Investigating the factors that affect consumer behavior in social capital management and facilitates the implementation of water local markets

Introduction: The world today faces accelerating changes in customer needs and a steady reduction in environmental resources. In such a situation, checking consumer behavior is essential. Consumer behavior refers to all the thoughts, feelings, and actions that an individual has or takes before or while buying any product, service, or idea. Considering that one of the declining resources in the world today is water resources, this study examines consumer behavior in local water markets as a case study. The studied area is the Zayandehrood basin of Iran, which, in recent years, has faced major problems in water resources decline. This has caused many social crises, especially in the agriculture section with the highest consumption. The focus of local water markets has recently been on this national issue, but its full implementation requires structural, legal, economic, and social reforms. Factors such as farmers' fear of unemployment, fear of decrease in agricultural land prices, and fear of migrations from the village have pushed farmers to resist the implementation of such markets. In recent years, the experience of water problems has brought the corresponding organizations to the conclusion that, merely with concentration on economic, technical, and engineering issues, water crises cannot be solved and the need for attention to social dimensions and consumer behavior management is essential. Therefore, in this research, the prerequisits are already provided for the formation of water markets not from the technical and economic vision, but from the social dimension. This is the distinction of this research from other research works.
Methodology: This study is developmental in terms of purpose. It is conducted through  the grounded theory and Gtopsis. The case study in this paper is the water market, and the statistical population includes three groups of experts (academics, farmers, and water industry experts). The sampling is by snowball method. The data collection tool is interviews. By the use of the qualitative approach of grounded theory, the factors affecting consumer behavior are identified with the aim of designing a social capital management model. An appropriate model is designed, and then the identified factors are ranked with the group Topsis approach.
Results and Discussion: In order to meet the aim of the study, which is to design a social capital management model to facilitate the implementation of the water market, it was decided to use grounded theory. For this purpose, first, it was necessary to identify the variables affecting the model. The variables were the factors affecting the behavior of consumers (farmers) and encouraging participation in the water market. The data analysis was carried out using the grounded theory in three stages of open, axial and selective coding. One of the most important results of this research is the ranking of factors affecting consumer behavior and planning based on them to attract popular participation in the implementation of the water market. After designing the model, in order to make the best use of the results and answer the second part of the main research question, the researcher proceeded to rank the identified factors with the group TOPSIS approach. The factors that encourage social participation in the formation of the water market include factors related to the regulatory body and the government, cultural-situational and lifestyle factors, factors related to publicity and awareness, demographic factors, factors related to the household economy, environmental factors, product-related factors, sales factors, factors related to production inputs, and factors related to the intention to buy.
Conclusion: The results of this research can be used to identify the factors affecting the implementation of a water market in the social dimension. The study suggests certain  ways of encouraging farmers to participate in water market implementation and, ultimately, attracting more farmers, improving the market conditions, increasing customer satisfaction, improving the community's welfare and saving more water resources. The results of the research show that, of the variables affecting social capital management, the factors related to the supervisory institution and government and situational-cultural and lifestyle along with the factors related to publicity and public awareness are the most important in the implementing and development of water markets. The suggestions that can be made for future research include integrating the proposed model with other patterns, using suitable software for qualitative data, applying the method in different local markets, and comparing the results. Overall, it seems that the proposed model helps to achieve public welfare, save water resources, predict consumer behavior in the formation of the water market, and solve social problems associated with its implementation.