The Impact And Mechanism Of Emotions On Consumers ' Variety Seeking Behaviors In The Upward Social Comparison Context

Variety-seeking behavior is a common decision-making behavior in the consumer field.In the real market environment,merchants are also constantly introducing new products and new flavors to meet consumers' needs,but consumers' variety-seeking behavior is not only related to new products and new flavors themselves.It is also related to the external environment and the consumer 's psychology.For example,consumer 's expected satisfaction,preference change,psychological and emotional state of seeking stimulation,etc.,will affect consumers' variety-seeking behavior decisions.Emotion is always an important factor influencing consumers' decisionmaking behavior.For modern marketing practice,social comparison information is often placed in advertising and other media,and consumers receive those information in their daily life.Because people are often conducting social comparisons at any time to seek self-cognition and improvement,when they fail in the upward social comparison,it may produce emotions such as benign envy or malicious envy.Past studies have shown that although benign envy or malicious envy are both negative emotions,there are significant differences in the results,which will lead to different coping measures for the individual.Therefore,benign envy or malicious envy are likely to have different effects on the same consumption behavior.Past research has already had relevant evidence in certain economic fields.This article will further explore whether benign envy or malicious envy also have different effects on consumers' variety-seeking behaviors.This article uses literature review and empirical research to explore the impact of benign envy or malicious envy emotions on the variety seeking behaviors of consumers in the upward social comparison.Through literature review,it is proposed that although benign envy or malicious envy are both negative emotions,they have different effects on consumers' variety seeking behavior.Benign envy will increase consumers' diversified seeking behaviors,while malicious envy will decrease it.Consumers 'perception of risk under two emotions may be an intermediary for such different effects.The different effects of benign envy or malicious envy on variety seeking behaviors only exist in the selection of products with anticipated pleasure.In diversification behaviors of products with anticipated pain,this difference effect will not exist,that is,whether the product bring anticipated pleasue or anticipated pain is the potential boundary condition of the main effect.The research will be conducted through a pre-test experiment and a formal experiment.The pre-test experiment is used to select and optimize the test methods and context materials used to start the participates' benign envy or malicious envy emotions.Variety-seeking behaviors and risk perception levels gradually verified the role of main effects,intermediary effects and potential boundary.Finally we added another study of emotions under the upward social comparison-admiration,and found that for admiration,there is no significant effect.So this study enriches the theory of the impact of envy subtypes on consumer behavior and provides a new direction for future research.