Understanding promotion framing effect on purchase intention of elderly mobile app consumers

In mobile commerce, the elderly have become a consumer group that cannot be ignored. Based on the framing effect theory, our paper mainly investigates the impacts of regulatory focus and reinforcement on the purchase intention of elderly mobile app consumers. The results of our empirical analysis show that the influence of the promotion framing on the perceived value and expected regret of the elderly consumers is regulated by the reinforcement and the regulatory focus. Specifically, for promotion focus elderly consumers, profit-increase promotions generally bring higher anticipated regret than loss-reduction promotions, while for prevention focus elderly consumers, loss-reduction promotions generally bring higher anticipated regret than profit-increase promotions. Our results also demonstrate that perceived value and expected regret play a mediating role in mobile apps' use of the promotion framing to influence consumers' purchase intention.