Stimulus Valence Heterogeneity in urban online travel booking: deterrent, catalytic, and structural risk stimuli in Indian cities

Urban tourism in Indian cities is increasingly mediated by online travel agency (OTA) platforms, yet how perceived risk drives, redirects, or dampens engagement remains undertheorised. Most accounts treat perceived risk as a single deterrent construct, obscuring divergent motivational effects in markets shaped by infrastructure density, multi-OTA competition, and the Tier-I/Tier-II digital divide. This study proposes the Stimulus Valence Heterogeneity (SVH) framework, extending the Stimulus–Organism–Response paradigm to distinguish deterrent, catalytic, and structural risk stimuli within a single domain. Using survey data from 496 urban OTA consumers across Indian Tier-I and Tier-II cities, three propositions are tested through sequential PLS-SEM, artificial neural network, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The three stimulus types produce distinguishable signatures: security risk shows a weak but directionally consistent direct deterrent effect alongside a clearer suppression of social processing, apprehension activates both organism states without a direct effect, and barriers exert positive direct and organism-routed effects. Multi-group analysis shows cognitive-organism primacy stronger in Tier-I markets and social-organism influence stronger in Tier-II, indicating that urban digital maturity moderates organism-layer composition. fsQCA recovers five consumer archetypes. The study contributes a within-domain risk taxonomy and segment-differentiated guidance for city destination managers.