Proposing Public IT Adoption with Its Theoretical Foundation and Empirical Findings

Summary

This study proposes the public IT adoption model, a prospect-theory-based perception-intention framework explaining how perceived gains and losses drive users’ acceptance or rejection of public IT services, such as airport biometrics. Two surveys, including one multinational survey, and expert interventions validated the model, supporting prospect theory across countries and contexts.

Abstract

This research proposes a theoretical model of public IT adoption (PITA). Public information technology (IT) services refer to IT-based services that public institutions offer to all citizens, such as e-government portals, public health applications, and biometric systems at airports. Because of public IT’s unique nature, previously developed models that focused primarily on the individual and firm levels have been deemed insufficient to identify the critical mass of public IT adoption. To address this gap, a perception-intention framework based on prospect theory was proposed to explore users’ perceived losses and gains in adopting a new public IT service, suggesting that these perceptions were the antecedents of either rejecting or accepting a novel public IT service. Two studies were conducted, including one with survey samples from three nations (South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Five industry experts were also invited, through an intervention-based research approach, to qualitatively refine and validate the model so that it could be used within a practical scenario. The results showed that the total value of acceptance, that is, the aggregate perceived value required for users to accept the service, computed as the sum of the relevant path coefficients, was consistently greater than that of rejection. A similar finding was seen for perceived gain, which was a stronger predictor of both acceptance and rejection than perceived loss. Although the findings rely on cross-sectional, self-reported data, they provide strong support for prospect theory and contribute to a further understanding of the theory’s fundamental role in public IT adoption. Thus, by extending prospect theory to the public-sector IT context, PITA offers researchers a validated theoretical foundation and practitioners a practical tool for diagnosing the adoption of public IT services.

Introduction

Information technology (IT) has evolved over the past few decades into a dominant and pervasive tool for pursuing innovation and has significantly altered everyday life. Since the introduction of IT adoption models based on psychological perspectives^1,2,3,4, the relationship between users and IT has been thoroughly researched at the individual and firm levels⁵.

Meanwhile, many public organizations have struggled to achieve operational efficiency under overwhelming societal demands, such as ....

Protocol

All study procedures complied with the ethical principles applicable to research involving human participants at aSSIST University, Sungkyunkwan University, and Dong-A University. Because survey responses were anonymized at the time of collection and no personally identifiable information was gathered, the Institutional Review Board of aSSIST University classified the study as exempt from full ethical review. The participating institutions did not obtain separate IRB approvals, as they relied on the exemption determination issued by the Institutional Review Board of aSSIST University, which covered both the research design and the data-collection procedures. This dete....

Results

Study 1
To assess potential CMB associated with self-reported data, the one-factor analysis was first carried out⁶⁷. According to the test’s findings, one factor accounted for 36.56% of the variance; a single factor accounting for less than 50% of the variance indicates that CMB is not a concern^62,67,68. The construct validity and reliability were then assessed. The findings in

Discussion

This two-study investigation tested the PITA model of public IT adoption; across both studies, all five hypotheses were supported, and the gap between V(A) and V(R) widened in the riskier COVID-19 context, in line with prospect theory’s prediction that riskier choices require greater perceived value. A gap was found in the theoretical foundations of the IT adoption literature, including TAM² and DOI¹, which failed to adequately explain public IT adoption. Most importa.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
IBM SPSS Amos (CB-SEM software)	IBM Corp. (Armonk, NY, USA)	version 27; https://www.ibm.com/products/structural-equation-modeling-sem/	Used for all covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) analyses, including measurement model assessment (CFA: composite reliability, AVE, and discriminant validity) and structural model path analysis.
Prolific (Online Participant Recruitment Platform)	Prolific Academic Ltd	https://www.prolific.com/	Online platform used to recruit survey participants. Participants were screened based on eligibility criteria (e.g., airport experience) and compensated according to Prolific's fair-pay guidelines.
Qualtrics (Online Survey Platform)	Qualtrics, LLC	RRID:SCR_016728	Web-based survey platform used for questionnaire design, distribution, and response data collection. All measurement items were administered via Qualtrics using a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree). https://www.qualtrics.com/