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Consumers’ willingness to adopt a new service is crucial for its success. Presumably, most mobile services are brought to the market without substantial studies measuring their adoption potential. The services are subjected to the Darwinian process of survival of the fittest without any or only little prior information about customer attitudes and needs. Conducting studies on service adoption potential among target customer group could save a lot of resources otherwise wasted at the highly competitive market in developing services not meeting consumers’ needs.
Several conceptual models measuring different types of behavior, including usage intention and adoption of a novel service, have been developed. They include the Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1985, 1988, 1991), and the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989; Venkatesh & Davis, 2000).
These models have predominantly been applied to existing mobile services. Bouwman, Carlsson, Walden, and Molina-Castillo (2008) studied the trends in mobile services in Finland from 2004 to 2006. Nysveen, Pedersen, and Thorbjørnsen (2005a) examined antecedents and did cross-service comparisons regarding intentions to use mobile services, whereas their subsequent study (Nysveen, Pedersen, & Thorbjørnsen, 2005b) evaluated the moderating effects of gender in explaining the intention to use mobile chat services. Pedersen (2005) explored the adoption of mobile Internet services among mobile commerce early adopters. Turel, Serenko, and Bontis (2007) deconstructed perceived value in user acceptance of mobile short messaging services. Verkasalo (2008) investigated the dynamics of mobile service adoption. Wang and Lo (2002) measured service quality, customer satisfaction, and behavioral intentions in the Chinese mobile telecommunications market. Yan, Gong, and Thong (2006) characterized the user acceptance of short message service in China and in Hong Kong.
Although conceptual models have been applied to several topics in the mobile domain, they have not previously been applied to mobile peer-to-peer (MP2P) services. Song and Walden (2007) studied how consumers relate to network size and how social interactions influence the intention to adopt peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies. Their study did not involve the mobile domain, and was based on a specifically constructed conceptual framework, not an established conceptual model. The purpose of this study is to model the intention to use novel, not yet existing MP2P services and to determine their adoption potential.
Mobile P2P services are analyzed in this study because P2P services do not yet commonly exist in the mobile handset domain, although they are common in the mobile laptop domain. Their wide-scale diffusion into the mobile handset domain is expected to happen soon. Because Skype and BitTorrent are the most widely used P2P applications in laptop and desktop computers, this paper focuses on similar kind of not yet existing mobile peer-to-peer services: (1) mobile peer-to-peer communications services and (2) mobile peer-to-peer content sharing services.
This study operationalises and uses the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) conceptual model to predict the intention to use a communications and a content sharing mobile peer-to-peer service. According to TPB (Ajzen, 1985, 1988, 1991), attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control predict both behavioral intention and actual behavior. Based on a survey among Finnish users of advanced mobile devices (N=155), user attitude was identified as the main variable affecting intention to use a novel mobile service. Furthermore, the need for a viable conceptual model for predicting the intention to use mobile services being under development is demonstrated.