Consumer Decision-Making in Digital Commerce: Effects of Virtual Influencer Motive Attributions on Trust, Perceived Risk, and Purchase Intention

In AI-enabled digital commerce, consumers evaluate virtual influencers (VIs) not only through source characteristics but also by inferring why they create content and recommend products. This study examines how perceived intrinsic and commercially oriented extrinsic motives are associated with trust, perceived risk, and purchase intention. Survey data from 295 South Korean consumers aged 20–39 were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 for descriptive and reliability analyses and IBM SPSS Amos 24.0 for confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Perceived intrinsic motivation was positively associated with trust but was not significantly associated with perceived risk or directly with purchase intention. Perceived extrinsic motivation was negatively associated with trust and purchase intention and positively associated with perceived risk. Trust was positively associated with purchase intention, whereas the conditional association of perceived risk was nonsignificant. Supplementary bootstrap analyses supported specific indirect associations through trust for both motive attributions, consistent with full (indirect-only) mediation for intrinsic motivation and partial mediation for extrinsic motivation within the specified model. Neither specific indirect association through perceived risk was significant. These findings distinguish consumers’ confidence in a recommending persona from their uncertainty about a recommended purchase and identify trust as a central statistical mediator of motive attribution and purchase intention in VI marketing.