Moderating Effects of Personal Innovativeness on the Relationship between Perceived Usefulness, Subjective Norm and Intention to Use Mobile Internet

Abstract

Recently, utilization of mobile Internet services is rapidly increasing. To properly accelerate the vitalization of mobile Internet usage, we have to know exactly about the factors affecting potential users' value recognition and intention to use. Technology acceptance model (TAM) is one of the most powerful reference framework for the individual user's adoption of IT innovations. This research borrowed core concept of TAM, and tried to explain users' intention to use mobile Internet by understanding the direct and indirect effects of subjective norm and perceived usefulness. To increase the explanatory power of the model, this paper introduced personal innovativeness as a key moderator variable. The research findings include; i) subjective norm has strong positive influence on perceived usefulness and intention to use, ii) perceived usefulness has positive influence on intention to use, iii) the influence of subject norm is greater than that of perceived usefulness, iv) positive influence of subjective norm on the perceived usefulness and intention to use are significantly stronger in the case of low personal innovativeness sub-group than the case of high personal innovativeness sub-group, and v) high personal innovativeness sub-group have shown strongly positive influence of perceived usefulness on the intention to use while there is no such significant relationship in the case of low personal innovativeness sub-group. Based on these findings, this paper proposed several guidelines to increase the adoption and the usage of mobile Internet; i) word-of-mouth is extremely important, ii) to form a good word-of-mouth, it will be very important to make early adopters and heavy users have positive direct experiences of using mobile Internet.