Content area
Full Text
An executive summary for managers and executive readers can be found at the end of this article.
Introduction
As accelerated technology innovations have led to shorter product lifecycles, new generations of products emerge from time to time. Every year, producers introduce new versions of mobile phones, digital cameras, and personal computers to the market. More frequently than in the past, users of an existing technology have to face the dilemma of choosing between keeping the existing product and upgrading to a new version. Adding to this pressure is the overwhelming complexity of many feature-packed new technology products. Consumers have increasingly experienced a certain level of technology fatigue ([20] Meuter et al. , 2003; [30] Thompson et al. , 2005; [31] Weil and Rosen, 1997). For some new technology products, consumer acceptance has not been as warm or quick as expected. They may delay the adoption, leapfrog the new product, or dis-adopt it after a trial. Despite promising forecast, an increasing number of consumer technology products such as wireless application protocol (WAP) services and third generation mobile (3G) phone experienced disappointingly slow adoption rates instead of a wholesale migration ([19] McCartney, 2002).
Existing research, however, has largely focused on the adoption and diffusion of completely new technologies. Little research has examined the psychological processes underlying consumers' decision about upgrading to new version of the same product, which is often a dynamically continuous innovation (DCI). Existing studies of consumers' adoption of innovations are based on the implicit assumption that technology innovations are always better and progressive and that consumers more or less view new technologies in a similar light. However, recent research suggests that consumers often consider innovations as paradoxes - a mix of positive benefits and potential negative effects on their lives, and they may enact certain coping strategies to deal with such stress and uncertainty ([21] Mick and Fournier, 1998). Coping strategies can help to explain consumer heterogeneity in their product beliefs and adoption behaviors regarding new technologies.
In this study, we examine the role of coping strategies in consumers' adoption of dynamically continuous innovations (DCIs). Following the work of [21] Mick and Fournier (1998), we propose a set of coping strategies including refusal, delay, extended decision making, and pretest. Based on a survey of...