Exploring individual behaviors to unveil their responses to modern life challenges

This Ph.D. thesis is a collection of three papers that jointly investigate the role of individuals in adopting specific behaviors in response to modern challenges, encompassing sustainable consumption and usage of mobile applications for communication purposes. The core element is the individual, alternatively identified as consumer when analysing green purchasing behaviors, or user when studying mobile applications adoption. According to a consumer perspective, the first two chapters explore the challenges arisen from sustainable consumption patterns, by investigating the role of sustainability and health-related product labels and behavioral determinants of green consumption. According to a user perspective, the third chapter investigates the determinants of technology adoption behaviour in the scenario of instant messaging and social networking mobile applications. Chapter One is based on consumers’ actual purchasing data and offers a consumer segmentation framework by examining which are the benefits that sustainability and health-related labels convey to consumers. It differentiates consumers’ actual purchases of sustainability and health-related products based on the benefits they offer and outlines three consumer profiles. Chapter Two investigates the determinants of organic food consumption and it is based on the combination of actual purchasing data and self-reported data. First, it explores the discrepancy between declared intention and actual purchasing behaviour. Second, it analyses the influence of social norms. Third, it goes beyond the classic framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (Ajzen, 1991), by examining what contributes to the formation of attitude, the role of knowledge and health beliefs. Chapter Three investigates the determinants of user adoption of instant messaging and social networking mobile applications. Based on self-reported data, it explores the effects of perceived usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment and subjective norms on instant messaging and social networking apps usage. In addition, it tests for moderating effects of resistance to change and subjective norms. The final Chapter presents conclusions and remarks.