction. In a set of hypotheses, the authors address how, why, and among whom parenting motivation affects a pervasive decision-making tendency, namely, variety seeking. Six studies, including a large-scale panel data study and five online and lab studies, show that, when shopping, parenting motivation spurs feelings of time crunch that result in less variety seeking among consumers. The effect is diminished when time-saving parenting support exists (which reduces feelings of time crunch in parenting), when consumers are led to believe that they have sufficient time available for shopping, and when they do not have much loyalty to any brand offered in the choice set and thus cannot save time by simply choosing the top-of-mind product option. The current research thus contributes to the growing literature on how parenting motivation affects consumer decision making. In addition, it augments the literature on variety seeking by identifying an important factor that can influence it.

Designing Entry Strategies for Subscription Platforms

We consider a subscription platform that offers services to variety-seeking consumers who incorporate transportation costs in their decision of how many and which vendor services to consume. ClassPass in fitness and MoviePass in entertainment are examples of such platforms. We find that for the platform to be successful, it should enter markets where consumers’ added benefit from patronizing more than one vendor is relatively high, thus strengthening the position of the platform in negotiations with the vendors. As well, managers should consider entering markets where competition between the vendors is relatively weak and in particular, where vendors benefit from local monopoly positions because of high transportation costs incurred by consumers. When entering such markets, offering the subscription contract is likely to attract new customers who are not active when the platform does not exist. Moreover, appropriate crafting of the agreement with the vendors in this case allows the parties to fully extract the surplus derived by platform customers. Last, the platform’s managers should be cognizant of the need to identify tools that facilitate alleviated price competition with vendors. Negotiating over an appropriate transfer fee per customer to pay the vendor or imposing restrictions on the level of service that their customers can use may be such tools. Offering customers lower-quality services when using the vendor in comparison with the quality they could obtain by buying directly from him may not be a successful tool to alleviate price competition. This paper was accepted by Duncan Simester, marketing.

Too Time-Crunched to Seek Variety: The Influence of Parenting Motivation on Consumer Variety Seeking

Too Time-Crunched to Seek Variety: The Influence of Parenting Motivation on Consumer Variety Seeking

Mindset predicts consumer variety seeking through learning goal orientation: The role of susceptibility to interpersonal influence

We examined how people's belief that human traits are either malleable or fixed—that is, mindset—can shape consumers' variety seeking through learning goal orientation. We also tested the moderating effect of susceptibility to interpersonal influence in the mindset–variety seeking relationship. Participants were 364 adults in the US, who completed a survey on mindset, variety seeking, learning goals, and susceptibility to interpersonal influence. Results show that consumers with a growth (vs. fixed) mindset were more likely to engage in variety seeking as they were more motivated by learning goals. This relationship was more evident when they cared less (vs. more) about others' approval. These findings offer new evidence for how mindset is related to consumption tendencies, provide insight into the conditions under which these relationships are stronger or weaker, and suggest that practitioners should pay more attention to mindset when they are developing marketing strategies.

Extending variety seeking to multi-sided platforms: Impact of new retailer listing

This study uses theories of variety seeking to examine how a new retailer listing on a multi-sided platform (MSP) affects consumer buying behavior. Using a unique dataset from an online MSP, we evaluate changes in purchase frequency with individual retailers after a new one is listed. Contrary to expectations, the results indicate that consumers increase their purchase frequency at existing retailers. Moreover, compared to consistency seekers, variety-seeking consumers show a higher positive effect as they buy even more. This result is observed for retailers in both competing and non-competing product categories. Finally, we discuss the theoretical contributions and implications for MSPs and retailers.

Pricing and Service Level Decisions under a Sharing Product and Consumers’ Variety-Seeking Behavior

We developed a two-period duopoly model to show how consumers’ variety-seeking behavior affects the pricing and service level decisions of a traditional product and a sharing product. Our analysis revealed that, without considering the consumers’ variety-seeking behavior, the traditional product attracted consumers with a high level of service and high price, while the sharing product attracted consumers with a low level of service and low price. When we only considered variety-seeking behavior and did not adjust the service level, the product with the low level of service benefited from the consumers’ variety-seeking behavior, while the product with the high level of service lost profits. When we considered the variety-seeking behavior and adjusted the service level as well as the price, the sharing product was attractive to variety-seeking consumers and it gained a greater competitive advantage over the traditional product. For two periods, the number of variety-seeking consumers who switched from buying traditional products to buying sharing products was greater than those who switched from buying sharing products to buying traditional products. Furthermore, we found that when the consumers’ variety-seeking behavior was not obvious, the number of consumers shifting from the traditional product increased monotonically. In contrast, when the variety-seeking behavior was obvious, the number of consumers shifting from the traditional product decreased monotonically.

Digital pricing with piracy and variety seeking

This paper aims to explore behavioral digital pricing which incorporates realistic consumer behavior into firms' pricing and anti-piracy investment models. We consider a duopoly market with an original company and a pirated group selling digital products. The demand is sensitive to both parties' prices. We extend the traditional Hotelling model by taking into account the effects of externality on both parties. We then propose three types of price competition games: (I) Cournot model, (II) Stackelberg model with the original company as the leader, and (III) the Stackelberg model with the pirated group as the leader. In model II, if the value of externality effects is lower than a threshold, the original company will benefit from the government anti-piracy policy that tolerates some piracy. Finally, we investigate the behavior of consumer variety seeking in a two-period Cournot model. With the presence of variety seeking, both the original and pirated parties will adopt higher prices in the first period. Surprisingly, variety seeking brings higher profits to both parties in two periods.

Positioning and pricing strategies in a market with switching costs and staying costs

We analyze positioning and pricing strategies in a two-period duopoly where consumers have heterogeneous switching costs and staying costs. In the second period, we show that firms offer discounts to new customers in a market where there are more inertial consumers with large switching costs, while firms offer discounts to past customers in a market where there are more variety-seeking consumers with large staying costs. If in the second period of our model there exist both inertial consumers and variety-seeking consumers, horizontal product differentiation is minimized and both firms locate at the center of the Hotelling line market. Furthermore, when consumers are relatively sophisticated (forward-looking), behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD) hurts firms’ profits as shown in the previous literature. However, when consumers are sufficiently naive (or myopic) and do not care much about the second period when making first-period decisions, we find that BBPD can be profitable.

Predicting consumer variety-seeking through weather data analytics

Abstract Marketing decision support systems (MDSS) incorporate both internal and external data in performing analytics to improve business effectiveness. Weather data have long been considered a crucial external data input in practitioners’ marketing strategy; however, academic research on how weather conditions affect consumer behaviors has been limited. To fill this gap, this research investigates how weather parameters, including sunlight, temperature, and air quality, can be incorporated into MDSS to predict consumers’ variety-seeking in their purchases using public weather data and supermarket panel data for five typical retail products. Our analyses show that weather conditions are associated with greater variety-seeking behavior. The results afford insights into how to exploit weather data for data analytics and employ weather targeting strategies to save promotional expenses and increase profitability.

Consumer Variety-seeking, Congestion Effect and Firm Discriminatory Pricing Competition

In some industries with consumer variety-seeking and congestion effect, firms can often use discriminatory pricing scheme by consumer purchasing history. In this paper, we build up a two-stage game model to investigate this economic phenomenon. As for our research results, we can show that both market environmental factors, namely consumer variety-seeking and congestion effect, can lead to firms’ own market power, but the main reason for firm discriminatory pricing is consumer variety-seeking. After the purchase during the first phase, consumer variety-seeking leads to differences in consumers’ valuation of the products, and firms can effectively distinguish different consumer groups, leading to market segmentation and discriminatory pricing during the second phase. The firms offer discounting prices for loyal consumers, but charge new customers higher prices, trying to attract repeat purchases of old customers and avoid too much loss of old customers. Because the congestion effect on all consumers is consistent, it will not lead to the differences in consumers’ valuation of products, and it is impossible for firms to make discriminatory pricing. But the congestion effect can restrain the firms from reducing prices to attract consumers, and weaken the competition between the firms, resulting in the tacit collusion” between oligarchic firms. In fact, we also find that both market environmental factors weaken price competition. Compared with uniform pricing, discriminatory pricing results in lower equilibrium prices during two phases, and both the equilibrium profits and social welfare are also lower, but consumers gain higher surplus. Further pricing strategy choice shows that discriminatory pricing based on consumer purchasing history selected by both two firms is an equilibrium result, leading to lower profits of two firms, thus they fall into the prisoner’s dilemma”. This paper explores the general welfare standard and the competition policy about the discriminatory pricing based on consumer purchasing history. The discriminatory pricing based on consumer purchasing history belongs to the third-degree price discrimination. Discriminatory pricing does not increase the total quantities of goods, so total social welfare falls. In general, in an industry with consumer variety-seeking and congestion effect, there is very sufficient competition between firms, which have almost no market power, and firms’ pricing behavior is more benefcial to consumers. The loss of social welfare mainly comes from consumer variety-seeking; it is very difficult to understand the information of characteristics of consumers, and there is a great deal of information costs. For these reasons, we believe that the competition policy should allow firms to adopt such pricing strategies and should not make too much intervention. The antitrust authorities should be cautious, and only confirmed that firms with such a pricing strategy have a dominant market position, can it intervene in firm behavior.

Assessing consumer preferences and willingness to pay for organic tomatoes in Albania: a conjoint choice experiment study

Albania has potential for developing the organic agriculture sector; however, it is a new industry and constraints abound including lack of consumer preferences information for organic food. Knowledge on consumer preferences and behaviour toward organic (bio) products is crucial for market development benefiting potential entrepreneurs and government policies. They need to know the preference for preferred product attributes and willingness to pay. Tomato, which is the most important vegetable in terms of consumption and production in Albania, is the subject of this study. A conjoint choice experiment with the most important product attributes: production type (bio vs. conventional), production system (open field vs. greenhouse), origin and price were used to design the choice surveys. Four distinct classes have been identified as significant using latent class analysis. The classes are summarized as: bio-ready consumers, price sensitive consumers, variety seeking consumers and quality seeking consumers. Origin played a small influence on preference. Education and income did show some influence on preference for organic tomatoes. Although the organic food market in Albania is in its infancy stage, organic tomatoes are clearly preferred and many consumers are willing to pay a premium price.

The Fresh Start Mindset: Transforming Consumers’ Lives

Abstract This article introduces the fresh start mindset, defined as a belief that people can make a new start, get a new beginning, and chart a new course in life, regardless of their past or present circumstances. With historical roots in American culture and neoliberalism, and with contemporary links to liquid modernity and global consumer culture, this mindset structures reasoning, experience, and everyday language, and guides behavior across self- and other-transformative consumption domains. We develop a six-item scale (FSM) to measure the fresh start mindset and situate it within a broader nomological network, including growth mindset, personal capacity for change, optimism, future temporal focus, internal locus of control, self-efficacy, perseverance, resilience, and consumer variety seeking. Individuals with a stronger (vs. weaker) fresh start mindset invest in transformative change through changing their circumstances, including their own consumption choices (e.g., buying a new pair of sunglasses and getting a new self); they also are more supportive of transformative programs that assist those who are challenged to get a fresh start (i.e., disadvantaged youth, at-risk teens, veterans, and tax-burdened adults). Our work significantly contributes to transformative consumer research with attention to self-activities and programs for vulnerable populations that enable new beginnings.

Sensory characteristics and consumer acceptance of black walnut gelato

SummaryThe objective of this study was to determine the sensory characteristics and consumer acceptance of gelato made with six black walnut cultivars: Davidson, Emma K, Football, Pounds, Sparks 127, and Vandersloot. The descriptive sensory panel found that black walnut ID, overall nutty and sour (P ≤ 0.05) attributes were different among gelato samples. The gelato samples were evaluated by 103 consumers for overall liking. Three clusters of consumers were found: one cluster of consumers (n = 29) liked milder black walnut flavour, while another (n = 20) liked more intense black walnut and overall nutty flavour. The third cluster of consumers (n = 54) liked all of the gelato samples. Consumer variation seeking tendency information was also collected. No significant differences in overall liking between the different types of variety seeking consumers. Gelati made with Pounds and Sparks 127 cultivars were accepted by all consumers indicating that these may be good cultivars to include in novel consumer products.

Are your consumers variety seekers? The moderating impact on the effectiveness of free gift promotions vs. price discounts

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of consumers’ variety-seeking tendency on their preference for monetary versus nonmonetary promotions (i.e. a price discount versus a free gift, respectively) and to identify possible reasons for this preference. A sample population of 150 students was surveyed. The research employed a 2 (discount/free gift) × 2 (high variety seeking/low variety seeking) between-subjects design. A two-way ANOVA was applied to analyse the effects of the promotion frame and variety seeking on perceived transaction value. The ANOVA revealed a general consumer preference for a free gift over a price discount. This outcome is moderated by the variety-seeking tendency of the consumer; that is, repetitive consumers prefer a price discount, but variety-seeking consumers favour a free gift. This study gives managers insights into the issue of what kind of price promotion is most effective under which circumstances, namely for which type of consumer segment. The practical implications of our findings recommend that if the targeted consumer segment is variety-seeking, a free gift may be optimal, yet if the target segment represents returning customers, a price discount yields better results. If no clear assignment of consumers to either segment is possible, a free gift is the preferred option.

Sleepiness and How it Affects Consumer Variety Seeking

Sleepiness and How it Affects Consumer Variety Seeking

Variety seeking by wine consumers in the southern states of the US

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate variety-seeking behavior among US wine consumers to determine if there are differences in their personal characteristics, values and relationship with wine. Design/methodology/approach – The research design uses a quantitative research study using data from an online survey of 401 US wine consumers. The Schwartz Value Inventory and the VARSEEK scale are used as measurement instruments. Data are analyzed using descriptive statistics, cluster analysis, ANOVA and discriminate analysis. Findings – The results illustrate strong differences between high variety-seeking consumers compared to moderate variety-seeking and variety avoiders. High variety seekers are younger, hold values favoring stimulation and tolerance of risk, pay more for wine, purchase wine in more locations, prefer more varietals and consider themselves more wine knowledgeable and involved than the other two segments. Practical implications – The results provide implications for wine marketers targeting high variety-seeking consumers, including offering wine brands with a wider array of varietals, wines from different countries, various price tiers and include creative packaging and sustainable messages in their presentation. Originality/value – This paper presents research addressing an important construct for wine marketers attempting to introduce new products and build brand loyalty.

Playing the Field: The Effect of Fertility on Women’s Desire for Variety

Previous research finds that ovulation—the time each month when women are most fertile—can shift women’s mating psychology and increase their desire for new options in men. However, might ovulation also increase women’s desire for new products? Four studies find that women select a greater number of unique options from consumer product sets at high fertility. This effect is especially strong for women in committed relationships. Additional findings show that the fertility shift in desire for variety in products is driven by the fertility shift in desire for new options in men activating a variety-seeking mind-set. Subsequently, loyalty to a romantic partner, whether manipulated or measured, moderated the effect of fertility on consumer variety seeking. This research contributes to the literature by revealing when, why, and how fertility influences desire for variety in consumer choice and highlights the mating motives that underlie this effect.