Enjoyment as a Bridge to Mobile Purchase Intention: The Roles of Scarcity and Urgency

Abstract

The rapid expansion of mobile commerce has reshaped how consumers form purchase intentions, yet the affective mechanisms underlying mobile shopping decisions remain underexplored. In particular, prior research has rarely examined how positive and negative digital stimuli jointly influence consumers’ emotional responses and purchase intentions within a unified framework. Grounded in Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R), this study conceptualizes personalization and digital fatigue as environmental stimuli, enjoyment as an affective organismic state, and mobile purchase intention as the behavioral response, while incorporating perceived scarcity and urgency as boundary conditions. Data were collected from 421 valid respondents via an online survey and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results reveal that enjoyment exerts a strong positive effect on mobile purchase intention and functions as a central mediating mechanism within the S-O-R framework. Personalization enhances enjoyment, whereas digital fatigue undermines consumers’ affective responses. Moreover, perceived scarcity and urgency significantly affect the purchase intention and strengthen the relationship between enjoyment and purchase intention. This study extends the S-O-R framework by integrating both enabling (personalization) and constraining (digital fatigue) stimuli, identifying enjoyment as a central mediating mechanism, and demonstrating the moderating role of scarcity and urgency in mobile commerce. The findings also offer practical insights for designing effective mobile shopping experiences.