TY  - JOUR
AU  - Dutra, Lauren McCarl
AU  - Nonnemaker, James
AU  - Taylor, Nathaniel
AU  - Kim, Annice E
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/06/29
TI  - Deception and Shopping Behavior Among Current Cigarette Smokers: A Web-Based, Randomized Virtual Shopping Experiment
JO  - JMIR Res Protoc
SP  - e10468
VL  - 7
IS  - 6
KW  - online shopping
KW  - deception
KW  - social and behavioral sciences
KW  - consumer behavior
KW  - smokers
AB  - Background: Virtual stores can be used to identify influences on consumer shopping behavior. Deception is one technique that may be used to attempt to increase the realism of virtual stores. Objective: The objective of the experiment was to test whether the purchasing behavior of participants in a virtual shopping task varied based on whether they were told that they would receive the products they selected in a virtual convenience store (a form of deception) or not. Methods: We recruited a US national sample of 402 adult current smokers by email from an online panel of survey participants. They completed a fully automated randomized virtual shopping experiment with a US $15 or US $20 budget in a Web-based virtual convenience store. We told a random half of participants that they would receive the products they chose in the virtual store or the cash equivalent (intervention condition), and the other random half simply to conduct a shopping task (control condition). We tested for differences in demographics, tobacco use behaviors, and in-store purchases (outcome variable, assessed by questionnaire) by experimental condition. Results: The characteristics of the participants (398/402, 99.0% with complete data) were comparable across conditions except that the intervention group contained slightly more female participants (103/197, 52.3%) than the control group (84/201, 41.8%; P=.04). We did not find any other significant differences in any other demographic variables or tobacco use, or in virtual store shopping behaviors, including purchasing any tobacco (P=.44); purchasing cigarettes (P=.16), e-cigarettes (P=.54), cigars (P=.98), or smokeless tobacco (P=.72); amount spent overall (P=.63) or on tobacco (P=.66); percentage of budget spent overall (P=.84) or on tobacco (P=.74); number of total items (P=.64) and tobacco items purchased (P=.54); or total time spent in the store (P=.07). Conclusions: We found that telling participants that they will receive the products they select in a virtual store did not influence their purchases. This finding suggests that deception may not affect consumer behavior and, as a result, may not be necessary in virtual shopping experiments. 
SN  - 1929-0748
UR  - http://www.researchprotocols.org/2018/6/e10468/
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/10468
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29959114
DO  - 10.2196/10468
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/10468
ER  -