An Empirical Study of the Impact of ICT on College Students' Shopping Behavior

The purpose of this research is to ascertain how the advancement of Information and Telecommunication Technology (ICT) changes people's behavior as well as the demand structure of transportation. In this paper, we focused on the purchasing behavior and shopping-related trips as the derived demand. Firstly, we produced a conceptional framework to model consumers' purchasing behavior, and specifically direct our attention to the transaction costs in shopping, that is, the costs for information gathering and for acquiring goods because they are certainly influenced by newly developed forms of information technology and their applications, such as the Internet, e-mail, and e-commerce. Secondly, for the empirical study, we conducted a questionnaire survey in two locations in Japan: the major metropolis of Tokyo and the smaller regional city of Nagasaki. The survey inquired into selection factors between retail shops and Internet or catalog-order shops. The result of our empirical survey showed that (1) the willingness to pay (WTP) for information gathering costs has a positive effect on individuals' ICT related characteristics, and (2) the WTP for information gathering has a positive effect to non-shop purchasing, while the WTP for acquiring goods affects non-has a negative effect on non-shop purchasing.