“35 Pearls for a T-Shirt?”: How a Virtual Currency’s Dissimilarity to Money Decreases Purchase Intentions

Money is much more than dollars, pounds or yen. The digitization of money has led to the emergence of numerous virtual currencies. Countless virtual currencies have emerged through the digitization of money. Billions of U.S. dollars are exchanged using such virtual currencies every year. Still, most pricing-related marketing research focuses on payments using official currencies. In our article, we build upon payment-mechanism and processing fluency research to predict consumers’ purchase intentions with virtual currencies. Study 1 addresses how perceived money similarity can be predicted by semantic similarity measurements. In Studies 2 and 3, we replicate real-world purchase scenarios to show how a virtual currency’s dissimilarity to money decreases purchase intentions through both the increase of processing fluency and the increase of pain of payment. Managerial as well as theoretical implications are discussed.