Deal sites are widely used for some time and there is a growing body of knowledge on them. There exists literature on infomediaries. But there is a gap when it comes to infomediaties focused on deal sites, i.e. aggregators of deal site offers. The research focused on impact of Big Five Inventory personality traits on whether respondents prefer visiting individual deal sites, or aggregators, or they do not have any preference and visit both. Gender was used as a control variable. With regards, to the results, conscientiousness agreeableness, and openness to experience influence the preference. Higher the values of all three variables, more likely it is that a person prefers aggregators.
launched about a decade ago. These days, probably most people think of Groupon when talking about deal sites. Possible reasons are summarized in (Sudzina, 2016c).
Within the business model framework compiled by Taran et al. (2016), Groupon can be classified as affinity club (Johnson, 2010), round-up buyers (like Linder and Cantrell's (2000) buying club), and trade show (like Timmers' (1998) third-party marketplace). According to the same framework, aggregators of deal site offers are infomediaries (Rappa, 2001).
The Groupon-style shopping has spread from the US to Europe and has achieved great popularity in the Czech Republic. Deal sites are present in the Czech Republic since 2009, they gained general popularity in 2010 with the advent of the company Slevomat. In 2011, when the number of deal sites peaked, there were 204 registered servers (4 times more than nowadays). Since 2015, the market cleared in the period of consolidation – it has achieved its growth limits, the overall market turnover has stabilized. In the market, there currently operate 45 active deal sites, top 5 of which control 90% of the market share, and the share of the leader (slevomat.cz) alone is 40 %. Gradually, it is also possible to detect the rising share of aggregators rather than individual deal sites. This article tries to identify the reasons behind the increasing popularity of aggregators.
The largest aggregator of deal sites offers in the Czech Republic is Skrz.cz, it was the first infomediary of its kind in the Czech Republic, it was founded in 2010. In 2011, Robox.cz was founded but it merged with Skrz.cz within a few months. Since 2012, Skrz.cz also includes offers of e-shops, and since 2015, it includes also offers of travel agencies. Other examples of Czech aggregators, which existed already in 2011 and are still active, include Zlateslevy.cz, Slevin.cz, Slevydnes.cz, Sleviste.cz, Slevoman.cz, Modreslevy.cz, Slevax.cz, Meslevy.cz, Ukazslevy.cz, and Slevo.cz.
Aggregators for deal sites offers may be considered still a relatively new phenomenon as they are not mentioned even in the newest version of Principles of Marketing by Kotler et al. (2017), and also even though there is a quite good coverage of Groupon-like servers in the academic papers, aggregators are not so well covered so far.
The aim of the paper is to fill in the above mentioned knowledge gap in the field of aggregators and investigate impact of gender and personality traits on preference to use aggregators rather than individual deal sites.
Introductory analysis of aggregators operating on the Czech market has revealed interesting finding just by comparing their headquarters location. Vast majority of them is situated in Prague. Similar results have been observed also by Suchacek et al. (2017) who investigated location of Czech large enterprises. It is safe to conclude that aggregators follow the unfortunate trend of Pragocentrism – phenomenon that large enterprises, primary because of the proximity to decisive authorities as well as because of lower transaction costs, agglomeration economies etc. locate their headquarters in the capital city.
The rest of the paper is organized in the following way: In the next section, there is a description what data were collected and how, and how they were analyzed. In the following section, results of the analysis are presented. The last section offers conclusions. 2
Data were collected in December 2016-January 2017 using an on-line questionnaire. Respondents were 264 university students from the Czech Republic, of which 140 respondents indicated that they use deal sites, and 124 do not. (From this data set, the analysis of use versus non-use of deal sites was published in (Sudzina and Pavlicek, 2017b); the analysis of extent of use of deal sites was published in (Sudzina and Pavlicek, 2017c); the analysis of customer satisfaction with goods and services purchased on deal sites was published in (Sudzina and Pavlicek, 2017a); and the analysis of use of coupons from deal sites as gift was published in (Pavlicek and Sudzina, 2017).)
SurveyXact was used for the questionnaire. Unlike Qualtrics, it does not allow to show/hide questions based on answers to questions on the same page. Therefore, the questionnaire was split into two pages and questions for deal sites users appeared on the second page. Seven respondents stopped after the first page. So, the effective sample size is 133 (43 men, 90 women; on average 20 years old).
Personality traits were measured using Rammstedt and John's (2007) Big Five Inventory10, i.e. a 10-item version of the Big Five Inventory questionnaire developed by John and Srivastava (1999), and translated to Czech by Hrebickova et al. (2016). The instruction was to rate "How well do the following statements describe your personality" with statements "I see myself as someone who..." 1. ... is reserved, 2. ... is generally trusting, 3. ... tends to be lazy, 4. ... is relaxed, handles stress well, 5. ... has few artistic interests,
10. ... has an active imagination on a 1-5 Likert scale where 1 meant strongly disagrees and 5 stood for strongly agree. Extra-version was calculated as an average of the 1st (reversed-scored) and the 6th answer, agreea-bleness as an average of the 2nd and the 7th (reversed-scored) answer, conscientiousness as an average of the 3rd (reversed-scored) and the 8th answer, neuroticism as an average of the 4th (reversed-scored) and the 9th answer, and openness to experience as an average of the 5th (reversed-scored) and the 10th answer.
The dependent variable was measured using the question "Do you use aggregators of offers of deal sites (e.g. skrz.cz)? Respondents were to choose one of the following answers: • • •
The coding was done this way with an aim to order the three possible answers from answers preferring individual deal sites to answers preferring aggregators. The questionnaire contained additional questions which were not used in the analysis presented in this paper.
Ordinal logisitic regression was used to analyze impact of gender and five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience) on preference of aggregators over individual deal sites. A multivariate approach was used. SPSS software was used for the analysis. 3
The research question is if/what five personality traits influence lead respondents to prefer of aggregators over individual deal sites. Ordinal logistic regression results for the full model are provided in Table 1. The model per se is significant, p-value = .012, Cox and Snell pseudo R2 is .116, Nagelkerke pseudo R2 is .141, and McFadden pseudo R2 is .072.
Conscientiousness is significant at .05 level, and agreeableness and openness to
experience are significant at .1 level.
The model per se is significant, p-value = .012, Cox and Snell pseudo R2 is .104,
Nagelkerke pseudo R2 is .126, and McFadden pseudo R2 is .064. According to
Based on the results, it is possible to theoretize that high conscientiousness leads to higher preference of aggregators because a person can be more sure that he or she is getting the best available deal, since he or she was able to "check" multiple deal sites at the same time this way. E.g. according to Sudzina (2016a, 2016b), agreeableness correlates with trust; so people higher in agreeableness more likely trust any offer shown by an aggregator, so they not feel a need to stick to one or a small number of trusted deal sites. People higher in openness to experience may prefer aggregators because they are able to see more offers at once, thus making it easier to find something new quickly, rather than spend time visiting individual deal sites. 4
Although there is an increasing body of knowledge about deal sites, there are virtually no studies on aggregators. The aim of the paper was to investigate influence of Big Five Inventory personality traits on preference of aggregators over individual deal sites. With regards, to the results, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience impact the preference – higher the values, more likely it is that a person prefers aggregators. Surprisingly, gender was not found to be significant.
This paper identified some factors that make us of aggregators more acceptable. These are most likely not all the factors, some other probably exist and should be a subject of further research, but conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience are important factors.
In future research, it could be investigated which aggregator(s) are used by individual
respondents, and sentiment for a particular aggregator could be also taken into consideration.
Hrebickova, M., Jelinek, M., Blatny, M., Brom, C., Buresova, I., Graf, S., Mejzlikova, T., Vazsonyi, A. T., & Zabrodska, K. (2016). Big Five Inventory: Základní psychometrické charakteristiky české verze BFI-44 a BFI-10. Ceskoslovenska Psychologie, 60(6), 567583.
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. Pervin, L. A., & John, O. P. (Eds.) Handbook of personality: Theory and research, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Guilford Press, 102-138.
Johnson, M. W. (2010). Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and
Renewal. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Kotler, P., Armstrong, G., Harris, L. C., & Piercy, N. (2017). Principles of Marketing, 7th
European ed. New Jersey, NJ: Pearson Publishing.
Linder, J., & Cantrell, S. (2000). Changing Business Models: Surfing the Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Accenture Institute for Strategic Change.
Ministr, J., & Racek, J. (2011). Analysis of sentiment in unstructured text. In IDIMT-2011
Interdisciplinary in Complex Systems. Jindřichův Hradec, 2011, 299-303.
Pavlicek, A., & Sudzina, F. (2017). Coupons from deal sites as gifts: Impact of gender, of age, and of personality traits. In 30th Bled eConference: Digital Transformation – From Connecting Things to Transforming Our Lives. Bled: University of Maribor, 461-470. Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10item short version of the big five inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(1), 203-212.
Rappa, M. (2001), Managing the Digital Enterprise – Business Models on the Web, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, accessed on 2 April 2017, available at: http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html Sudzina, F. (2016a). Do gender and personality traits (BFI-10) influence trust? In Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference of Business Economics Management and Marketing (ISCOBEMM) 2016. Brno: Masaryk University, 31-37.
Sudzina, F. (2016b). Do gender and personality traits (BFI-10) influence trust? A replication.
Central European Journal of Management, 3(1), 47-53.
Sudzina, F. (2016c). Impact of Theory of Consumption Values Motives on Intention to Use Deal Sites. In IT for Practice 2016. Ostrava: VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava, 357363.
Sudzina, F., & Pavlicek, A. (2017a). Customer satisfaction with goods and services purchased on deal sites: Impact of trust, of personality traits, and of age. In Challenges and Opportunities of Quality and Sustainability in the 4th Industrial Revolution: 20th QMOD-ICQSS Conference: International Conference on Quality and Service Sciences.
Helsingør: Lund University Library Press.
Sudzina, F., & Pavlicek, A. (2017b). Do gender and personality traits influence use of deal sites? A replication. In The 12th International Conference on Strategic Management and its Support by Information Systems. Ostrava: VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava, 112-119.
Sudzina, F., & Pavlicek, A. (2017c). Do gender and personality traits influence visits of and purchases at deal sites? In IDIMT-2017, Digitalization in Management, Society and Economy. Poděbrady: Trauner Verlag, 189-194.
Suchacek, J., Seda, P., Friedrich, V., & Koutsky, J. (2017). Regional aspects of the development of largest enterprises in the Czech Republic. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 23(4), 649-665.
Taran, Y., Nielsen, C., Montemari, M., Thomsen, P.P., & Paolone, F. (2016). Business model configurations: A five V framework to map out potential innovation routes. European Journal of Innovation Management, 19(4), 492-527.
Timmers, P. (1998). Business models for electronic markets. Electronic Markets, 8(2), pp. 38.