User acceptance of new services and devices in the ICT industry : an extended perspective of perceived value

Abstract

ICT markets around the world have become more competitive and continue to grow. The mobile sector in particular is expected to continuously grow due to increasing mobile broadband demand, advent of new mobile devices, such as smartphones and media tablets, as well as expansion of mobile services. The rising adoption of smartphones contributes to the popularity of mobile social networking services (SNS) including location-based SNS that integrates location-based information and social networking. Media tablets are regarded worldwide as one of the most innovative and popular mobile computing devices. Thus, location-based SNS and media tablets are emerging in the ICT industry and are expected to further its growth. However, there are few prior studies about users’ adoption of these services and devices. Especially, recent studies related to the adoption of innovative mobile devices or mobile services applied extended TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) or IDT (Innovation Diffusion Theory) theories even though they lack explanation of various factors that affect adoption decisions, such as economic, emotional and social factors. Perceived value, overall assessment of the utility, is important when trying to understand user or customer behavior such as technology adoption or shopping behavior, in the marketing and IS fields. Thus, this study aims to investigate user acceptance of location-based social networking services and media tablets by an extended perspective of perceived value through an empirical analysis. This dissertation is composed of two essays that seek to conceptualize perceived value and empirically analyze the relationship with other constructs using structural equation modeling. The first essay develops a research model examining a user’s perceived value of a location-based social networking service (LB-SNS) through hedonic, utilitarian, and social values from a multi-dimensional construct perspective. This study investigates the impact of each ty...