Factors affect intention to purchase face swap apps: the social comparison perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine factors that influence people's intention to purchase face swap apps. Face-swap models gained popularity in recent years because of their improvement in generation quality and applications in privacy protection and entertainment. This study proposed a research framework based on the theory of social comparison to explain the causal relationship between four categories of social comparison, self-esteem, appearance dissatisfaction, curiosity, perceived enjoyment and intention to purchase paid apps, with privacy concern added as a control variable. The Partial Least Squares technique was used to analyze data from a survey of 315 respondents. The results indicated that upon the aforementioned variables, curiosity and privacy concern were strongly correlated with intention to buy face swap apps. In addition, it was shown that perceived enjoyment had no significant impact on purchase intention. These exploratory findings revealed various theoretical and practical implications.