Author: Asle Fagerstrøm

Asle Fagerstrøm is a Professor in Marketing at Kristiania University College (Department of Technology). Dr. Fagerstrøm’s research areas are primarily online shopping, use of technology to influence healthy choices, future of retail, and personal finance. He has published in Journal of Business Research, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, International Journal of Information Management, Computers in Human Behavior, and Interacting with Computers.
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Analyzing motivating functions of consumer behavior: Evidence from attention and neural responses to choices and consumption

Academia and businesses have shown an increased interest in neurophysiological methods, such as eye-tracking and electroencephalography (EEG), to understand consumer motivation. This research examines if these methods can predict the impact of motivation triggers, such as water deprivation, has on attention, brain response, choices, and consumption. Through experiments, results reveal that water deprived participants focused more on images of water and were more likely to choose and consume water. These findings suggest that neurophysiological methods can offer deeper insights into how motivational factors influence consumer behavior.

The full article can be found in at Frontiers in Psychology and it is also posted in the National Library of Medicine.

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An Explorative Study on the Impact of Antecedent Mood States on Consumers’ Evaluation of Hotels Online

Many travelers plan their trip using online
booking platforms. These often have recommendations for
things to do and explore in the target destination. The
suggestions could have either positive or negative
connotations. This study aimed to investigate if such
recommendations can trigger certain mood states that
impact consumers’ evaluation of hotels online. Web-based
mood induction procedures were used to see whether moods
as antecedent states had any impact on consumers’
evaluations of hotel bookings. The results of the conjoint
analysis demonstrate that the impact of location and hotel
reviews can change based on consumers’ mood. The impact
of mood can help online managers in developing more
effective hotel marketing and advertising strategies. This paper is published at the IEEE International Engineering and Enginering Management (IEEM) conference 2021.

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Call for Industrial PhD Fellowship in Omni-channel and Business Analytics

EUROSKO is looking for one outstanding candidate for a 4-year doctoral project in the industry in cooperation with Kristiania University College in the fields of Omnichannel/Business Analytics. The successful candidate is expected to start the appointment with EUROSKO autumn 2021. The candidate will be members of the Behavior & Technology Lab (BTLab) at Kristiania University College and will be expected to conduct research of high-quality level under the supervision of Prof. Asle Fagerstrøm.

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Price consciousness as basis for Thai and Finnish young adults’ mobile shopping in retail stores

This short paper, published in Procedia Computer Science, explores the connection between price-conscious shopping habits and the use of smartphones for in-store shopping among young adults from Thailand and Finland. Through a cross-national survey, the study finds that price-conscious consumers are more likely to use mobile shopping in retail stores. Thai consumers had a stronger association to price consciousness and mobile shopping, than for Finnish consumers. These insights suggest that cultural factors can impact how a consumers mobile shopping behavior is influenced by their price awareness

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Motivating Events at the Point of Online Purchase: An Online Business-to-Business Retail Experiment

The point of online purchase refers to the location and conditions in which an online transaction takes place. It includes how products are presented to consumers and the means of completing the transaction. Understanding how the online setting and specific situations impact consumers behavior at the point of online purchase may improve online marketing efforts.

An online experiment was conducted to analyze the factors that influences purchases during the online buying process. Results show that the treatment group had a 39% conversion rate for up-sell offers. Which lead to an 87.94% increase in revenue compared to the control group. The findings of the experiment are discussed in relation to consumer behavior and rules governing inline purchases. For further reading, the full study can be found in the Procedia Computer Science.

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Special Section on “Health, Technology, & Behavior Science”

Valdimar Sigurdsson (Reykjavik University) and Asle Fagerstrøm (Kristiania University College) are guest editors for a special section on “Health, Technology, & Behavior Science” in Perspectives on Behavior Science. The aim of this section is to provide reviews and empirical research that integrates the latest technological innovations and behavior science. The contributors in this special section demonstrate that behavior science can aid an understanding of why people do or do not engage in a healthy lifestyle and help identify what is needed to design a successful health behavior intervention through the use of technology

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Persuasive technology

Sanchit Pawar gives a presentation at The Behavior Bar the 12th of October 2017. His talk is on Persuasive technology, a topic which is part of research in the Behavioral Lab at Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology. Persuasive technology is broadly defined as technology designed to facilitate behavioral change. It is based on the principles of human-computer interaction and experimental methodologies. It shares several core features with behavioral science. In order to effectively utilize technology for behavioral change, we propose that the influence of technology can be better understood from a behavior-analytic perspective. Show up and listen to this groundbreaking topic within human-computer interaction.

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Consumers´ credit use

The consumer credit use project has gained a lot of attention. From the lens of behavioral economics, we investigates consumers´ choice between saving and credit use. Understanding of consumers’ credit use is of vital importance as well as for the responsible policy-makes, credit card companies, researchers, as for the individual credit users. This research is done by Asle Fagerstrøm (Westerdals Oslo ACT, Norway), Donald Hantula (Temple University, US) and Lars Sydnes (Westerdals Oslo ACT). Our research is published in The Psychological Records and has been mentioned in Forskning.no, Aftenposten, NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation).

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That personal profile image might jeopardize your rental opportunity!

This study aims to investigate the impact of a seller’s facial image and their expression upon buyers’ behavior in on Airbnb. The impact of facial expressions was investigated together with other relevant variables (price and customer ratings). Findings show that the impact of a seller’s facial expression on buying behavior in an online peer-to-peer context is significant. A negative facial expression and absence of facial image (head silhouette) abates approach and evokes avoidance tendencies to explore a specific web page on Airbnb, and, simultaneously decrease the likelihood to rent. The reverse effect was true for neutral and positive facial expressions. We found that a negative and positive facial expression had more impact on likelihood to rent, for women than for men. Further analysis shows that the absence of facial image and an angry facial expression cannot be compensated for by a low price and top customer ratings related to likelihood to rent. The study published in Computers in Human Behavior and is presented at ScienceNordic, Forskning.no, and Icelandic National Broadcasting Service.

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Wi-Fi services get high priority when booking hotels

Our research on the impact of Wi-Fi service on consumers´ hotel booking online is presented in ScienceNordic. The study aim to expand understanding of the relative importance of Wi-Fi when consumers book hotel rooms online.When looking only at Wi- Fi, results show that previous guests’ Wi-Fi reviews have a higher impact on booking than Wi-Fi price. Further analysis shows that Wi-Fi can be a “deal breaker” in a competitive and/or undifferentiated market. We propose that the impact of Wi-Fi can be understood as rule-governed behavior. Consequently, behavioral understanding of the impact of Wi-Fi could aid hotel managers in developing more effective marketing strategies. The study is done by Niklas Eriksson (Arcada University of Applied Sciences) and Asle Fagerstrøm (Westerdals Oslo ACT), and is published in Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research