Hope, Perceived Risk and Propensity to Indebtedness

Informações

Código: MKT552
Divisão: MKT - Marketing
Tema de Interesse: Tema 01 - Comportamento do Consumidor

Autores

Lucia Salmonson Guimarães Barros, Delane Botelho

Resumo

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relations among three constructs inmarketing: hope, perceived risk and propensity to indebtedness, which play important roles inconsumer behavior.Theory – Hope arises from the belief or expectancy that a future outcome can possibly beachieved, since it is positive and goal congruent, important and uncertain. Recently, theliterature suggested that: i) hope can be one factor which influences perceived risk (Snyder2000); ii) hope brings a person to action and getting indebted to purchase an expensive goalmay become one of these actions (MacInnis and de Mello, 2005); and iii) when one has lowerperceived risk, s/he is less likely to take protective actions (Brewer et al., 2004). For thesereasons, hope is a crucial construct in consumer behavior, and it can play an importantinfluence on perceived risk and propensity to indebtedness.Methodology - This article investigates the relations among those three variables through twoempirical studies: i) a laboratory experiment in which we evaluated the impact of hope andperceived risk on getting a mortgage loan; ii) a structural equation model representinguniversity students’ propensity to get indebted to pay for their university tuition, given theirhope and perceived risk.Findings - Our findings demonstrate that hope plays an important role on propensity toindebtedness, as higher levels of hope predicted an increase in the propensity to accept themortgage loan, independent of actual risks, and an increase in the propensity of collegestudents to get indebted to pay for their studies. The experiment suggests that hope may leadto a decrease in perceived risk, which, however, has not been confirmed by the second study.We present some methodological contributions, since this is the first study in the internationalmarketing literature using an experimental approach to understand hope and its relationshipwith perceived risk and propensity to indebtedness.Discussion - Our results expand the current literature in three ways. First, we providedempirical evidence that hope works as an antecedent of consumer’s propensity toindebtedness. Second, we suggested that one of the reasons for getting indebted when hope ishigh is a decrease in perceived risk. Finally, results supported that the three constructs (hope,perceived risk, and propensity to indebtedness) can be integrated in one theoretical model,which may provide insights for future research.

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