Gender differences in college students’ online shopping: utilitarian and hedonic motivation approaches

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2.4 The development of our theory
Existing literature had been studied that different gender had different motivations for online shopping behaviors, such as costs saving, availability of information and brand/fashion. These motivations can be classified into utilitarian dimension or hedonic dimension. However, not much is known about the effects of utilitarian and hedonic motivation on the behavioral differences based on gender. Moreover, the differences between men and women really exist, including physical and mental differences. The differences drew marketing researchers’ interest that brought out related studies, such as gender differences in decision-making styles (Vincent and Walsh, 2004), online and store buying motivations (Dittmar et al., 2004) and internet shopping behaviour (Chang and Samuel, 2004). The general conclusion is that gender has significant effect on a person’s decision to shop online.
According to previous literature reviews, utilitarian motivation is described as rational, and emotional is hedonic motivation in natural. However, Zhang, X., Prybutok, V. R., & Strutton, D. (2007) indicated that males were more impulsive online shoppers than females, whereas, Gasiorowska (2003) stated women tended to have stimulating character, thus it is connected to emotions derived from the process of shopping. The different results of these studies issue a question, which group is more emotional or rational? Therefore, there is still a need for closer examination of the online shopping intention based on gender. Since the gender differences of personality traits are significant, this paper would like to address that female will report higher person-oriented and more affect by emotions.
We would like to find out how these...

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...e) is also being analysis. (Davis, 1989). Park (2007) argued that perceived ease of use represents well the person’s incentive on the utilitarian aspects. Based on the above analysis, perceived ease of use has an effect on utilitarian motivation.
Venkatesh and Morris (2000) suggested that females have higher computer anxiety compared to men and proposed that the influence of perceived ease of use on the intention to use e-shopping is stronger for females than for males. On the other hand, perceived ease of use is more salient in determining perceived usefulness for females than males (Ong and Lai’s, 2006). Thus, the corresponding hypothesis was:
H3a. The effect of perceived ease of use on utilitarian of shopping online will be stronger for women than men.
H3b. The effect of perceived ease of use on attitude toward shopping online will be stronger for women than men.

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