Investigating the antecedents of post-purchase regret

Abstract

In the field of consumer psychology, research on post-purchase affects is of great interest to marketers because they can potentially predict the future buying behaviour of the consumers. Much of the present research done has been on post-purchase product satisfaction; however, much lesser research was done on post-purchase regret. The post-purchase regret refers to the feeling of regret that some consumers experience after purchasing an item. Such feeling of regret occurs for various reasons, a major reason being that consumers may consider their chosen option against their rejected options (Inman, Dyer, & Jia, 1997). However, post-purchase regret was identified as one of the major affect influencing future buying behaviours of the consumers (Tsiros, 1998; Tsiros & Mittal, 2000). The objective of our study was to contribute to the pool of research that may eventually aid in the construction of a robust process model for consumer's regret. Our study contributes to this research by studying the types of counter-factual thinking, product type and level of obsessive-compulsive symptoms as possible antecedents of level of post-purchase regret. We investigated by administering various decision-making tasks, reflection tasks and questionnaires to 84 local undergraduate students and collecting their post-purchase regret score. Our results revealed significant effect for the types of counter-factual thinking on the level of post-purchase regret levels, where upward counter-factual thinking increases post-purchase regret while downward counter-factual thinking decreases it. However, no significant effect was found for product type and the level of obsessive-compulsive symptoms on post-purchase regret.