An information service is one in which information is the primary value exchanged between two parties. The research object of the current study is information service provided online (termed as online information service, OIS) which is also the core service product in the service offerings of Internet content providers (ICPs). The OIS industry is the highest growth area in the current service revolution (Santos 2003). However, the many efforts so far in the industry for developing innovative OISs have largely failed to attract audiences and frustrated the attempts to generate revenue from subscriptions and advertising (Alves 2001; Sullivan 2006). Researchers face great challenge in applying conventional wisdom from information system (IS) research to analyse OISs. Bobbitt and Dabholkar (2001) and Santos (2003) argued that there is no comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding or predicting consumers' online adoption behaviour. Research to gain greater understanding of factors that contribute to online adoption behaviour is therefore of high priority. / The aim of the study is to identify the key factors contributing to the adoption of OISs, enhance the understanding of the adoption process of online innovation, and thereby confirm, or add to the general understanding of the innovation adoption process. For comprehensively exploring the factors, in addition to an extensive review of literature, a series of in-depth interviews with industry experts were conducted to potentially gather new and important insights not yet appearing in the literature. For facilitating the current research in a real business context and among typical OIS users, a new commercial OIS and a Web-based survey system co-designed by the researcher were launched by industry partners during study, and the survey respondents were then invited to answer questions online after sampling the new OIS. The current study uses multivariate analysis and also structural equation modeling (SEM) as the statistical analysis technique. / A conceptual model mainly developed from Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) for understanding the adoption of OIS is proposed and tested in the real business context. The extended model employed additional constructs drawn from Uses and Gratification Theory, among others, and demonstrated improved prediction capacity (55%). The inter-relations between constructs were also investigated. This study successfully identifies online users' key preference that influences the OIS adoption, and provides new and empirically-based insights into several important debates in the academic and industry literature. The conclusions and implications include that OIS adoption may not be enhanced by online interactivities among users (or termed as C2C online interactivities, such as on-site Blogs) and services that add values to the core service (or termed as “supplementary services”). These are contrary to what many experts expected. Also, the popular assumption of behaviour intention (BI) having a direct positive effect on actual adoption behaviour (B) is not supported by the data of the current research. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2007.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267114 |
| Creators | Chen, Yen-Hao Howard. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | Some text in Chinese. |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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