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From virtually nowhere 20 years ago to sales of US$9.5 billion in 2007, the video game industry has now overtaken movie industry box-office receipts in terms of annual sales, and blockbuster video games can out perform blockbuster movies for opening-week sales. This dramatic growth is likely to continue in coming years. Yet there has been little scholarly attention to consumers within the industry. This research fills this gap by providing a comprehensive study of consumer behaviour in the gaming industry, using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB); a widely used, robust and reliable consumer research instrument. The study elicits key salient attributes for the major constructs in the TPB model -attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control -and shows how these key constructs affect purchase intention. To avoid aggregation error in analysing overall market data, this study segments the market and examines differences in perspective by gamer type. We therefore examine differences in these key salient attributes by gamer type to understand consumer motivations better. As the first systematic study to examine consumer behaviour issues in the gaming industry, this study provides useful insights to consumers' behaviour in a large, growing industry. Consumer perceptions and behaviour toward entertainment software is complex and this study is not the final word, but it is the first available empirical evidence and can thus move forward the discussion from speculation to replication, extension, and alternative approaches. For managers in this industry, this study demonstrates how a comprehensive model can be applied to entertainment software.

Despite past studies that explore the typical factors that influence Asian consumers' decision making processes little has been done to address the influence of information sources on their expectations of services. This study addresses this gap by exploring Asian consumer's information and knowledge sources (explicit service promises such as advertising, personal selling and implicit service promises such as tangibles and price) that influence their expectations prior to choice of overseas higher education. The study applies Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman's (1993) model that proposes that a customer's level of expectations is dependent on several antecedents. Results indicate the three most influential sources of information on Asian students expectations of universities are: past experiences, advertising and word of mouth. The findings suggest that the more explicit and implicit service promises the respondent is exposed to; the higher the desired and predicted expectations of the university's service quality. However their level of expectations (both desired and predicted) is considerably greater when exposed to explicit service promises. The findings also suggest that measuring the influence of these information sources provides insightful information for universities when developing marketing communication campaigns.

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