Consumer Acceptance Of New Technologies Research Articles

Scent and sustainability: investigating consumer evaluations of biocatalysis and naturalness in fragrances

With growing global environmental concerns, consumer acceptance of new technologies or innovation-derived products can be tied strongly with how natural the latter are perceived to be. A prior study found that fragrances were evaluated more positively if participants were informed that the fragrances were of natural origin. This led the authors to conclude that the perceived naturalness of a fragrance activates a positive effect, similar as for other consumer products. However, obtaining fragrant molecules from natural sources can pose a strain on the environment and biotechnology-based fragrances could potentially improve the sustainability of the perfumery industry. The primary goal of this study was to extent the findings of this initial study with a focus on biocatalysis-based fragrances. For this, a laboratory experiment was conducted with a 3x2x2 mixed design: participants smelled either three fragrances of natural origin or three biocatalysis-based fragrances and were either informed or not informed about the origin of the fragrances. In contrast to expectations, no consistent positive effect of natural origin or negative effect of biocatalysis-based origin of fragrances was found in our study. The results suggest that the participants were open to novel production methods in the fragrance industry. The discussion comprises a methodological comparison to the prior study, alternative explanations for these findings, and discusses insights for the fragrance industry and future research. Further research is needed to fully understand the complex factors that shape consumer behaviour in the fragrance industry.

Methods to Assess the Value of New Technologies: the Case of Consumer Sentiment Towards Digital Wallet Technology

New technologies and scientific findings are typically announced in peer-reviewed scholarly journals which seldom assess the economic or social consequences of the technology, even though this may be important in motivating funding for future extensions and commercial applications of the research. This paper describes new methodologies that have become available with the advent of social network data and computationally intensive statistical methods to ascertain the value of new technologies. It provides an example application of two methodologies to answer basic questions in a specific industry, regarding the dynamic processes governing IP protection, innovation law, market structure and evolution, and rates or entry and exit. It also proposes a third affective technology for revealing true consumer sentiment and discusses risks and controls of collecting such affective data, which is commercially important in areas such as film and television review, food and beverage consumption, and in general arenas that display strong non-verbal or emotive characteristics, which would be likely subjects for data acquisition. Our application collected 449,145 Twitter postings on consumer perceptions of digital wallet payment systems and collected all available information on patents in the US Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) databases on digital wallet technologies. Automated lexical analysis was programmed and applied to individual tweets to extract consumer sentiment concerning specific technologies in the USPTO database, and assessed using customized econometric methods. The application of methodologies in this topic area can provide guidance for using newly available datasets to assess the potential economic value and consumer acceptance of new technologies arising out of the laboratory.

Evaluative conditioning of food technologies in China: Moderating effect of social trust

This study provides an initial examination of the evaluative conditioning (EC) of consumers’ attitudes toward food technologies in China, including how EC can affect consumer acceptance of new technology when participants possess different levels of social trust. In a study using the EC paradigm and a combination of between-subjects control groups and within-subjects control conditions, participants considered three food technologies (conventional, enzyme, and genetic), paired with affectively positive, neutral, and negative images. Subsequent evaluative measurements revealed that EC can explain attitude formation toward food technologies in China when consumers see affective images, but the strength of the effects varies at different levels of social trust. Participants with a high level of trust in the institutions that promote and regulate the technologies can be conditioned both positively and negatively, independent of food technology. Participants with a low level of trust can be conditioned too, but only when the technology is paired with negative unconditioned stimuli. If social trust is low, positive conditioning of food technologies is not demonstrated in this study.

Using mature concepts to generate new ideas: technology acceptance revisited

This study contributes to literature on consumer acceptance of new technology and in line with other research in this area builds on the technology acceptance model (TAM). In the proposed model, consumer perceived value was hypothesised to mediate the effects of perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness on intentions to use 3G mobile technology in Indonesia. Additionally, different levels of technology readiness were posited to moderate the process. While the mediation hypothesis was not fully supported, this unique configuration of well-known constructs provided fresh insights into the drivers of consumer intentions and these are discussed from a theoretical and managerial perspective. The paper concludes with future research possibilities.