Arun Vishwanath

An Examination of the Factors Contributing to Adoption Decisions among Late-Diffused Technology Products

According to diffusion theory, consumer beliefs or perceptions of innovation attributes, along with external socioeconomic and media exposures, influence the decision to adopt an innovation. To examine the relative influence of beliefs, attitudes, and external variables, the current study synthesizes perspectives from the Technology Adoption Model (TAM) and diffusion theory, and presents an integrated model of consumer adoption. The article reports the results of a survey investigating the measurement model in predicting potential adoption by late adopters of cellular phones. The model confirms the importance of attitudes towards potential adoption. Also significant are the influence of media ownership on perceptions of advantage, observability, and compatibility of the innovation. Media use and change agent contacts significantly influence perceptions of complexity of the innovation. Age, income and occupation were the sociodemographic variables that indirectly influenced adoption intention.

Barriers to the adoption of electronic health records: using concept mapping to develop a comprehensive empirical model

The study attempts to unify prior research and develop a comprehensive, empirically based conceptual model of the barriers to EHR adoption among community physicians. The model uses concept mapping, which taps the shared expertise of a group and provides reliable estimates with relatively small sample sizes. The methodology includes brainstorming of barrier statements and sorting and rating of issue statements. The model illuminates the larger structure of barriers as well as the finer details of constituent issues. Core issues are standardization and interoperability; also important are technical issues and the cost—benefit of adopting EHRs. However, psychosocial issues, the main focus of diffusion research, seem relatively peripheral. We believe the development of this model is an important first step in creating effective and measurable interventions that enhance the adoption of EHRs in healthcare.

Comparing Online Information Effects A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Online Information and Uncertainty Avoidance

Despite the global reach of the Internet, extant cross-cultural research is limited to examining the uses and users of the medium rather than the effects of information presented within it.T he current exploratory study investigates the effects of differing information on participants within a standardizedWeb site across three cultures: Germany, Japan, and the United States.T he findings reveal a significant interaction between culture, information, and uncertainty avoidance.Online interactants in high uncertainty-avoidance cultures such as Japan seem to exhibit drastic behavioral changes when faced with limited information within an ambiguous decision context as compared to similar participants in Germany and the United States.T he overall findings are consistent with Hofstede’s (1984, 1991, 2001) perspective on culture and uncertainty avoidance.

Impact of personality on technology adoption: An empirical model

An innovators personality along with the perceived attributes of an innovation predicts the rate of diffusion. The current study focuses on the personality factors that determine the likelihood of adoption of a technological innovation. To that end, the study distinguishes between global innovativeness and context-specific innovativeness. An information processing model was tested where technological innovativeness was purported to be indirectly influenced by an individuals global innovativeness, through its impact on communication and media use behaviors. The structural model was tested on two separate technology clusters, and partial support was found for linking sophistication in information search, and prior technology ownership to technological innovativeness.

Technology Clusters: Using Multidimensional Scaling to Evaluate and Structure Technology Clusters

Empirical evidence suggests that the ownership of related products that form a technology cluster is significantly better than the attributes of an innovation at predicting adoption. The treatment of technology clusters, however, has been ad hoc and study specific: Researchers often make a priori assumptions about the relationships between technologies and measure ownership using lists of functionally related technology, without any systematic reasoning. Hence, the authors set out to examine empirically the composition of technology clusters and the differences, if any, in clusters of technologies formed by adopters and nonadopters. Using the Galileo system of multidimensional scaling and the associational diffusion framework, the dissimilarities between 30 technology concepts were scored by adopters and nonadopters. Results indicate clear differences in conceptualization of clusters: Adopters tend to relate technologies based on their functional similarity; here, innovations are perceived to be complementary, and hence, adoption of one technology spurs the adoption of related technologies. On the other hand, nonadopters tend to relate technologies using a stricter ascendancy of association where the adoption of an innovation makes subsequent innovations redundant. The results question the measurement approaches and present an alternative methodology.

Habitual Facebook Use and its Impact on Getting Deceived on Social Media

There are a billion Facebook users worldwide with some individuals spending 8 hours each day on the platform. Limited research has, however, explored the consequences of such overuse. Even less research has examined the misuse of social media by criminals who are increasingly using social media to defraud individuals through phishing-type attacks. The current study focuses on Facebook habits and its determinants and the extent to which they ultimately influence individual susceptibility to social media phishing attacks. The results suggest that habitual Facebook use, founded on the individual frequently using Facebook, maintaining a large social network, and being deficient in their ability to regulate such behaviors, is the single biggest predictor of individual victimization in social media attacks.

Manifestations of interpersonal trust in online interaction A cross-cultural study comparing the differential utilization of seller ratings by eBay participants in Canada, France, and Germany

As the internet continues to expand globally, the understanding of the micro-level connections between culture and online interaction is vital from a scientific perspective. This article explores the effects of societal values of interpersonal trust on online interactions. Using data from the World Values Survey and Inglehart’s (1997) scores on interpersonal trust, the study compares the effect of seller feedback ratings on online auction participation in three economically similar but culturally distinct countries, Canada, France, and Germany. The results indicate a significant interaction between culture, interpersonal trust levels, and seller ratings on bidder participants. Cultures that exhibit high levels of interpersonal trust tend to participate in online auctions irrespective of the sellers’ feedback ratings. However, in low trust cultures, seller ratings have a significant effect on bidders. The extent of the effect seems to depend on the degree of trust and the variation in seller ratings.

Retweeting the Fukushima nuclear radiation disaster

The Japanese government tweeted to calm public fear, as the public generally listened to tweets expressing alarm.

Physician Adoption of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA): Testing Its Determinants Within a Structural Equation Model

Research has begun to explore the determinants of personal digital assistant (PDA) adoption in health care. Much of this research has, however, been inconsistent in its treatment of key constructs and its methodological approaches. The current study takes a stricter approach and tracks the pre- and postadoption beliefs of physicians provided with an actual PDA within a single health care facility in the United States. Results show that age, position in hospital, beliefs about health IT, and cluster ownership are significant, direct predictors of the physicians preadoption beliefs about PDAs. Contrary to prior research findings, both ease of use and usefulness perceptions significantly influenced the physicians intent to adopt PDAs. More important, results show that physicians focus on a broader range of PDA factors during preadoption assessment of the technology, while actual use is based solely on the PDAs ease of use. Moreover, the preadoption usefulness perceptions do not influence postadoption usefulness. Hence, the cognitive and affective determinants of intent to use are seemingly different from those used to evaluate PDA use.

Diffusion of deception in social media: Social contagion effects and its antecedents

What makes deceptive attacks on social media particularly virulent is the likelihood of a contagion effect, where a perpetrator takes advantage of the connections among people to deceive them. To examine this, the current study experimentally stimulates a phishing type attack, termed as farcing, on Facebook users. Farcing attacks occur in two stages: a first stage where phishers use a phony profile to friend victims, and a second stage, where phishers solicit personal information directly from victims. In the present study, close to one in five respondents fell victim to the first stage attack and one in ten fell victim to the second stage attack. Individuals fell victim to a level 1 attack because they relied primarily on the number of friends or the picture of the requester as a heuristic cue and made snap judgments. Victims also demonstrated a herd mentality, gravitating to a phisher whose page showed more connections. Such profiles caused an upward information cascade, where each victim attracted many more victims through a social contagion effect. Individuals receiving a level 2 information request on Facebook peripherally focused on the source of the request by using the sender’s picture in the message as a credibility cue.