From an analysis of related theories, this paper induced three characteristics of impulse buying,
including “being unplanned prior to purchase”, “unnecessary at the moment”, and “short decision-making
time”. The empirical finding showed that even in an impulse buying context, most consumers would still
perform information search, an essential decision-making step of rational buying, to maximize the utility
202 The Journal of Global Business Management Volume 9 * Number 1* February 2013
of the product they purchase. In other words, their impulse buying is not necessarily an irrational behavior
(Malter, 1996; Mowen and Minor, 1998). This finding also implied that impulse buying is not necessarily
an “unplanned” action (Kacen and Lee, 2002). In addition, our empirical findings indicated that impulse
buying with information search has a significant impact on post purchase satisfaction, and impulse buying
without information search does not affect satisfaction. It can be inferred that impulse buying without
thorough evaluation does not cause cognitive dissonance on product performance. Based on a more
comprehensive model, this paper empirically confirmed that information symmetry has a moderating
effect on consumer satisfaction.
In order to obtain a large sample, we administered the survey online. Due to this survey method, we
could only measure respondents’ post-purchase satisfaction. Future researchers are suggested to collect
data of both pre-purchase and post-purchase satisfaction to find the variation in consumer satisfaction. As
the main objective of this paper was to examine the effects of moderator variables, this paper focused on
the decision-making stages of impulse purchase only until post-purchase evaluation. Future researchers
can include attribute variables in the model to investigate whether information search has any impact on
“repurchase intention”.