Affective responses to service failure in social commerce: an application of the attribution-affect-behavior sequence model to two-sided market

Abstract

Social commerce is a type of electronic commerce that uses social media with the structure of a two-sided market. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of attribution on negative emotions, dissatisfaction, and post-purchase behaviors based on the attribution-affect-behavior sequence model when a consumer has a negative experience when using social commerce. The results of this empirical study showed that internal players, intermediaries, and merchants are all liable to experience a service failure which can lead to the formation of negative consumption emotions, whereas the relationship between internal attribution and disappointment is insignificant. Both regret and disappointment affect dissatisfaction, which increases negative e-WOM and decreases repurchase intentions. Academically, this study implies that the multiple loci explain causation inference by cognitive dissonance in a two-sided market such as social commerce. The new scheme weighs the liability of an intermediary as one of the main source of service failure. Also, we identified a strong relationship between social commerce service failure and negative e-WOM on the Internet. For managerial implications, social commerce companies should keep monitoring merchants and enhance consumer satisfaction as well as provide an institutional strategy to evaluate merchant performance levels, as they have the liability of a duty to protect the consumer. Also, social commerce companies should manage negative e-WOM, which spreads on social networks, effectively. This study contributes to the breaking down of the locus of causality into three categories to explain service failure in a two-sided market. We also found that the repurchase intentions of social commerce of consumers who are dissatisfied decrease even if they know they can save almost half of the original price through this new service (price stimulus). We conclude that the specified locus of causality abundantly explains affective respon...