Investigating innovation diffusion, social influence, and personal inner forces to understand people's participation in online e-waste recycling

Abstract

By integrating the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), innovation diffusion theory (IDT) and social cognition theory (SCT), this study constructs a research model through which to explore the key factors and their influence mechanisms to understand people's participation in online e-waste recycling. Based on the ELM, we believe that people's behavioral intention to participate in online e-waste recycling is affected by the information processing of central and peripheral routes. Based on IDT, we take the perceived innovation characteristics as the key elements of the central route and consider social influence as the key element of the peripheral route. At the same time, we consider personal inner force factors, based on SCT, as the functional condition of the information processing mode to explore the moderating effects of privacy concern, pricing fairness concern, and environmental concern on the information processing of the central and peripheral routes. By taking discarded mobile phones as an example, we collect 475 valid samples to test our research model using the structural equation modelling (SEM) approach. The results confirm that perceived innovation characteristics and social influence are two factors that motivate people to participate in online e-waste recycling and that the three kinds of inner forces have different moderating effects on perceived innovation characteristics and social influence. Based on the above findings, this study puts forward some policy proposals.