Abstract

Consumers are often faced with purchasing situations for products/services that require expertise, are complicated or complex, and are difficult to evaluate and compare prices. Incomplete or unbalanced information of consumers leads to perception of uncertainty. In high uncertainty purchase situations, consumers feel unsure about making a good choice and thus hesitate or postpone the purchase. This paper started from the question of how to make consumers feel more confident in their choice so that they do not hesitate to purchase. The study expected that an instantaneous activation of confidence, independent of the level of consumer’s expertise in the product/service, would increase purchase intention. The paper tested the hypothesis that a pre-purchase manipulation of choice behavior would activate decision confidence and that activated confidence would influence purchase intention. Two experiments were conducted using purchase scenarios of products/services with high uncertainty (wine and financial investment products). For the choice behavior manipulation, a pre-purchase sweepstakes was used. In each scenario, the study distinguished between a group that actively chose the sweepstakes entry and a group that was passively given the entry and compared their confidence. The results showed that manipulating preceding choice behavior affects decision confidence and that confidence affects purchase intention even after controlling for product/service expertise. The contribution of this study is that it addresses the effect of choice behavior in a high uncertainty purchase situation and sheds new light on the effect of choice behavior manipulation on confidence in the context of consumer behavior research.