Proposing Public IT Adoption with Its Theoretical Foundation and Empirical Findings

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.