The Effect Of Functional Congruity On Consumers' Intention To Visit Peer-to-peer Accommodations

The rise of sharing economy has greatly changed people's consumption concept and consumption mode.More and more people choose to visit peer-to-peer accommodations when they go travelling.Due to the close connection between peer-to-peer accommodation and the internet,consumers can obtain different kinds of information related to peer-to-peer accommodations,such as housing description information and online comments,to reduce transaction risks.There are some questions:how does the information influence consumers' decision-making?How peer-to-peer accommodations should manage the information?Previous research that focused on the influence of information related to peer-to-peer accommodations on consumer behavior studied the effects of housing description information and online comments respectively,but did not combine the two types of information.This paper based on the perspective of the interaction between housing description information and online comments,explores the effect of functional congruity on consumers' intention to visit peer-to-peer accommodations.This paper also examines the interaction effect of functional congruity and consumer psychological ownership on consumers' behavioral intention and its mechanism.Based on the theory of planned behavior and "stimulate-organism-response" model,from the perspective of interaction of two types of information,2 empirical study are conducted to explore the effect of functional congruity on consumers' behavioral intention.Experiment 1 found that functional congruity can significantly affect consumers'behavioral intention and consumer attitude plays the mediating role.We focused on the effect of consumer psychological ownership in experiment 2 and found that consumer psychological ownership can disturb the effect of functional congruity.When consumer psychological ownership is higher,the effect of functional congruity is more significantly.This paper has theoretical contributions as well as marketing practical significance.For the theoretical contributions,we put forward some new opinions:(1)we think that the two types of information respectively represent two kinds of consumers' expectations(normative expectation and predictive expectation).When the two types of information are consistent,the consumers'expectations will be satisfied,thus generating the intention to visit peer-to-peer accommodations.(2)we introduce psychological ownership as a moderator,and find that peer-to-peer accommodations satisfy consumers' demand for a home and prompt consumer psychological ownership,which disturbs the effect of functional congruity on behavioral intention.For the marketing practical significance,we think that peer-to-peer accommodations should pay attention to the online comments which have functional cues about peer-to-peer accommodations and improve their service based on the comments.At the same time,they should change the housing description information,so the two types of information can react the congruity.In addition,the housing description information can include ownership implied language(such as "mine"?"yours",etc.)to promote consumer psychological ownership,thus weakening the effect of functional congruity on behavioral intention.