The Influence of Environment Contexts on Purchase-Decision Involvement

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly entrenched in the on-line purchasing cycle. Thus the requirement for recommender systems to become truly context-aware remains an issue if they are to be effective under different situations atypical with mobility. We adopt a number of established theories to investigate the relationship between physical and modal contexts and levels of purchase-decision involvement as used for measuring a consumer’s state of mind towards a specific product purchase. We extend the understanding of the positive correlation between purchase-decision involvement and user affective state by demonstrating that different situations can reduce or increase this correlation for high-involvement products. We explore environment stressors including noise, distractions and crowding together with levels of familiarity with people and environment to categorise unfavourable physical situations. We demonstrate that these situations can be used to inform context-aware systems to optimise engagement with consumer’s decision processes.