The impact of living environment on online movie consumption

Abstract: The focus of this master thesis is to demonstrate the influence of living environment on online movie consumption. A number of applicable studies on the cultural-artistic consumption and consumer behavior, involving the theories of taste formation, pre-purchase information, reference group, culture, and consumer behavior model were reviewed in the thesis. Many economists have confirmed that, in theory, an individual’s living environment occupies an important place in explaining his or her consumption of cultural goods to some extent. The question hereby arises: whether these environmental influences are still important for cultural goods with stable and constant supply, and how they affect the consumption and behavior in statistic. For this reason, a particular cultural good and target population were selected, namely online movies and Chinese students and scholars in the Netherlands. In this thesis, a quantitative survey was conducted. This survey employed a self-completion closed-ended questionnaire that was distributed among Chinese students and scholars in the Netherlands via the Internet. Through the empirical research, we can tell that watching online movie is a considerable common behavior among Chinese students and scholars in the Netherlands. Their consumption behavior can be influenced from the following factors: the length of residence in the Netherlands, the consumption behavior of both resident reference group and non-resident reference group, as well as past exposures in relation to arts and culture. Besides the examination of environmental influences on online movie consumption, we also realized that Chinese students and scholars’ tastes changed after they moved from China to the Netherlands. In addition, we found out that the cheapness and convenience of watching online movie occupied the most important place in the decision-making process of Chinese students and scholars in the Netherlands.