The Influence of Event Stimulation on Consumers' Purchase Behavior with Health Agricultural Products in the Digital Era: A Case Study of the Selenium-enriched Fraud

Background: Understanding consumers' behavioral choices after the stimulus of negative events has great significance for repairing consumer perceptions, improving crisis management strategies for negative events, and promoting the food industry’s healthy development. Methods: Based on the "stimulus-organic-response" (SOR) theory, this study constructed a consumer purchasing-behavior model stimulated by negative events and analyzed the influence mechanism of internal stimulus, external stimulus, and consumer characteristics on consumers' negative emotions and selenium-enriched agricultural products purchasing behavior. Conclusions: The empirical analysis produced the following conclusions. Negative perceptions and media disclosure not only can directly predict consumers' purchasing behavior with Se-enriched agricultural products but can also predict consumers' purchasing behavior with Se-enriched agricultural products through the mediating effect of negative emotions. There is no effect of negative emotion between preferences and consumers' purchase of Se-enriched agricultural products. This is explained by the current online and offline purchase channels, which expand the space of consumer choice. Additionally, in the digital era, consumers are more likely to obtain product information and guidance from relatively professional or targeted opinions, and their purchasing preferences tend to be decentralized and personalized. The influence of lay belief, impulse buying, and herd behavior on consumer purchasing has gradually decreased. External intervention cannot moderate the relationship between negative emotion and purchase. Findings indicated that in the digital era, the rise of we-media, the reduction of information-acquisition cost, and the rise of anti-authority thoughts all lead consumers to distrust authority interventions and consequently, they were more inclined to trust the opinions of non-institutional and non-academic opinion leaders such as celebrities with massive followings.