Mobile payment is an emerging and important application of mobile commerce. The adoption and use of mobile payment services are critical for both service providers and investors to profit from such an innovation. The present study attempts to identify the determinants of pre-adoption of mobile payment services and explore the temporal evolution of these determinants across the pre-adoption and post-adoption stages from a holistic perspective including behavioral beliefs, social influences, and personal traits. A research model that reflects the characteristics and usage contexts of mobile payment services is developed and empirically tested by using structural equation modeling on datasets consisting of 483 potential adopters and 156 current users of a mobile payment service in China. Our findings show that behavioral beliefs in combination with social influences and personal traits are all important determinants for mobile payment services adoption and use, but their impacts on behavioral intention do vary across in different stages. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are presented.
Mobile payment is one of the most critical drivers for successful mobile commerce. Mobile payment refers to a payments for goods, services, and bills using a mobile device using wireless and other communication technologies (Dahlberg, Mallat, Ondrus, & Zmijewska, 2008). Given the widespread use of mobile devices and users’ needs for convenient and timely payment, mobile payment is expected to become an important channel for conducting financial transactions. Once realized it could become an additional revenue stream to service providers and investors. Already, a large number of commercial organizations have invested substantially in mobile payment services to reap its prominent profits. For instance, Nokia invested $70 million in Obopay to enter mobile payment market in April 2009, China mobile bought 20% of PuDong bank stake (about $5.9 billion) to develop mobile payment services in May 2010, and Google ventures invested $100 million into mobile payment business in May 2010. Nonetheless, the expected business value that could be derived from mobile payment services relies on its acceptance by the consumers as their favorite payment channel.
In the contemporary information systems literature, research on mobile payment services acceptance focuses mainly on notions of instrumentality, e.g. perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use (Chen, 2008 and Dahlberg et al., 2008). On the other hand, literature from behavioral sciences and individual psychology suggests that social influences and personal traits (e.g., subjective norms, social image and individual innovativeness) are potentially important explanatory variables in technology adoption as well (Agarwal and Karahanna, 2000, Agarwal and Prasad, 1998, Venkatesh et al., 2003 and Wu and Lederer, 2009). It is useful to have a holistic view on identifying the critical determinants of mobile payment services adoption incorporating behavioral beliefs, social influences and personal traits.
In addition, most of the extant studies on user beliefs and attitudes toward mobile payment services were conducted after the system was adopted (e.g., Chen, 2008 and Schierz et al., 2009). The results of these studies on beliefs and external stimuli that users hold for continued use of mobile payment services may not be the same as for initial adoption, or the degree of influence may differ (Karahanna, Straub, & Chervany, 1999). Identification of individuals’ pre-adoption beliefs and attitudes on mobile payment services and an understanding of the temporal evolution of these factors across the pre-adoption and post-adoption stages is, therefore, crucial for understanding and managing the individuals’ initial adoption and subsequent use of mobile payment services.
In view of the current state of the existing research on mobile payment, the objective of this study is to empirically test a theoretically grounded model on mobile payment services adoption that incorporates behavioral beliefs, social influences, and personal traits. In order to capture the temporal evolution of behavioral beliefs, social influences, personal traits, and behavior across different stages of the innovation decision process, we examine these determinants on the pre-adoption stage of mobile payment services and empirically compare the impacts of these factors between the pre-adoption and post-adoption phases. Specifically, the study investigates (1) to what extent individual perceptions of mobile payment is attributed to social influences and personal traits; (2) whether behavioral beliefs such as positive utility and negative utility explain mobile payment adoption; (3) how does the influence of the components of behavioral intention (i.e., behavioral beliefs, social influences, and personal traits) on intention to use mobile payment services change over from the pre-adoption stage to post-adoption stage. In this way, this research attempts to contribute to a better theoretical understanding of the antecedents of pre-adoption of mobile payment services and the differential impact of these factors across pre-adoption and post-adoption stages. Also, this study offers organizations practical insights for managing users’ acceptance during each phase of the adoption process.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. An overview of information systems and technology adoption research is presented in Section 2. In Section 3, we propose the conceptual model and the research hypotheses. Next, we describe the research methodology in Section 4, followed by the analysis of empirical findings in Section 5. Then, we present an extended discussion of the results in Section 6. In Section 7, we conclude with a discussion on the theoretical and practical implications. Finally, limitations and future research are presented in Section 8.
