Perceived personalization, digital FOMO, and repeat purchase intention: The boundary role of algorithmic awareness in social commerce

Personalized recommendation systems and persuasive interface cues are prominent features of social-commerce platforms, but users do not respond to them uniformly. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) framework and an interaction-oriented view of human–AI responses, this cross-sectional study examines associations among perceived personalization, perceived digital nudging cues, perceived algorithmic transparency, situational digital Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), algorithmic trust, perceived personalization accuracy, social-commerce engagement, and repeat purchase intention. Survey data from 452 users of TikTok Shop, Shopee, and Lazada in Vietnam were analyzed using PLS-SEM. Perceived personalization and nudging cues were positively associated with situational digital FOMO, while perceived personalization and perceived algorithmic transparency were positively associated with algorithmic trust and perceived personalization accuracy. FOMO, trust, and perceived accuracy were each positively associated with social-commerce engagement, and engagement was strongly associated with repeat purchase intention. Algorithmic awareness weakened the positive associations of perceived personalization with both FOMO and trust. The study therefore positions algorithmic awareness as a theoretically meaningful user-side boundary condition reflecting recognition and understanding of algorithmic personalization processes, while treating digital FOMO as a context-specific manifestation of FOMO rather than claiming a wholly new dispositional construct. Because the design is single-wave and self-reported, all paths are interpreted as associations and statistical indirect effects rather than causal mechanisms.