소비자의 제품 처분 행위에 관하여: 지각된 유용성과 매몰 비용을 중심으로

How consumers dispose products they no longer use is not just the matters of consumers themselves. the Issue is directly related to the environmental concerns which is very important and sensitive to diverse stakeholders. Moreover, the existing consumer behavior researchers have focused their research interests on consumers’ purchase behaviors. In this sense, the present study focuses on consumers’ disposal behaviors. Consumers dispose products they no longer use in various ways such as throwing, donating, giving to others, keeping, and reselling. diverse disposal methods require different levels of consumer effort. Therefore, the present study adopts consumer effort level to explain their disposal efforts. By doing this, more fundamental understanding of consumers’ disposal behaviors is possible. For this purpose, disposal effort, perceived usefulness, and sunk cost has been accepted. The present study argues that perceived usefulness and sunk cost influence consumers’ effort level. Perceived usefulness is the concept that consumers perceive how useful the product will be to others rather than product owners themselves. Sunk cost is the cost consumers put to purchase and maintain the product they are about to dispose. It is expected that consumers who peceive high level of perceived usefulness and sunk cost will put more effort to dispose the product and will use a method that needs more effort. Retrospective questionnaires were utilized to test the hypotheses and the results showed that sunk cost consumers perceived positively influence disposal efforts. In other worlds, consumers who perceived high sunk cost are likely to adopt disposal behaviors such as donate or resell, which needs high disposal efforts. However, perceived usefulness does not influence disposal efforts statistically. It was also found that consumers’ perceived sunk cost influenced the perceive usefulness. To sum up, consumers consider the sunk cost they have put into very importantly but do not consider how much the product will be valuable to others when they dispose unnecessary products. The present study is meaningful academically in the sense that it adopted perceived usefulness and sunk cost, which have never been utilized to explain consumers’ disposal behaviors. it is also expected to give managerial implications to diverse parties such as environmental policy makers, reused product industry, nonprofit organizations, and durable product makers.