Exploring determinants of consumers' platform usage in "double eleven" shopping carnival in china: Cognition and emotion from an integrated perspective

Abstract

There is a great deal of interest concerning how e-commerce in China can be developed in sustainable ways. Answering this question requires not only the strategic management at the aggregate level, but also developing a micro framework that can effectively understand the cognitive-behavioral pathway of consumers in various online contexts. This paper focuses on the "Double Eleven" Global Online Shopping Carnival (GOSC) in China and attempts to investigate the determinants of consumers' behaviors of shopping platform usage. The distinguishing feature of this study is that we define GOSC as a unique scenario compared to normal online shopping context, where consumers' emotional state towards such an event plays a larger role in determining behaviors. Based on Cognitive Emotion Theory (CET), the main findings of this paper suggest that (1) consumers' behaviors of online platform usage can be affected by both cognitions related factors, including price value, gamification and personalized services, and by emotional state such as having arousal and being pleasured; (2) cognition has an effect on emotional state, such as the positive effect of price value on arousal and pleasure or gamification on arousal. Our study, therefore, has highlighted a number of key points to the sustainable development of GOSC. Limitations and further research directions are also discussed.