“35 Candy for a T-Shirt?”: How a 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 (i.e., company-issued currencies for purchases within the company’s ecosystem). Billions of US dollars are exchanged using such virtual currencies every year. Still, most pricing-related 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 decrease of processing fluency and the increase of pain of payment. Managerial as well as theoretical implications are discussed.