25 Chapter 2 content, see Hu and Wise, 2021) than when they feel threatened in this freedom (e.g., by non-interactive ads; see Edwards et al., 2002). Correspondingly, Hu and Wise (2021) showed that the interactive elements of playable ads (indirectly) reduced perceived freedom threat, and therefore decreased consumers’ resistance to the ads. Self-agency has been found to (unconsciously) strengthen a sense of authorship (e.g. Aarts et al., 2009), empowerment, and mastery (e.g. Chiu et al., 2013) and may therefore be expected to represent the opposite of freedom threat. In line with Hu & Wise, we will examine to what extent interactivity enhances feelings of self-agency and, subsequently, if self-agency affects impulse buying. Customization is known to evoke feelings of self-agency (Sundar, 2008). The possibility of customization allows consumers to actively to adjust the content on, for example, an interface. Therefore, this option makes users part of the communication process rather than just the receivers, which, in turn, enhances feelings of self-agency (Sundar, 2008). Without implying that customization and interaction are the same, it could be argued that the option to change the communication process actively (e.g., changing the interface) plays an important role in both constructs. Furthermore, although it has not provided proof, the AMC (Sundar, 2008) proposes that interactivity techniques may enhance agency (also see Sundar and Marathe, 2010, p. 304). This agency model also posits that self-agency results in positive attitudes toward the displayed content (Sundar, 2008). Attitudes toward products are known to correlate with impulse-buying behavior (Chen, 2008), indicating that self-agency may lead to higher impulse-visit urges and impulse-buying urges. Moreover, the literature reveals that people who experience a high sense of self-agency perceive messages as more important and are easier to persuade, to visit and buy impulsively for example, than people who experience a low sense of self-agency (Kang and Sundar, 2016), corresponding with Reactance Theory. Similar as the reasoning for hypothesis 1a and 1b, there are no a priori reasons to suspect that interactivity affects both types of impulsive consumer behaviors through different processes (see e.g., Prediger et al., 2019). Based on the preceding, the following hypotheses are formulated (see Figure 2 for the conceptual model): Figure 2: Conceptual model hypotheses. H2a: Self-agency mediates the effect of interactivity (high versus low) on impulse-visit urges. H2b: Self-agency mediates the effect of interactivity (high versus low) on impulse-buying urges. Interactivity Self-agency Impulse-visit urge Impulse-buying urge + + + H2a H1a H2b H1b + +
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