The Impact of Perceived Self-Skill Levels on Product Choice: An Exploratory Study of the Moderating Influence of Mood

Abstract

In view of previous research on consumers’ single-peaked product preference and “matching” process, this paper examines the effect of price as a necessary condition for consumers’ ideal-point formation process in making choices in a product array that has monotonically increasing values on the benefit dimension. Building on the “mood-as-information” perspective and incorporating the emerging stream of mood study, this paper also studies the moderating impact of mood on the effects of perceived self-skill levels on consumers’ purchase intentions. Using experiments, this research generates and replicates consumers’ single-peaked product preferences in a consumer behavioral lab. Results show that subjects always go for the best product option in the absence of price information (i.e., preference is monotonically increasing, rather than single-peaked), and subjects exhibit different product preference patterns when they are in different moods. This paper extends previous research by explicitly including and testing the effect of price as a cost dimension, and incorporating the emerging trend of mood study, and therefore, this paper gains a deeper understanding of consumers’ single-peaked preference function.