On market mavens and consumer self-confidence: A cross-cultural study

Market mavens are attentive to media and important diffusers of marketplace information. This study examines the relationships between cultural individualism, general and consumer self-confidence, and market mavenism in the context of two distinct cultural systems, the United States and South Korea. The examination of cross-cultural equivalence of the constructs under study provides evidence for both configural and full or partial metric invariance. The results indicate that cultural individualism is positively related to general self-confidence, general self-confidence is positively related to consumer selfconfidence, and consumer self-confidence is positively related to market mavenism. Additionally, this research shows that these relationships hold in both the U.S. and South Korean samples. The results of this study indicate that market mavenism, and thus levels of confidence about marketplace knowledge and speed of diffusion of such information may be more prevalent among the more individualistic than collectivistic consumers. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.