The Influence of the Product Attributes on the Consumer's Risk Perception (A Case Study on Student's Perception of Mobile Phone Radiation in the use of Mobile Phone at the Economics Faculty-Islamic University of Indonesia)

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing awareness among the product users toward the product safety. Finding out the users' behavior toward the product safety is becomes the important factor in order to survive in today's market competition. One way to analyze the user's behavior is by investigating the relationship between product's attributes and users' perception on productsafety. The research which investigate the relationships of the product attributes to the perception on product safety done by Tse (1999) and Siu (2000). Their research conclude that the product attributes are having strong relationship to the perception on the product safety. This research tries to find out the relationships between the mobile phone product attributes to the users' perception toward mobile phone radiation safety. The product attributes in this research are: price of the mobile phone, brand name of the mobile phone, specialty and reputable store which sell mobile phone, product test, length of the mobile phone warranty and position of the mobile phone antenna. The first objective of this research is to find out the relationships and the relationship's power between overall mobile phone's products attributes to the user's perception on mobile phone radiation safety. The second objective is to find out the dominant product attribute that influences the user's perception on mobile phone radiation safety. Those objectives analyzed by using Multiple Linier Regression, Multiple Correlation Analysis, Multiple Coefficient of Determination, F-test and t-test. Meanwhile, this research is done in Faculty of Economics of Islamic University of Indonesia. The result indicates that Financial and Functional Risks are the risks that the users most avoided. Thus, according to the computation it is showed that there is a weak relationship between the overall product's attributes to the user's perception on mobile phone radiation safety (instead of brand name variable) and the coefficient and equation is considered significant. The dominant product attribute that influences the user's perception on mobile phone radiation safety is product test and the t-value of the product test is considered significant. The research implications are the mobile phone vendors must develop their product that would not give financial and functional loses for their consumers, maintain their relationship to the more specialty and reputable media which usually done product test and develop their good image. The specialty and reputable mobile phone store must maintain and develop their image by giving excellent services and provide qualified products.