It’s Cool! Analysis of Factors That Influence Smart Thermostat Adoption Intention

Smart thermostats represent an innovative smart home technology and a growing commercial opportunity, yet little is known about the salient factors that affect the adoption of such devices. To address this gap in research, we conduct a three-stage study that progresses through belief elicitation, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factory analysis within a nomological network. We leverage the mixed methods approach to explore the factorial structure of salient perceived benefits and concerns associated with smart thermostats, and we examine the effects of the emergent factors on the adoption intention. We discover that a novel factor, which we term techno-coolness, is the key predictor of the smart thermostat adoption intention. Techno-coolness encompasses the perceptions that a smart thermostat can make a home look modern and futuristic, be fun to use, and make the user feel technologically advanced. We also find that compatibility concerns as well as privacy concerns are significant impediments to the smart thermostat adoption intention

The Crowd on the Assembly Line: Designing Tasks for a Better Crowdsourcing Experience

Leveraging crowd potentials through low paid crowdsourcing micro-tasks has attracted great attention in the last decade as it proves to be a powerful new paradigm to get large amounts of work done quickly. A main challenge for crowdsourcers has been to design tasks that trigger optimum outputs from the crowd while providing crowdsourcees with an experience that would attract them to the platform in the future. Drawing mainly from expectancy theory and the motivation through design of work model, we develop and test a theoretical framework to explore the impact of extrinsic reward valence and perceived task characteristics on perceived output measures in crowdsourcing contexts. We specifically focus on the impact of three crowdsourcing task dimensions: autonomy, skill use, and meaningfulness. Our findings provide support for our model and suggest ways to improve task design, use extrinsic rewards, and provide an enhanced crowdsourcing experience for participants

Working on Low-Paid Micro-Task Crowdsourcing Platforms: An Existence, Relatedness and Growth View

Low-paid micro-task crowdsourcing sites present a new workplace that has been increasingly popular. Given recently reported crowd demographics and relevant literature we believe that the understanding of higher-level motivations for workers on these sites is still an under-explored area. Using a qualitative research methodology, we explore workers’ motivations in their natural settings. We conduct interviews with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and analyze the data through the lens of Alderfer’s existence, relatedness, and growth theory. Our paper contributes new insights to the crowdsourcing literature, specifically that low-paid micro-task crowdsourcing workers aim to satisfy relatedness (connectedness and societal impact), existence (income, basic rights and rewarding experience), and growth needs (impact on self and skill development). We also discuss three additional categories that emerge from our data: sense of control and power, having fun and passing the time. Our findings provide new contributions that are of high relevance to both theory and practice

Perceived Intelligence and Perceived Anthropomorphism of Personal Intelligent Agents: Scale Development and Validation

Personal intelligent agents are systems that are autonomous, aware of their environment, continuously learning and adapting to change, able to interact using natural language and capable of completing tasks within a favorable timeframe in a proactive manner. Examples include Siri and Alexa. Several unique characteristics distinguish these agents from other traditional information systems. Of particular interest in this work are characteristics of intelligence and anthropomorphism. This paper describes the process of developing two new measures with satisfactory psychometric properties that can be adapted by researchers to assess the users’ perceptions of intelligence and anthropomorphism of PIAs. The measures are validated using data collected from 232 experienced PIA users

THE ROLE OF SAAS SERVICE QUALITY FOR CONTINUED SAAS USE: EMPIRICAL INSIGHTS FROM SAAS USING FIRMS

Despite its success in the software industry, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) still struggles with fulfilling customer expectations regarding service quality. To contain customer churn rates to low levels, SaaS providers have to address their service quality weak spots and find out which factors are crucial for continued SaaS usage. Drawing on previous service quality literature, we develop a Zone-of-Tolerance (ZOT)-based SaaS-QUAL scale and validate it in a model of IS continuance based on two empirical surveys of SaaS using firms. By doing this, we examine the importance of SaaS service quality factors for shaping customer satisfaction and SaaS continuance intentions. Furthermore, we provide insights into what service factors effectively meet or miss SaaS customer expectations. As a practical contribution, we develop and apply a SaaS-QUAL scale that can be used as a diagnostic tool by SaaS providers and users alike. For researchers, we enrich existing research models on IS continuance by integrating a more fine-grained conceptualization of service quality confirmation that provides stronger explanatory power than in previous models

Customer Retention and Unplanned Purchases on the Web

With the explosion of business to consumer commerce on the web, many companies are faced with new challenges in their efforts to retain customers and increase sales. Our study explores some of the important factors that increase customer intention to return and the number of unplanned purchases made. We find that both the level of perceived control and the shopping enjoyment experienced by new web customers can increase their intention to return. However, repeat customers do not seem to be influenced by either perceived control or shopping enjoyment in terms of their intention to return. We also find that an engaging web store design that utilizes value-added search mechanisms and presents a positively challenging experience can increase the customers' perceived control and enjoyment. Our results also indicate that product involvement is less important to new customers as opposed to repeat customers but the more often customers return to a web store the more their shopping enjoyment is determined by their product involvement. Finally, our study shows that neither perceived control nor shopping enjoyment have any significant impact on the number of unplanned purchases made by customers. Our results deepen our understanding of the consumer online shopping experience and provide guidelines for the more effective design and implementation of web-based stores.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Customer Retention and Unplanned Purchases on the Web

The explosion of business to consumer electronic commerce creates new challenges for companies to design electronic systems and interactions that retain customers and increase sales. This exploratory study examines the impacts of select system design and other variables that can influence customer intention to return and the number of unplanned purchases made in an online store. We find that both the level of perceived control and the shopping enjoyment experienced by new web customers can increase their intention to return. However, repeat customers do not seem to be influenced by either perceived control or shopping enjoyment in terms of their intention to return. We also find that an engaging web store design that utilizes value-added search mechanisms and presents a positively challenging experience can increase the customers' perceived control and enjoyment. Our results also indicate that product involvement is less important to new customers as opposed to repeat customers but the more often customers return to a web store the more their shopping enjoyment is determined by their product involvement. Finally, our study shows that neither perceived control nor shopping enjoyment have any significant impact on the number of unplanned purchases made by customers. Our results deepen our understanding of the consumer online shopping experience and suggests the need for the design of systems which increase the user's perceived control to encourage repeat use of online storesInformation Systems Working Papers Serie

The Role of User Psychological Contracts in the Sustainability of Social Networks

Many emergent ventures, such as social networks, leverage crowd-sourced information assets as essential pillars supporting their business models. The appropriation of rights to information assets through legal contracts often fails to prevent conflicts between the users and the companies that claim information rights. In this paper, we focus on social networks and examine why those conflicts arise and what their consequences are by drawing on psychological contract theory. We propose that intellectual property and privacy expectancies comprise core domains of psychological contracts between social networks and their users. In turn, perceived breaches of those expectancies trigger a psychological contract violation. We use the exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect typology to define the user behavioral outcomes. We evaluated our framework by surveying 598 Facebook users. The data support our framework and indicate that perceived breaches of privacy and intellectual property rights generate the affective experience of a psychological contract violation, which is strongly associated with exit intentions

Website Signal Perceptions and Seller Quality Identification

This study extends the understanding of signaling in online shopping environments by evaluating website signal perceptionsof online buyers. Drawing from signaling theory, this study proposes and empirically tests a model for conceptualizing theinfluence of website signal perceptions on perceived trust, perceived deception and purchase intentions. Experimental resultssupport the assertions of the model and indicate that the online buyers’ perceptions and purchase intentions are mainlyinfluenced by website content and website physical presence, whereas human presence and website policy credibility are lesssignificant. In addition, there is evidence that signal perceptions change depending on the quality of online sellers. Whendealing with low-quality online sellers, online buyers are concerned with physical and human presence. When evaluatinghigh-quality sellers, online buyers are concerned with website amateurism