Study On Factors Affecting The Adoption Of Upgraded Information Technology From The Consumer Perspective

With the rapid development and popularization of mobile intelligent terminals, mobile Internet wave has come. But due to the limit of 2G/3G’s network capacity, many mobile application services can’t provide good user experience, such as mobile phone network game, video conference and mobile office and so on. Fortunately, the arrival of 4G will improve the experience of mobile application services, activate the innovations of mobile application services, and expand the boundary of mobile application services. Compared with the previous generations of communication technology, the biggest advantage of 4G is that the wireless network speed is greatly increased. If we compare 3G to the highway of mobile information,4G is the high-speed railway. The development and popularization of 4G is of great significance to promote the progress of China’s mobile Internet industry.However, in order to make the market accept a new upgrading technology fast and widely, we must firstly explore the key factors which affect the consumers’ adoption of new technology and understand their mechanism of action. Because of the differences of technical characteristics and adoption way between the traditional information system and 4G, the classical theories and existing researches’conclusions about technology adoption are not fully applicable to explain the problem of adopting 4G.Therefore, this paper tries to study the factors affecting the adoption of 4G and their mechanism of action from the perspective of consumer. Firstly, we review the classical theories of technology adoption, including theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior and technology acceptance model. And we summarize the researches about the factors affecting individuals’ adoption of mobile commerce. Then combined with the technical characteristics and adoption situation of 4G, we identify six critical factors from two angles of the positive utility and the negative utility of adopting 4G. These factors are perceived relative usefulness, perceived relative enjoyment, perceived energy cost, perceived expense cost, perceived risk and attitude. What’s more, this study explores the function mechanism of these factors, and lastly proposes the research model and hypotheses.After that, we use the structural equation model to empirically test the research model and hypotheses through the method of questionnaire survey. The results show that the perceived usefulness and the attitude respectively has a significant positive impact on the adoption intention; the perceived risk has a significant negative impact on the adoption intention; the perceived usefulness and the perceived enjoyment respectively has a significant positive impact on the attitude; the perceived energy cost and the perceived expense cost respectively has a significant negative impact on the attitude; the perceived energy cost and the perceived expense cost respectively has a significant positive impact on the perceived risk; but the negative impact of the perceived risk on the attitude is not statistically significant. Based on the research findings, this paper puts forward some corresponding management recommendations for mobile operators’ marketing practice so as to promote the development of 4G and the mobile Internet industry.