Modeling Hedonic Consumption Behaviors in Online Shopping

Increasingly, researchers have acknowledged that consumption activities involve hedonic components. Hedonic consumption relates to affective consumer behaviors in that it deals with the emotive and multisensory aspects of the consumption experience. Because the online shopping environment is characterized by the existence of an IT-enabled web interface that acts as the focal point of contact between customers and vendors, its design should also embed hedonic elements to create a holistic consumption experience. Drawing on the Expectation Disconfirmation Theory (EDT), this study advances a model that not only delineates hedonic consumer expectations into its constituent dimensions for online shopping but also highlights how these expectations can be best served through properties of aesthetic performance. The model is then empirically verified via an online questionnaire administered to a sample of 84 student participants. Theoretical contributions and pragmatic implications to be gleaned from our proposed model and its subsequent empirical validation are discussed.