FOMO and Online Purchasing Behaviour of Students Using Random Forest

Author

Dr. C. VENISH RAJA, J.JASIKA, A.G. CATHERINE SUJATHA

Abstract

 Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is a psychological factor that can influence how students respond to trending products, peer purchases, influencer recommendations, discounts, and limited-time offers on social media and e-commerce platforms. This study examines the impact of FOMO on students' online purchasing behaviour and identifies the factors that contribute to FOMO-driven purchasing decisions, including social media usage, peer influence, influencer marketing, product trends, discounts, and limited-time offers. Primary data are to be collected from college students through a structured questionnaire. The responses are cleaned, encoded, and converted into features, and a Random Forest classifier is proposed to classify purchasing behaviour. The model is to be evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and a confusion matrix, and feature-importance analysis is used to identify the most useful predictors. As the work presents a proposed methodology, no experimental results are reported, and final conclusions must be based on the collected data. The study is intended to improve understanding of FOMO-driven online purchasing among students and to provide a basis for future research on psychological and social influences in e-commerce.

Keywords

FOMO; online purchasing behaviour; impulse buying; Random Forest; social media; college students.

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References

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