Factors affecting the perceived risk of Kerman handmade carpet customers and its role on their attitude and intention to buy

Handmade carpet as an art-industry is one of the most widely used handicrafts in Iran. Despite its historical background and antiquity, handmade carpets need extensive research in terms of thematic and content knowledge, especially with a scientific perspective. Paying special attention to the perceptual and attitudinal factors of handmade carpet customers can be a great help in the production and marketing of this original art. Therefore, the purpose of study is to investigate and analyze the role of the three factors of trust, price awareness and homogeneity intention on the perceived risk in buying Kerman handmade carpets and the effect of this risk on the attitude and intention to buy. The statistical population of the study was all customers of Kerman handmade carpets that 100 of them were selected as the sample by in-access sampling method. The research data has been collected using library and internet resources in the theoretical section and standard questionnaires in the survey section. Reliability and validity of the questionnaires are confirmed based on Cronbach's alpha, Combined Reliability (CR) and AVE. To analyze the data in the descriptive part, SPSS software and in the inferential part to test the model and hypotheses by structural equation modeling (SEM) with a partial least squares approach, Smart PLS2 software has been used. The research findings showed that based on the fitting indices, the research model has a suitable and relatively good fitness. The results also showed that perceived risk affects the customers' attitude and intention to buy at 0.36 and 0.27, respectively. Also, the customers' attitude is 0.43 effective on the intention to buy. Based on the results, among the three factors affecting the reduction of customers' perceived risk, trust had the greatest decreasing effect at 0.49 and then price awareness (0.27), and the decreasing effect of the homogeneity intention on perceived risk was not significant.