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Abstract

An experiment was conducted to determine if consumers purchased products with many more functions than they actually used, and if so why. It was found that, in the case of calculators, the higher the variety seeking drive of the consumer, the higher his level of anticipated usage of functions in the future, and hence higher the number of functions purchased. It was also found that the actual number of functions used by a consumer relative to the total number of functions available in a product increased rapidly for a short time following purchase, and then stabilized. Further, the disconfirmation with product usage was found to decrease over the life of the product. The implications for future research have also been discussed.

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Ram, S., Jung, HS. (2015). How Does Variety Seeking Affect Product Usage?. In: Hawes, J.M., Glisan, G.B. (eds) Proceedings of the 1987 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17052-7_18

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