24 The Urge to Splurge Bressolles et al. (2007) argue that website interactivity benefits feelings of gratification and could therefore induce buying impulses. They found that interactivity and impulse-buying buying urges are positively related. Additionally, through a survey, Huang (2016) showed that online interactive activity (browsing) and impulse buying are related. It is interesting to study the extent to which the positive effects of interactivity in online settings will hold in offline settings, as online consumers differ from offline consumers. The former seek variety (e.g., Donthu and Garcia, 1999) and convenience (Monsuwé et al., 2004) more often than the latter. Additionally, some consumers prefer to interact in an online retail setting over interacting in an offline retail setting (Becker and Pizzutti, 2017). Moreover, some consumers can experience more risk when shopping online than when shopping offline (see Kim et al., 2020). These differences could imply that the positive effects of online interactivity do not necessarily apply to in-store interactivity. However, this study examines the effect of in-store interactive digital screens, which are in functionality and use comparable with interactive digital screens that are used for online shopping, such as laptop-screens. Therefore, we also expect a positive effect of interactivity as a functionality of digital screens in physical shop windows on impulsive consumer behavior. Impulsive consumer behavior may manifest itself in various ways. In general, one may argue that such behavior manifests itself in terms of experiential shopping motives and behavior (where the experience itself is the goal of the behavior), as well as materialistic motives and behavior (where the acquired product is the goal of the behavior, see e.g., Carter and Gilovish, 2012). In the current context such experiential behavior translates into impulse store visits while materialistic behavior translates into impulse buying. There is no a priori reason to suspect that interactivity affects both types of impulsive consumer behavior differently (see Prediger et al., 2019). However, considering marketing implications, a separate examination of the effect of interactivity on both types is interesting. A visit does not necessarily result in a purchase (Vukadin et al., 2016). Likewise, with the possibility of online purchases store visits are no longer essential to impulse buying. We, therefore, explicitly distinguish impulse visits from impulse purchases and propose the following two hypotheses: We further study the extent to which the positive effects of interactivity can be explained by self-agency. Self-agency refers to the feeling that one shapes her/his own actions and, therefore, is frequently intertwined with freedom of choice (Barlas and Obhi, 2013). According to Reactance Theory (Brehm, 1966), people are easier to persuade when they feel free to make their own choices (e.g., through interactive Self-agency as a mediator in the effect of interactivity on impulse urges H1a: High interactivity leads to stronger impulse-visit urges than low interactivity. H1b: High interactivity leads to stronger impulse-buying urges than low interactivity.
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