Vicarious innovativeness or vicarious learning: The role of existing vicarious innovativeness in new product purchase intentions

• Existing vicarious innovativeness scale is only a measurement for vicarious learning.
• Existing vicarious innovativeness scale can predict new product purchase intentions.
• The usefulness of existing vicarious innovativeness scale is validated across cultural contexts.

This paper draws on the consumer innovativeness literature to examine the relationship between existing vicarious innovativeness scale and other forms of consumer innovativeness scales and its role on predicting new product purchase intentions in Australia and China. This study found that existing vicarious innovativeness scale is negatively associated with other forms of consumer innovativeness. Contrary to a significant body of academic research, this study demonstrates the ability of the existing vicarious innovativeness scale in predicting new product purchase intentions rather than new product adoption behaviour. The results have important implications by validating the existing vicarious innovativeness scale in a cross-cultural context. The results of this study question the existing vicarious innovativeness scale that it should only be considered as a measurement for vicarious learning. Instead, further research should seek additional sources of both innovators' and imitators' new product information acquisition in order to develop a proper scale to better measure vicarious innovativeness.

Chinese Abstract本文参考有关消费者创新性的文献，研究现有的替代性创新等级与其他形式的消费者创新等级的关系，以及它对预测澳大利亚和中国市场对新产品购买意愿的作用。本研究发现现有的替代性创新等级与其他形式的消费者创新是此消彼长的关系。不同于大量的学术研究，本研究展示了现有替代性创新等级预测新产品购买意愿的能力，而不是新产品采用行为。本研究在跨文化环境下对现有的替代性创新等级进行了验证，从研究结果中能够看出重要的引申意义。本研究的结果质疑了现有替代性创新等级只能用于度量替代性学习的理论。相反，进一步研究应寻找关于“创新者”和“模仿者”对获取新产品信息的额外来源，以创造能够更好地测量替代性创新的等级。