Users' Adoption of Mobile Services: Preference and Location Personalization

Abstract

The topic of mobile services has piqued the interest of practitioners. Mobile service providers invest many resources to provide mobile services of higher quality in the hope of gaining more business opportunities and higher customer satisfaction. They often increase the service quality through the use of personalization, i.e., generating customized mobile content for each individual. Despite the proliferation of mobile personalization worldwide, prior studies are not definitive regarding whether and if users have a positive perception of personalized mobile services. If this question is left unanswered, mobile service providers do not know whether their investment can be justified. This paper examines how two types of personalization, preference personalization and location personalization, affect users' trust and distrust in the services and how trust and distrust affects users' adoption intention. Trust and distrust are not opposite ends of a single continuum. They are two constructs. While much information systems research examines the role of trust in technology use, distrust has been under investigated. Distrust manifests as users' suspicions of the competence and intent of a technology. In this study, we conducted a four-week experiment with 165 participants. The participants received personalized mobile content for restaurant recommendations. After four weeks, they reported their trust beliefs and distrust beliefs about personalized mobile services. We found that both types of personalization increase users' trust, but at the same time, they increase users' distrust. Trust has a positive effect on users' intention to adopt mobile services, whereas distrust has a negative effect on it. This paper also discusses the research and practical implications of the findings and describes opportunities for future research. Show more