Search results

The objective of the study is to evaluate the impact of social affinity on the strategic choices made by economic agents using the framework of Ultimatum Game. Conventional theory underpinning the Ultimatum Game predicts the complete absence of altruistic behaviour wherein the agents are expected to maximise individual monetary payoffs of the agents. The authors' experimental findings disprove this assumption of purely self-interested behaviour of the agents as proposed by orthodox neo-classical utility maximisation model.

The final outcome of the Ultimatum Game is mutually dependent on the agent's strategic choices, i.e. the proposer's altruistic concern towards the responder and their expectation of altruistic concern by the responder. In this study, the authors evaluate the participant's strategic choice under three levels of partner selection arrangements – (1) stranger, (2) face-to-face interface with a peer and (3) friend.

From the experimental results, the authors found that the proposers reflected greater degree of altruism towards proposers' partners and also expected greater degree of altruism to be reciprocated by proposers' partners. The proposers were voluntarily willing to offer fair share to proposers' socially close partners and also increasingly expected that the proposers would be willing to accept unfair offers.

The study stresses that the ignorance of the human capacity for altruism runs the serious risk of legitimising narrow-minded selfishness and failure in recognising the capacity for public spiritedness which can distort the range and choice of optimum policy prescriptions. This requires policy makers to adopt a more holistic and less-pessimistic view of human nature.

The authors study offers a novel experimental framework that provides insights on how increase in social affinity can influence both altruistic behaviour and altruistic expectations of the participants, highlighting the inadequacy of the neo-classical maximisation hypothesis predicated on all agents.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-07-2022-0481.

This paper conducts a meta-analytic review of literature focused on the salient socio-psychological and personality antecedents of luxury purchase intention. It investigates the role of moderators that can assist an effective market segmentation of the luxury market in both emerging and developed economies.

The final analysis includes 95 effect sizes from 42 studies conducted in 15 countries, spanning 5 continents, from 2000 to 2020. The review examined moderating role of Hofstede's cultural dimensions, market type (emerging vs developed) and other study characteristics.

Findings show that socio-psychological antecedents had a more salient role than personality antecedents in driving luxury purchase intention (LPI), across both emerging and developed markets. Normative influence, status consumption and materialism exhibited a stronger influence on LPI in emerging markets than developed markets. Further, stronger effects for normative influence and status consumption on LPI were found in high power distance cultures. The role of seeking uniqueness was more salient and the role of normative influence was less salient in studies with a higher percentage of females. Conspicuous consumption was a stronger driver of LPI for fashion luxury products than other luxury products. The study also proposes distinct definitions of status and conspicuous consumption as there is often theoretical overlap of these constructs in literature.

A meta-analytic review may leave blind-spots due to lack of sufficient number of studies investigating certain theoretically relevant moderators. The authors discuss these gaps, along with study limitations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous study has conducted a meta-analytic review of the antecedents and moderators of LPI. With the extension of luxury demand beyond the developed countries in the West to the “new rich” consumers in the East, it becomes imperative to conduct a meta-analysis for a richer understanding of the drivers of luxury demand across different cultural orientations and market segmentations.