Technology purchasing decisions represent complex processes that have attracted
substantial attention from both researchers and managers. Individual consumers often
make choices about software products with varying relative strengths and limitations, on
the basis of key characteristics, such as price, functionality, user interface design, and
vendor support. For organizations, technology choice decisions tend to involve broader
strategic considerations, such as strategic orientation, and the contextual factors of the
technology usage. Thus vendors must understand the key factors affecting choice by
consumers and organizations, and then leverage that knowledge to improve their product
design and marketing communication.
To approach this broad research question, I examine the influence of the three
fundamental aspects of decision-making: external market information, the decision
context, and internal information process strategies. Specifically, I focus on the placebo
effects of software pricing, incorporating user perceptions and product attributes in
modeling software product choices, and firms’ practices of green information technology
(IT). My customer-centric approach to users’ assessments of IT applications and products
differs from prior studies that tend to focus on vendors’ profit maximization or product
differentiation. Instead, I address the evaluative responses of individual consumers and
organizations—in the form of product evaluations, purchase decisions, preferential
choices and adoption decisions—to market information including price, product
attributes, and key contextual drivers.
My first essay conjectures that product price may create placebo-like effects which
could enhance user satisfaction and purchase intention. Price is a critical marketing tool
for delivering product signals. Customers tend to expect a positive correlation between
price and quality, and price thus, can signal quality. This price–quality relationship is
often implicit and unconscious, yet, still can exert placebo-like effects on product
evaluations. I investigate these placebo-like effects on consumer satisfaction, problemsolving
performance, and purchasing behaviors. To better understand the underlying
mechanisms, I focus on a trial consumption setting that involves a software product, and
investigate the influences of consumer expectancy and motivation. This essay includes a
controlled experiment as an empirical test of the influences of price placebo-like effects
on customers’ perceptional and behavioral outcomes.
Consumers’ software choices also warrant further conceptual analysis and empirical
testing. The second essay posits that product attributes manipulated by software vendors
can affect users’ product preferences, both directly and indirectly through perceptions.
With a wide range of software to choose from, end users often find the purchase of
packaged software a complex decision process; the process consumers use to select from
product alternatives have been of interest to researchers and managers alike. I examine
the influences of observable product attributes and perceived characteristics on
consumers’ software product choices by considering key factors that affect purchase
decision-making, using a choice experiment and conjoint analysis that models