Scheidegger, GianlucaGianlucaScheidegger2023-04-132023-04-132021-05https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/110451Money 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.enconference paper