Abstract:
This research investigates the moderating role of consumer self-confidence on the purchase
intention of deceptive and non-deceptive advertisements. Therefore, the consumer self-
confidence scale of Bearden et al. (2001) have been used. Besides, the moderating role of
overconfidence on the purchase intention after seeing deceptive and non-deceptive
advertisements has also been investigated. The purchase intention is investigated on four
different kinds of advertisements: two monetary (price comparison and bargain offer) and
two claim (puffery and semantic confusion) advertisements. The research suggests that
only the self-confidence on information acquisition (IA) had a negative moderating role on
the purchase intention after seeing deceptive advertisements. The other two aspects of
consumer self-confidence, consideration set formation (CSF) and persuasion knowledge
(PK), and the overconfidence had no moderating role on the purchase intention after seeing
deceptive advertisements. The outcome of this research is that consumers with a high IA
have a lower purchase intention after seeing deceptive advertisements than consumers with
a low IA. This new insight can help make supermarket advertisements more efficient,
which will lead to higher purchase intention of the consumers.
