PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Ambassador Crawford / Department of Management and Information Systems

The ubiquity of information, in part a consequence of the fast growth of Internet technologies, provides individuals with previously unknown opportunities to acquire and share information about new technology products. One may witness numerous situations where potential adopters observe the decisions (but not the reasoning) of others, and imitate their system usage behaviors. This implies that herd behavior can lead to en mass adoption and subsequent abandonment patterns. Adopting a herding lens, this dissertation investigates individuals' technology adoption and post-adoption behaviors. Drawing on the rich extant literature on technology adoption, post-adoption usage, and technology exploration, and integrating it with other relevant research streams, I aim to shed light on understudied determinants of individual decision-making regarding technological artifacts in highly uncertain environments. Each of the three essays concentrates on investigating different technology-related phenomena, i.e., adoption, usage, and exploration of technology by individuals through the lens of herd theory. My research follows the three-manuscript model. In the first essay, which focuses on the adoption phase, I look at user and technology characteristics and their interaction with the antecedents of herd behavior, observed popularity of prior adoption and perceived uncertainty. In the second essay, I extend my focus to the post-adoptive context and study the impact of the herd effect on how a user's task-technology-fit perceptions evolve over time. I also investigate factors influencing en mass abandonment in herd-like adoption conditions. In the third essay, which focuses on a specific explorative technology usage behavior, I investigate how team-level factors influence herd-like adoption and consequently explorative learning behaviors in the post-adoption stage.

Committee: Greta Polites (Committee Chair); Mary Hogue (Committee Member); Dong-Heon Kwak (Committee Member); Christopher Groening (Committee Member) Subjects: Information Systems