The impact of expectation discrepancy on food consumers’ quality perception and purchase intentions: Exploring mediating and moderating influences in China

The discrepancy between expected and actual food product features can be an important indicator of food quality and thus may inform consumer decisions. Using mixed method design, this paper explores whether and how expectation discrepancy affects food consumers' quality perception and purchase intentions under food safety risk situation. In the first phase, a qualitative study based on in-depth semi structured interviews (N = 15) was conducted. The interview results revealed that consumers in general responded negatively towards the existence of expectation discrepancies as it led to poor perceived food quality. It was further revealed that the discrepancy in expectation dimensions had a stronger effect on consumers’ perceptions as compared to the discrepancy in expectation extent. In the second phase extensive online survey (N = 2172), it was confirmed that expectation discrepancy had significantly affected quality perceptions and purchase intentions. Moreover, perceived quality played a mediating role between expectation discrepancy and purchase intentions. In addition, expectation proportion (measured with the importance of specific food feature) was shown to strengthen (moderate) the impact of expectation discrepancy. Furthermore, the effects of expectation discrepancy were stronger for high-risk food (versus low risk food). The current paper shows that the effects of expectation discrepancy play a highly significant role in forming perceptions about food safety, therefore, precise marketing strategies can be made by clustering consumers according to the expectation proportions.