Offering an apology is one of the common service failure recovery strategies. Previous studies focused on examining the effectiveness of apology from the customer perspective. It is not clear whether and how customers perceive firm remorse after an apology influence their blame attribution and coping behaviors. Integrating a cognitive-emotive model and an empathy model, this research proposes and empirically tests a remorse-empathy-coping model to explain how customers respond to apology after mobile application service failures occur. Specifically, this research examines how perceived firm remorse influences blame attribution and emotional empathy, which subsequently affects coping behaviors (revenge and avoidance) in the mobile app service recovery context. The moderating role of technology anxiety in the proposed model is also identified. Four hundred and fifty-two mobile application service users were recruited for a survey study and the Structural Equation Modeling was used in order to test the research hypotheses. Our findings show that perceived firm remorse negatively influences blame attribution but positively influences empathy. Empathy negatively affects revenge and avoidance behaviors. In addition, technology anxiety moderates the effect of perceived firm remorse on blame attribution. The negative effect of perceived firm remorse on blame attribution becomes weaker when technology anxiety increases.

Marketing becomes more and more data driven and hence enables machine learning to empower instruments to foster the interaction between firms and consumers to a new level of customization. Replacement and redirection of workforce through machine learning powered devices is not anymore a mere myth (Huang and Rust 2018). Adaption of machine learning has remained low in the recent years even though disposability was given. Nevertheless the acceptance and the implementation of machine learning based marketing efforts experience currently an exponential increase (Syam and Sharma 2018). In this article, the authors aim to develop a stronger understanding of machine learning in the context of marketing as well as to provide an overview about already established usage and implementation of machine learning in the interactions between firms and customers. To achieve this objective, the authors discuss and study machine learning in marketing from both the management and the consumer perspective. This is supported by survey data retrieved from managers out of varies industries as well as consumers, which reveal great variety in usage of machine learning not only among different marketing activities but also among industries. The authors examine the roots of machine learning in marketing and evaluate inferential state-of-the-art instruments. Predictions of what can and will evolve in the marketing context with the help of machine learning in the near future are also connected with concerns and safety issues related to the increasingly transparent consumer-firm-relationship. To conclude, the article the authors present a summary of state-of-the-art mechanisms in machine learning in marketing and propose a research agenda for upcoming research.

Over the last decade, e-commerce platforms for goods and services have been widely explored by the marketing literature. Coherently, e-commerce is emerging as a relevant distribution channel also in the wine industry. This notwithstanding, wine e-commerce platforms show a slower growth rate whether compared to other goods and services categories – such as electronic and digital products. This is particularly true in Italy where the total volume of e-commerce sales in the food and drink sector are less than 1% of the total online sales. Therefore, it is important to investigate the underlying mechanisms explaining consumers’ positive and negative intentions to purchase wine online. This will in fact allow both theoretical and practical insights to wine industry marketers. Hence, this study proposes and empirically tests a conceptual model concerning the antecedents of consumers’ intention to purchase wine online. Specifically, the objective is to identify the differences that are specific to the context of the wine buying process. The 5 steps of the purchasing process – need perception, pre-purchase, purchase, post-purchase, intention of repatronage – are analyzed through eleven determinants such as risk aversion, convenience propensity, product information availability, degree of independence in purchasing, shopping enjoyment, channel layout, shipping conditions, loyalty intention, and free-riding behavior. Data were collected from a sample of Italian 570 online consumers who habitually purchase wine online. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for testing the hypothesized relationships. Results show that product information availability and convenience propensity significantly influence the digital channel selection and, consequently, loyalty and patronage intention. Building on these results, the present study suggests that wine industry should focus more on digital channels’ layout in order to better stimulate consumers’ loyalty and intention to provide positive feedbacks. Yet, it also emerged how this kind of channel is useful at most when targeting price sensitive consumers. Theoretical and practical implications are thus provided along with suggestions for future research in the marketing literature.

Every year consumers spend billions of dollars on impulse purchases across the globe. Noticeably, occasions for impulse buying have been expanding due to new technologies and the growth of e-commerce that enhanced both the consumer’s accessibility to products and the ease of purchase transactions (e.g., one-click purchase) (Strack and Deutsch 2006). For instance, the retail store have become ubiquitous—being present on our desktop, in our mailbox, on our phone, in subway platform, in gas station kiosks—and reaching every street corner in our neighborhood. Such ubiquitous nature of mobile commerce combined with the introduction of IT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) makes consumers even more vulnerable to the sudden, powerful, and persistent urge to buy something instantly (i.e. impulse buying) (Rook 1987; Watson et al. 2002; Danaher et al. 2015). From the perspective of firms, this indicates that marketing opportunities to influence shopper attitudes and behavior can emerge at any point in the shopping cycle from the couch in a person’s living room to the shopping cart in mobile devices and media (Shankar et al. 2010; 2011). While impulse buying has been a well-known approach to explaining empirical deviations from the rational choice model in the literature (Strack et al. 2006), previous researchers have mainly focused on antecedents of impulsive behaviors, such as mood (Rook and Gardner 1993), self-construal (Zhang and Shrum 2009), chronic goals (Ramanathan and Menon 2006) and consumers’ self-loneliness (Sinha and Wang 2013). However, relatively little has been studied on what factors drive consumers to purchase products impulsively and how firms can utilize marketing activities (e.g., 4Ps) to engage consumers in such behavior. There exist a few studies paying attention to the interaction of individual characteristics and marketing variables for impulse buying (e.g., Bell et al. 2010; Inman et al. 2009; Narasimhan et al. 1996) but several issues still can arise from measurement problems, self-selection, lack of marketing variables, and limited breadth of product categories. In particular, researchers have used the term ―unplanned‖ purchases exchangeably with impulse purchases despite a conceptual distinction between the two terms: impulse buying is defined with three key components; unplanned, difficult to control, and resulting in emotional response (Rook 1987). In other words, mostly all impulse purchases are unplanned, but not all unplanned purchases are impulse buys and we cannot rule out other alternative explanations (e.g., it is a ―reminder‖ purchase based on true needs). In this study, therefore, we aim to differentiate two terms and investigate the consumers’ impulsive purchase behaviors using the actual behavioral data with respect to product characteristics, customer demographics, timing and controllable marketing activities such as advertising. We obtained the data from one of the leading TV shopping channels in Korea on 2,657 products and 17,848 air time slots covering a broader range of both hedonic and utilitarian products including electronics, food, fashion, home appliances, and so on (7.8 million orders and 2 million order cancels). Unlike typical supermarket shopping where consumers can actively search products, programming on TV shopping channels are shown randomly to viewers which helps us rule out self-selection problems. Most importantly, distinct from previous studies, we use an objective measure for impulse buying by exploiting the actual order placement and subsequent order cancellation (i.e., regret with retrospective judgment about purchase decisions). We find that product characteristics are the primary factors explaining the half (60.5%) of impulse purchase ratio variations followed by marketing variables (20.4%), and timing fixed effects (10.9%). Interestingly, we find little evidence of consumer demographics (1%) as a driver for impulsive buying behavior. Consequently, we focus on the interplay between product categories and marketing activities. Specifically, we classified the product categories into utilitarian and hedonic on the basis of the gross product categories and investigated the roles of two main marketing activities: advertising and price promotion. We find that the informative and persuasive roles of advertising (Akerberg 2003; Mehta et al. 2004) lead to a U-shaped effect on impulse purchases over time as the informative role attenuates over time but the persuasive role increases over time. While utilitarian products are more likely to be influenced by informative role of advertising and hedonic goods are more likely to be influenced by persuasive role of advertising, we detect that the U shape would be moved to the left (right) with a price discount (increase). In other words, price information does not change over time but the persuasive role increases over time with a price discount. Hence, our results can provide managerial insights for retailers and manufacturers to utilize point-of-sale marketing tactics and to improve their shopper engagement strategies to trigger impulse purchases.

Inconsistent findings about role stress and performance motivates this study. Data from 240 customer service representatives (CSRs) and 27 supervisors showed that role conflicts (involving supervisors and consumers) negatively relate to performance, while CSRs’ adaptive behavior mediates the relationship. CSRs’ feedback seeking moderates effects of role conflicts on adaptive behaviors.

As customer loyalty becomes a key to the profitability, companies in game industry have shifted its marketing focus from acquisition to retention of customers. The present study investigates the factors presumably affecting reacquisition of the lost customers using actual transactional data. The research interest lies in not just regaining the lost customers but also keeping them. One of the objectives of the current paper is to figure out who would “stay alive” (i.e. keep using the service) after responding to the reacquisition campaign. Since few customers actively respond to a reacquisition campaign, the distribution of the response measurement is highly skewed. To handle this problem, this study uses “quantile regression (QR)” method in estimating the model. For the analyses of gamers’ real behavior, a dataset on one of the most successful online games in Korea, Sudden Attack, was utilized. This study focused on the customers who became inactive, i.e., no log-ins, during the 12-week period of April 19th to July 11th, 2012. Some of them returned when the win-back campaign was conducted beginning July 12th until August 8th (“Period 1”), and others didn’t. And further, some of those who returned stayed active (i.e., logged in) during the 4-week period after the campaign was over (“Period 2”), and others left again. In each of the four cases, a random sample of 1,000 users was drawn for the analysis. The estimation model includes four sets of variables: demographic variables (age, location), RFM variables (recency, frequency, monetary value), behavioral variables (level, experience, number of chats, kill per death ratio), and social variables (number of friends, number of gifts). The analyses confirmed their linear and/or non-linear effects in Period 1(win-back) and Period 2 (retention).

The present research deals with the influence of managers’ construal level and anticipatory regret behavior on evaluations of customers’ and employees’ ideas in innovation contexts. While prior research focused on positive outcomes of open innovation, we provide theory and evidence to suggest that managers’ avoidance behavior in idea evaluation processes can result in negative side effects for the assessment of employees’ ideas. We conducted an experiment with 113 managers to reveal that top managers tend to higher creativity ratings of ideas from customers in comparison to identical ideas from employees. Lower level managers showed no difference in their creativity evaluations, but differentiated their feasibility rating in favor for customers’ ideas, whereas top managers did not. Our findings contribute to existing managerial decision making research and provide initial evidence on negative outcomes of open innovation for managers’ evaluation of employees’ ideas.

Nostalgia refers to the sentimental longing for the valued past (Sedikides, Wildschut, & Baden, 2004). It is considered a bittersweet emotion, involving both wistful joy and sadness (Sedikides et al., 2004). Nostalgia is also a social emotion. Nostalgic memories typically center on social activities involving the self and close others (Wildschut et al., 2010). Prior research has mainly focused on the social and emotional nature of nostalgic narratives, and researchers have only recently started to investigate the motivations triggered by the process of recalling nostalgic narratives. For example, recalling a nostalgic event can heighten people’s motivation to savor such an experience and prolong it (Huang, Huang, & Wyer, 2016). In the current research, we posit that thinking about nostalgic events can trigger another motivation, namely, a desire to revive the past. Whenever people experience nostalgic feelings, they are likely to perceive differences between the present and their memorable past and desire to go back in time (Hepper et al., 2012; Sedikides et al., 2004). This motivation, once activated, can lead people to take actions to change their current state in the hope of reviving the past (Koole & Jostmann, 2004; Kuhl, 1985). This tendency of taking actions to make changes may generalize to subsequent unrelated situations (Kruglanski et al., 2002), and consequently increase consumer switching behavior (Jiang, Zhan, & Rucker, 2014). These predictions were tested across five studies in various consumption contexts. Our findings contribute to consumer research in two important ways, (a) by demonstrating a novel motivational impact of nostalgia on consumer behavior, and (b) by delineating a systematic influence of an unexplored but pervasive emotional factor— nostalgia—on consumer switching behavior. This research also offers practical implications. Conventional wisdom suggests that nostalgia can make consumers prefer products reminiscent of the “old days”. Our findings show that nostalgia can have broader implications for consumer choices and marketers may use it to manage consumer switching behavior.

Consumers have enjoyed shopping via the web for over a decade, but the emergence of shopping through social media or social commerce is slowly gaining traction Instagram is one of the largest interactive photo-sharing sites that retailers, specifically apparel and accessory companies, are utilizing to sell their merchandise. Consumers are increasingly using this platform to engage, discover and get inspired; therefore, it is critical for retailers to understand how this platform influences purchase intention. This paper focuses on analyzing the impact of Instagram on consumer’s purchase intention based on an adapted model of Technology Acceptance Model and Theory of Reasoned Action. Using multi-group analysis, consumers (n=317) were divided into two groups: shopped for fashion products (including browsing, making a one-time purchase, or making repeat purchases) or not shopped using Instagram for apparel specific brands. The participants were surveyed using an online instrument with questions related to attitude, subjective norms, normative beliefs, perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU) and purchase intention. Frequency statistics were obtained for the demographic variables. Overwhelmingly (approximately 78%), respondents used Instagram daily with 82.6% following an apparel brand. 40% of the respondents had shopped previously on Instagram (i.e. browsed as well as purchased products), with 13% of these respondents spending more than $100. An exploratory factor analysis using principal component with varimax rotation and a minimum eigen value of one was used to identify the latent variables in the model: PEOU (α = 0.82); PU (α = 0.81); Normative Beliefs (α = 0.81); Attitude (α = .87); Subjective Norm (α = 0.88); Purchase Intention (α = 0.79). Results indicated that subjective norms did not influence purchase intention for both the groups indicating that consumers do not follow “groupthink” mentality while intending to purchase via Instagram. Furthermore, it was found that PEOU influence on attitude for the two groups of consumer were different, with no impact for the group who had shopped on Instagram. All the other relationships were supported in the model. These results provide both implications and limitations for retailers and academia.

Introduction The retail environment, which is offering special experience to consumers based on customized consumer lifestyle, creates customer value from voluntary customer engagement. In recent study, it is shown that customer engagement is becoming an important factor which determines the characteristics of customer behavior in the retail and hospitality industries. However, the study of customer engagement has mainly focused on its performance in marketing field ( Hapsari, Clemes, and Dean, 2017; Kumar and Pansari, 2016) and most researches have handled the concept of customer engagement from the perspective of online environment(Shin and Byun, 2016; Jeon, 2016). Theoretical Development This study aims to investigate the psychological motivation for customer engagement and to examine the underlying factors of customer behavior in offline retail environment based on experience economy theory and Self-Determination Theory(SDT). First, this study investigates the relationship between perceived psychological benefits (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) and intrinsic motivation. Also, this study tried to analyze the relationship between intrinsic motivation and customer engagement (conscious participation, enthusiasm, and social interaction). Second, we tried to examine the relationship between customer engagement and customer creation value (functional value, hedonic value, and social value). Thirdly, we suggested the effect of customer creation value on customer purchasing behavior (shopping memories, customer satisfaction, word-of-mouth, and revisit intention). In addition, we attempted to find the mediating effect of the hedonic value between customer engagement and shopping memories; customer engagement and customer satisfaction. Futhermore, we investigated the mediating effect of shopping experience between hedonic value and customer satisfaction. Finally, We discussed the managerial implication for differentiated competitive advantage in the experience-based retail environment. Research Design and Model Testing To test the research hypotheses and our research model, we conducted questionnaire survey from the respondents who have ever been to the major experience-based shopping malls within 6 months. Through the confirmatory factor analysis, reliability and validity of the study constructs were verified. By using the structural equation model, research hypotheses were tested and most research hypotheses were statistically significant and accepted. The final research model also showed the statistical significance with the goodness-of-fit indices. Result and Conclusion As shown in the results of this study, the experience-based retail environment leads to higher customer engagement and increase the customer’s hedonic value and reinforce positive shopping memories. Specifically, the experience-based retail environment is offering psychological benefits and customers enjoy experience itself. During the shopping experience, the customers are motivated for customer engagement. The managerial implications of the study results for the corporate managers in the retail and/or hospitality industries were also discussed.

This research was conducted to examining the mainland Chinese tourists‟ behavior on and credibility perception of travel websites. According to the data collected from the online questionnaire survey, mainland Chinese tourists tend to share negative experiences on the web; and consider more on review information than on reviewers‟ information.

Products are successfully designed only when they are in accord with the users’ emotional needs. A systematic research approach is aimed to propose that physiological metrics can be effectively used to assess user emotion and behavior intention based on an eye tracker and neurophysiological approach. Forty participants (20 males and 20 females, mean age=35.6, SD=6.38, range 21-48 years), were recruited from college campuses and communities to conduct an eye tracker and electroencephalography (EEG) experiment with the presented stimuli (images of SUVs). The study uses partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the model hypotheses. The results show a strong and significant relationship between eye tracker metrics, neurophysiological metrics, user affective responses, and behavior intention. These findings could enable industrial counselors, professional product designers, and academics to categorize users’ emotional needs that can be subsequently incorporated into final product design.

The study of environmental behavior is widespread in the literature. However, while substantial consideration has been given to home environmental behaviors and sustainable consumption, far less research has focused on workplace environmental behaviors. The values-beliefs-norms (VBN) model is a framework that has been utilized to examine environmental behavior but the model has rarely been applied to a workplace setting. This paper examines the “4Rs” (reducing use, reusing, repurposing, and recycling) of workplace environmental conserving behaviors, based on Ones and Dilchert’s (2013) taxonomy, along with all elements of the VBN framework. This research identifies relationships between these variables via a quantitative methodology. In doing so, this study presents a new and important application of the VBN framework to employee pro-environmental behavior and suggests potential directions for using related interventions and communications to improve environmental behavior in organizations.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is generally regarded as good and necessary to inform stakeholders of a company’s CSR deeds. However, research has recently uncovered the practice of “greenhushing” within the context of the hospitality industry (Coles, Warren, Borden, & Dinan, 2017; Font, Elgammal, & Lamond, 2017). Greenhushing means that companies de-emphasize green credentials and CSR activities. Going on holidays is an indulgent act that might result from people feeling they have earned some luxury, including behaving lavishly in terms of resource consumption and responsible behavior. Thus, curtailing this indulgent, irresponsible guest behavior without compromising a guest’s holiday experience is a key challenge for hotels. This paper explores whether the assumption that customers do not want to hear about CSR communication while on holiday is true from the customers’ side and what type of communication achieves to curtail unethical behavioral intentions. Based on 594 usable responses from an online survey, we undertake a moderation analysis with a multi-categorical antecedent variable (different communication stimuli), pro-environmental identity as a moderator and behavioral intentions for “unethical” behavior as a dependent variable using PROCESS 3.0 for SPSS (Hayes, 2018). The results provide partial support for our theoretical predictions.

Foods play important roles in Chinese gift giving behavior; they contain abundant symbolic and semiotics meanings. Typical food products are exchange during festivals, commercial intercourse, and other social intercourse occasion. The purpose of study is to investigate how the meanings and values of food gifts affect gift-giving behavior under Chinese cultural context. Qualitative in-depth interviews are applied, eighteen participants from food gift industry, academic field and consumers are invited in the study, and qualitative data analysis framework is designed based on Sheth’s consumption values theory. We find that food gifts cover function value, emotional value, social value, epistemic value and conditional value. Gift values are explained by givers and recipients during gift-giving process. Gift-giving occasion, gift-giving purpose, relationship between givers and recipients are influence the value of gift. Study provides some practical recommendation for food products design and marketing.

Employee innovation is critical to business success and draws knowledge and ideas from customer engagement (CE). In particular, customer interaction, a key aspect of CE, offers opportunities for, and act as a source of, hotel employees’ innovative behaviors (Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014; Li & Hsu, 2016). Focusing on the hotel industry, this study investigates the role of customer interaction, positive affect, and employee motivations in enhancing employees’ innovative behaviors. A structural model was developed based on relevant literature and pilot tested on data collected via a quantitative survey of 196 hotel employees who were in a position requiring interactions with customers. The findings provide support for the proposed model and suggest customer interaction, positive affect, and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as influential factors impacting on employees’ innovative behaviors directly and/or indirectly. This pilot study forms the basis of a larger project modeling the customer interaction - employee innovation relationship (findings to be presented at the conference). The study contributes to the limited literature on innovation through enhancing CB and employee emotional welfare, addressing the call to strengthen research on the antecedents and outcomes of CB (So, King, Sparks, & Wang, 2016). Practically, the results highlight a need for hotels’ benefit and reward systems to incorporate measures of employee performance in relation to CB.

The channel transformation to omni-channel is currently in progress in the retail industry. For the progress to occur, facilitating meaningful experiences of customers in their customer journeys, capturing such experiences through various channels and touch points, and then analyzing the information acquired as big data are required (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). With the increase in the number of customer experiences being observed through the internet and mobile communication, the focus is now on engagement. However, there have not yet been many studies conducted to deliberate comprehensively on how the engagements of behavioral aspects captured through various channels and the evaluation indicators of customers, as represented by the RFM or LTV, are related in a broader sense. The purpose of this research is to clarify the relational structure from a comprehensive perspective that are not constrained by monetary amounts. This paper showed results using data from the retailer. This research is divided broadly into two stages. The first stage identifies the engagements of behavioral aspects and the relationship between the respective behaviors, as well as the typification of behavioral patterns. The second stage involves clarifying the relationship between the customer’s evaluation indicators and engagement behaviors. The engagement behaviors are basically correlated with RFM, however authors found that there is no relationship between specific engagement behavior and RFM in the group of low rank customers. On the other hand, using different types of services or shops from the core business strengthens the customer relationship. Finally, the relationship between the types of engagement behaviors and the respective customer evaluation indicators is presented in the conclusion.

During the last decade, customer complaint management received considerable attention in marketing literature, e.g., researchers examined the consequences of a negative incident on customer attitudes towards the provider and the associated behavioral intention such as self-reported repurchase intentions ( e.g. Evanschitzky, Brock, and Blut, 2011; Smith and Bolton, 2002; van Doorn and Verhoef, 2008). However, this stream of research has not examined actual purchase behavior after the complaint (e.g., de Matos, Henrique, and Rossi, 2007). Hence, it is unclear whether service recovery only affects self-reported outcomes (i.e., purchase intention) or actual purchase behavior. Moreover, recent research has indicated that customer inertia explains a large proportion of the variance of a customer’s repurchase behavior (e.g. van Doorn and Verhoef, 2008). So far, no research has assessed the impact of inertia in the service recovery context. It is indicated that the relationship between the provider and the customer is strongly affected by the service failure (van Doorn and Verhoef, 2008), but as of now, the role of past behavior has not been investigated. This study contributes to the complaint management literature by (1) analyzing the effects of service recovery on actual purchase behavior after recovery and (2) by assessing the role of inertia in situations of service recovery. Results indicate that complaint satisfaction has a significant positive impact on post complaining purchase behavior while overall satisfaction has no such effect. Furthermore, past purchase behavior has the strongest impact; thus, inertia plays a substantial role in complaint management.

In this paper, we investigate whether and how morality irrelevant inspiration can influence consumer’s own morality behavior. Thrash & Elliot (2003) conceptualized inspiration as a psychological construct with three core characteristics: evocation, transcendence, and motivation. Morality behavior include prescriptive morality (e.g., prosocial behavior) and proscriptive morality (e.g., immoral behavior), which have different antecedents. We propose a common antecedent for both faces of morality and found that morality-irrelevant inspirational experiences (triggered by others or oneself) could decrease proscriptive morality and increase prescriptive morality, via emotional and cognitive transcendence. This is the first paper to explore the roles played by the emotional and cognitive transcendence resulted from the inspirational experiences and the consequences of transcendence on a source-irrelevant context.

Introduction With awareness of the importance of environmental protection, encouragement of green consumption has been an important part of the Chinese government's efforts to promote sustainable development. Green consumption is similar to the concept of environmental responsible consumption, which refers to individual’s behavior with a consideration of the environmental impacts in the process of purchasing, using and disposing of various products, or use of various green services (Stern, 1999). Previous studies tried to predict pro-environmental behavior with social-psychological factors, such as values, attitudes and beliefs. However, researches about the relationship between environmental attitudes and behaviors do not produce consistent results. Some prove that they are positive related, and others argue that their relationship is very weak. Studies have testified that lots of consumers declare that they concern about the environmental situation, but hesitate to pay for green products due to this affect (Chang, 2011). Advancing knowledge about the motivations and obstacles that shape intention and behavior of green consumption is important. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991) is appropriate as an initial framework for studies investigating consumers’ pro-environmental behaviors. With the inclusion of a new construct perceived behavioral control, the explanatory ability of this model is strengthened. However, simple adoption of this model does not give us deep insight into consumers’ behavior. Later studies apply TPB in different contexts (e.g. Paul, Modi, Patel, 2016; Mancha & Yoder, 2015; Han, Hsu, Sheu, 2011). The mechanism of how attitude, norms and perception of behavioral control are formed may differ in different circumstances, which is still under research especially in China. The purpose of this paper is to (a) identify applicability of TPB model in predicting green purchasing intention and behavior in China and capture which factor including attitude, perceived behavioral control and norm is the most influential determinant; (b) to examine the most useful psychological and situational antecedents, which indirect influence consumers’ green purchase behavior through the factors in TPB framework. Literature Review and Hypothesis Development Green products refer to those produced with consideration of less harm to the ecological environment such as air, water and land. Green purchase behavior should be considered as a typical socially conscious behavior that is different from other types of consumer behaviors, which can deliver instant personal gain and gratification (Kim & Choi, 2005). Most of the time, pro-environmental purchasing is future-oriented and benefits society as a whole (Author, Mccarty, & Shrum, 2001). Previous research models seek to explain green purchase behavior from two aspects of causal factors. Some emphasize intra-personal determinants from within and others may stress that from outside. However, a single consideration of any one set of these factors will weaken the interpretation of consumers’ green consumer behavior. The research model of this study is based on the most influential TPB framework. Some significant psychological and situational factors are integrated into the framework with the purpose of further understanding Chinese consumers’ purchase behavior. Theory of planned behavior According to the TPB model, individual’s decision making is oriented by a rational evaluation of behavioral consequences (Bamberg & Moer, 2007). The intention to perform a behavior, is considered as the central factor in the TPB model (Tarkiainen & Sundqvist, 2005). Attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm about the behavior, and perceived behavioral control regarding the performance of the behavior are three principal factors that determine behavioral intention. H1: Intention to buy green product has a positive relationship with the green purchase behavior. Attitude refers to individuals' beliefs about the outcomes of the behavior together with an evaluation of the importance of these outcomes. Consumers who feel positive toward green products and have agreement on their environmental goodness will most likely to consider buying products with pro-ecological features. H2a: Attitude toward buying green product is positively associated with the intention to perform green purchase behavior. Subjective norm refers to the responses of important reference group (e.g. family members, close friends) to a particular behavior. Some scholars argue that “subjective norm” is the weakest component in the TPB model when predicting behavioral intentions due to its feature of both self and social interest (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Bagozzi et al., 2000). In this study, “moral norm” instead of “subjective norm” is proposed as a direct predictor of intention toward green purchasing. Moral norm indicates individual’s perception that whether performing a certain behavior is morally correct or not (Ajzen, 1991). H2b: Moral norm regarding buying green product is positively associated with the intention to perform green purchase behavior. Perceived behavioral control is an individual’s perception about if performing a particular behavior is easy or difficult. People tend to be more involved in behaviors that are considered to be easier to realize than what they think is difficult and have less control (Bamberg & Moer, 2007). H2c: PBC of buying green product is positively associated with the intention to perform green purchase behavior. Psychological antecedents of attitude Environmental concern indicates consumers' awareness about environmental issues and people’s worry that the human intervention will have threat to the environment (Kim & Choi, 2005). Literatures reveal an indirect relationship between ecological affect and actual behavior. Bang et al. (2000) concludes that environmental concern has indirect effect on purchase intention through the influence of consumer’s attitude toward paying a premium for renewable energy. The emotional responses to ecological problems help consumers to create a positive attitude toward green purchase behavior. H3a: Environmental concern is positively associated with the attitude toward green purchase behavior. Environmental knowledge represents consumers’ understanding of the environmental conditions, as well as fundamental factors that contribute to environmental change and crucial ecological effects (Pagiaslis & Krontalis, 2014). Knowledge has impact for individual’s cognitive processing. Zhao et al. (2014) confirms knowledge as one of the factors that form people’s attitudes toward environment-friendly behavior. Compared with less knowledgeable consumers, those who have more environmental knowledge incline to be more concerned about the environment, which in turn leads consumers to take attention to products’ ecological features while purchasing (Kim, Park, & Schwarz, 2010). H3b: Perceived environmental knowledge is positively associated with attitude toward green purchase behavior. In the pro-environmental behavior domain, PCE indicates to what extent consumers feel that every single person can contribute to solve environmental problems through their own efforts and their everyday purchase behavior (Straughan & Roberts, 1999).With the absence of belief that individual’s actions have observable outcome in making different solution to a problem, people will hesitate to take into action. Kim and Choi (2005) conclude that PCE has indirect effect on green purchasing through the role of ecological sensitive attitudes. H3c: PCE is positively associated with attitude toward green purchase behavior. Moral norm and subjective norm Bamberg and Moer (2007) suggest that people make use of subjective norms to determine whether a specific behavioral choice is easy to perform or whether it is beneficial. The opinions from “important others” deliver the standards for people to conform when they encounter the same situation. That is, the views about what is right or wrong from reference group will be absorbed and transformed as one’s personal moral norms (Bamberg & Moer, 2007). H4: Subjective norm is positively associated with moral norm regarding green purchase behavior. Situational factors influencing PBC Perceived availability indicates if consumers feel they can easily obtain or consume a certain product. If green products are not easy available, most consumers will not spend too much time and effort for searching. The limited availability and inconvenience in obtaining products is bound to hamper green products purchasing (Vermeir & Verbeke, 2006). H5a: Perceived availability of green product is positively associated with PBC regarding green purchase behavior. Perceived price is one of the most important factors that have impact on consumers’ decision-making of green consumption (Osterhus, 1997). Green products are generally priced higher than conventional products. However Chinese consumers who would like to pay a large premium are still in the minority. The perceived high price is a barrier that influences consumers’ perceived capability over green purchase behavior. H5b: Perceived price of green product is negatively associated with PBC regarding green purchase behavior. Information has an impact on individual’s cognitive process. It is an influential factor that leads consumer behavior change (Bator & Cialdini, 2000). Atkinson and Rosenthal confirm that eco-labels have effects on consumer’s trust and purchase intention. If consumers feel hard to recognize eco-labels and cannot understand their difference with regular ones, their perception of control will be highly influenced and the green purchase may be hindered. H5c: Perception of information provided by eco-label is positively associated with PBC regarding green purchase behavior. Methodology This research adopted the survey approach for data collection. A questionnaire that consisted of 46 items was designed according to relevant previous studies. All the items in the questionnaire use five-point Likert scale, which ranging from “strongly disagree” (1) to “strongly agree” (5). The target group of this study was consumer who is over 18 years old in the urban areas of Mainland China. An online survey was conducted for collecting data in the mid-October, 2017 and 500 samples were collected totally. After removing the disqualified questionnaires, 485 questionnaires were identified as eligible for further analysis. To testify the proposed hypotheses, the simple and multiple linear regression analyses using IBM SPSS Statistics was primarily adopted in the study. Meanwhile, the structural equation modeling (SEM) was also conducted as an alternative approach to examine the arguments. Results Firstly, the theory of planned behavior suggested by Ajzen (1991) was proved to be applicable in the green purchasing circumstance. Attitude was identified to play the most significant role in predicting the intention. The construct “moral norm” was resulted to be more predictable for green purchase intention compared with the original “subjective norm”. It indicates that in certain contexts, personal feeling of moral obligation or responsibility is more crucial and direct reason for consumer conducting ethical behaviors. Perceived behavioral control was testified as the third prediction of purchase intention. The proportion of variance explained (R2=0.546) for intention was even better compared with previous studies, which claimed that the three determinants account for between 40% and 50% of the variance in intention (Ajzen, 1991; Amireault et al., 2008; Conner & Armitage, 1998). This model revealed consumers’ mental development of their purchase intention before enacting the buying behavior. Secondly, the results testify that PCE plays as the central role in predicting attitude. Respondents who believe that their consumptions can help to reduce environmental deterioration will be much likely to hold positive attitudes toward green purchasing. Environmental concern and perceived knowledge have a considerable, but only indirect impact on consumers’ attitude. Implications for practice The results of this study suggest that consumers’ intentions to buy green products are directly predicted by attitude, moral norm and their perceived behavioral control. Firstly, enterprises in the green market need to adopt effective communication strategy to inform consumers about the advantages of environmentally friendly products in order to help consumers to develop a positive attitude to pro-environmental products. Moreover, due to the significant effect of PCE on consumer attitude, it's necessary for the government to quantify the effect of green consumption by real cases and data, so that people can perceive the effectiveness of green buying behavior in a more intuitive way. Meanwhile, companies should take more emphasis on consumer’s ability to solve the problem in a positive manner in marketing communications. Secondly, personal moral norm is also found to have direct effects on purchase green products. Thus, normative appeal is needed for creating consumers' emotional connection and should be presented in the promotion programs to stimulate green consumption. Thirdly, this study reveals that the availability is the main factor that affects consumers’ perceived behavioral control over green purchasing.