The Effect of Perceived Risk, Hedonic Value, and Self-Construal on Attitude toward Mobile SNS

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of perceived risk on attitude toward mobile Social Network Services (SNSs). First, we understand that perceived risk of SNSs is a multidimensional concept, and we study the relationship between attitude and perceived risk such as social risk, performance risk, and privacy risk in SNS environments. Subsequently, the relationships between these multidimensional concepts of perceived risk and attitude are investigated. The result indicates that social, performance, and privacy risk have negative effects on attitude. In addition, the moderated effect of individual characteristic variables such as hedonic value and self-construal are confirmed as mitigating factors that alleviate the negative impact of perceived risk. The Findings show that customers who perceive SNSs to be risky are more likely to have a negative attitude toward SNSs. However, the negative impact of perceived risk on their attitude toward SNSs is alleviated in customers with high hedonic value. Similarly, the negative impact of perceived risk on their attitude toward SNS is weaker with customers in interdependent self-construal. This paper presents effective segmentation variables, such as consumer's motivation (hedonic value) and psychological variable (self-construal), which mitigate the risk perception of customers. Therefore, it provides practical guidelines for the marketing managers in terms of who to target and what kind of strategies to implement in terms of these segmentation variables to approach consumers more efficiently.