Time perspective and continuance intention to use mobile commerce: The dual role of perceived risk and security

ile commerce from the perspective of, for example, consumers’ personality traits and perception, and thus, a study is needed to explain continuance intention to use mobile commerce in a Vietnam context. HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT Theoretical frameworks to connect consideration of future consequences, perceived risk and security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce Regulatory focus theory Higgins (1997) and Higgins et al. (2001) develop regulatory focus theory which states that consumers can adopt either promotion-focused self-regulation or prevention-focused self-regulation to achieve goals. A promotion orientation “facilitates achieving ideal goals (hopes and aspirations) by focusing on an individual’s efforts on eagerly achieving positive outcomes” (Joireman et al., 2012, p. 1274). As a result, promotion orientation is typically concerned with the absence or presence of positive outcomes and with advancement and accomplishment (van Noort, Kerkhof and Fennis, 2008). On the other hand, the second “facilitates one achieving ought goals (duties and responsibilities) by focusing an individual’s efforts on vigilantly avoiding negative outcomes” (Joireman et al., 2012, p. 1274). Thus, prevention orientation is typically concerned with the absence or presence of negative outcomes and with safety and responsibility (Joireman et al., 2012, van Noort et al., 2008). Since previous studies have demonstrated that consumers’ regulatory focus is related with an online shopping environment and consideration of future consequences (Joireman et al., 2012, van Noort, Kerkhof and Fennis, 2007), we adopt regulatory focus theory as the main theory to explain the relationships between consideration of future consequences, perception of risk vs security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce. More specifically, based on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997), perceived risk can be seen as to be closely associated with prevention focus and perceived security is connected to promotion focus (Flavián and Guinalíu, 2006, Hartono et al., 2014, Ovčjak et al., 2015, Sanakulov and Karjaluoto, 2015, Schierz et al., 2010, Shin, 2009, Zhang et al., 2012). Furthermore, individuals with CFC-Immediate tend to focus more on losses, negative results, pessimistic thoughts, and prevention orientation, while those with CFC-Future tend to focus on gains, positive consequences, optimistic thoughts, and promotion orientation as guides for their current actions (Joireman et al., 2012). Also, previous studies have emphasized that consumers with CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future may think about both the prevention and promotion foci (Joireman et al., 2008, Joireman et al., 2012). As such, CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future may have direct and asymmetric effects on perceived risk and perceived security. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future can asymmetrically influence perceived risk and perceived security Regulatory fit theory The regulatory fit theory posits that a match between an individual's aims and interests (i.e., regulation orientation to a goal) and the strategic manner in which the decision is made (i.e., the means used to approach that goal) produces a state of regulatory fit. In particular, promotion-focused consumers experience fit when they adopt eagerness strategies such as focusing on means of advancement to seek their goals, whereas prevention-focused consumers experience fit when they adopt vigilance strategies such as focusing on means of being careful to achieve their goals (Avnet and Higgins, 2006, Higgins, Idson, Freitas, Spiegel and Molden, 2003). According to this theory, fit status creates a feeling of rightness about the goal pursuit and increases task engagement such as the value of a decision, a chosen object, persuasion as well as make consumers become more engaged and motivated in their goal pursuit (Aaker and Lee, 2006, Avnet and Higgins, 2006) and create more extreme reactions toward the products and services such as mobile commerce (Avnet and Higgins, 2006, Lee, Keller and Sternthal, 2010). Based on this theory, we argue that individuals with a high level of CFC–Immediate will have a feeling of “fit” when thinking about risk and individuals with a high level of CFC – Future will have a feeling of “fit” when thinking about security. On the other hand, individuals with a high level of CFC – Immediate will have a feeling of “mismatch” when thinking about security and individuals with a high level of CFC – Future will have a feeling of “mismatch” when thinking about risk. As such, it is expected that CFC-Immediate makes consumers become more and less sensitive to risk and security respectively. Also, it is expected that CFC-Future makes consumers less and more sensitive to risk and security, respectively. This implies CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future may interact with perceived risk and security to influence behavioral consequences (c.f. Kees et al., 2010, Strathman et al., 1994). More specifically, this study proposes that CFC-Immediate positively and negatively moderates the relationship between perceived risk and continuance intention to use mobile commerce and the relationship between perceived security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce, respectively. This study also proposes that CFC-Future positively and negatively moderates the relationship between perceived security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce and perceived risk and continuance intention to use mobile commerce, respectively Research hypotheses and research model CFC-Immediate versus CFC-Future and continuance intention to use mobile commerce H1: CFC-Immediate (a) and CFC-Future (b) have a positive impact on continuance intention to use mobile commerce. Perceived risk vs security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce H2: (a) Perceived risk has a negative effect, while (b) perceived security has a positive influence on continuance intention to use mobile commerce. The relationships between CFC and perceived risk versus perceived security H3: (a) CFC-Immediate has a positive effect on both perceived risk and (b) perceived security. H4: (a) CFC-Future has a positive effect on both perceived risk and (b) perceived security. H5: (a) CFC-Immediate predicts perceived risk better than CFC-Future does, while (b) CFC-Future predicts perceived security better than CFC-Immediate does. The moderating effects of CFCs H6: CFC-Immediate strengthens the perceived risk – continuance intention relationship (a), and weakens the perceived security – continuance intention relationship (b). H7: CFC-Future strengthens the perceived security – continuance intention relationship (a), and weakens the perceived risk – continuance intention relationship (b). Proposed research model and hypotheses Figure 31: Proposed research model Notes: Perceived risk is a reflective – reflective second-order construct with six first-order constructs, including financial risk (FR), performance risk (PER), privacy risk (PrR), psychological risk (PSR), social risk (SR), time risk (TR). Perceived security is a reflective – formative second-order construct with four first-order constructs, including perceived confidentiality (PC), perceived availability (PA), perceived non-repudiation (PNR). (Source: author’s proposal) RESEARCH METHOD Research process Data collection (30 students) Data collection (441 MC users) FIRST STEP: LITERATURE REVIEW Research model & Hypotheses SECOND STEP: PILOT STUDY Questionnaire development Draft scale Scale pretest Final scale THIRD STEP: MAIN STUDY Reliability test (Cronbach’s alpha) Convergent & discriminant test Hypothesis testing (PLS -SEM) Research gap Theoretical and practical implications The research process, which is presented in Figure 4-1, has three main steps. Figure 41: Research process diagram (Source: author’s proposal) Pilot study Questionnaire design The self-reported questionnaire was divided into two parts. The first part included items measuring the consideration of future consequences, perception of risk and security as well as continuance intention to use mobile commerce. This study measured responses on a 7-point Likert scale, on which 1 = totally disagree, 4 = neither disagree nor agree and 7 = totally agree. More specifically, the multi-dimensional construct of perceived risk came from the study of Featherman and Pavlou (2003) and Kim et al. (2005). The multi-dimensional construct of perceived security was used from Hartono et al. (2014). Furthermore, while the perceived risk was conceptualized and operationalized as a reflective-reflective second-order construct (Park and Tussyadiah, 2016), perceived security was conceptualized and operationalized as a reflective-formative second-order construct (Hartono et al., 2014). Continuance intention to use mobile commerce construct included three items from Chong (2015). In this study, we borrowed the CFC scale from Joireman et al. (2012) and this scale was justified for the specific domain as mobile commerce context. Cronbach’s Alpha testing results The testing results show that the Cronbach’s Alpha of all constructs was greater than 0.7 and all corrected item-total correlations were greater than 0.3. Therefore, all items were used in the questionnaire of the main study. Furthermore, based on the comments of two university lecturers, the Vietnamese version of the questionnaire was slightly modified to better fit with the Vietnamese style. The main study Data collection Based on the pilot testing results, we developed the final version of questionnaire that included three parts: Introduction of aims and purposes, main content to ask for consumer perception about mobile commerce, and demographic information section that includes age, gender, occupation and income (Hair, Celsi, Ortinau and Bush, 2008). Self-administered surveys at stores were conducted, and incentive gifts (i.e., prepaid phone cards) were offered to increase the response rate. Data analysis method PLS-SEM with SmartPLS 3.2.8 was adopted to assess the reliability and validity (internal consistency, convergent, and discriminant validity) of the studied constructs. It was further used to test the proposed hypotheses, including direct, moderating effects and relative importance (asymmetric) of direct effects. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS Validation of measures: reliability and validity First-order and reflective – reflective second-order constructs The reliability, convergent validity and discriminant validity were acceptable. Reflective - formative second-order construct The convergent validity of the formative second-order construct was acceptable. Checking for common method bias The Harmon’s one-factor test, and the common method factor approach (Podsakoff et al., 2003, Williams, Edwards and Vandenberg, 2003), justified for PLS-SEM (Liao, Chen and Yen, 2007) indicated that common method biases are not problematic in the present study. The strategy for testing the proposed moderating effects The current study adopts the two-stage approach to estimate the moderating effects of CFCs on the relationships between perceived risk, security, and continuance intention to use mobile commerce since there is a formative construct in the research model. Testing hypotheses by applying PLS-SEM Research model quality The quality of the proposed model was assessed through the R2 values and Stone-Geisser Indicator (Q2) values. Further, a t-test calculated from the bootstrapping procedure of 5000 samples was applied to examine the hypothesized effects, while Cohen’s Indicator (f2) was used to measure the effect sizes of the studied relationships. The direct effects The testing results supported the hypotheses of positive impacts of CFC-Immediate (β1a = 0.16, t = 2.66, p < 0.01) and CFC-Future (β1b = 0.14, t = 2.41, p < 0.05) on continuance intention to use mobile commerce. The negative impact of perceived risk (β2a = -0.21, t = 3.19, p < 0.01) and positive impact of perceived security (β2b = 0.19, t = 2.65, p < 0.01) on continuance intention to use mobile commerce were also confirmed. The moderating effects The testing results showed support for two over four moderating hypotheses. CFC-Immediate weakens the relationship between perceived security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce (β6b = -0.16, t = 3.05, p < 0.01), CFC-Future strengthens the relationship between perceived security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce (β7a = 0.10, t = 2.10, p < 0.05) were two hypotheses supported by dat Testing for asymmetric impact The testing results of hypothesis H5a indicated that standard CI, percentile CI and basic CI range from 0.15 to 0.55, 0.14 to 0.55 and 0.15 to 0.55, respectively (do not contain the value of 0). Thus, the hypothesis H5a was supported by the collected data. Similarly, the hypothesis H5b was also supported by data. The summarization of model estimation The results demonstrated that seven over eight direct effect hypotheses and two over four moderating hypotheses were supported by data. Hypothesis testing results summary Out of fourteen hypotheses, eleven hypotheses are supported, and three hypotheses are not supported by collected data. Figure 51: Path analysis results (without lower-order constructs) (Source: author’s calculation) Discussion The testing results indicated that CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future had positive effects on continuance intention to use mobile. Although the previous literature does not exist any studies that investigate the association between CFCs and continuance intention in mobile commerce context, the findings of Olsen and Tuu (2017) in (un)healthy eating behavior domain seem to support this finding. Accordingly, these authors have demonstrated that individuals with CFC-Immediate are more likely to focus on hedonic values such as fun, enjoyment, and excitement while ones with CFC-Future are more likely to concern themselves with utilitarian values, including weight control or keeping a good health status. Previous studies have contented that mobile commerce is a dual-purposed system (Wu and Lu, 2013) that provides consumers with both hedonic and utilitarian values. Thus, the impacts of both CFC-Immediate and Future on continuance intention to use mobile commerce are as expected. These impacts are also consistent with the suggestions of Joireman et al. (2008) and Joireman et al. (2012) which argues that consumers may consider the future consequences or the immediate consequences of their actions, or both. Previous studies in B2C electronic commerce context have proved the prevention role of perceived risk (Chen, 2013, Shao et al., 2019, Wu and Wang, 2005, Yuan et al., 2014) and the promotion role of perceived security (Chang and Chen, 2009, Cheng et al., 2006, Lian and Lin, 2008, Salisbury et al., 2001). As such, the negative impact of perceived risk and the positive influence of perceived security on continuance intention to use mobile commerce is consistent with previous findings. It is worthy to note that the magnitude of the effect of perceived risk on continuance intention to use mobile commerce seems to be larger than the one of perceived security on continuance intention to use mobile commerce. This implies that consumers of mobile commerce may put more importance on risk over security when evaluating whether they should keep using mobile commerce or not. The testing results showed that CFC-Immediate has a positive effect on perceived risk while CFC-Future has a positive effect on perceived security. These findings are consistent with regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997), which suggests that consumers’ regulatory focus is related to an online shopping environment and consideration of future consequences (Joireman et al., 2012, van Noort et al., 2007). More specifically, while the perceived risk is considered as a prevention focus (Ovčjak et al., 2015, Sanakulov and Karjaluoto, 2015, Zhang et al., 2012), perceived security can be seen as a promotion focus. Joireman et al. (2012) clarified that promotion-oriented consumers are likely driven by the consideration of future consequences, while prevention-oriented consumers are likely to be affected by the consideration of immediate consequences. Thus, the results are expected and explainable. Also, the testing result indicated that CFC-Immediate had a positive relationship with perceived security. This is consistent with a previous argument of Joireman et al. (2008) which argues that consumers with CFC-Immediate may think about both the prevention and promotion foci, and empirical finding of Joireman et al. (2012), which shows that CFC can be related to both prevention and promotion foci. However, the impact of CFC-Future on perceived risk was not supported by data. This may be because consumers with CFC-Future are more like to focus on promotion focus such as perceived security, and thus, put less concern for prevention focus such as perceived risk. The testing results supported two over four moderating hypotheses. More specifically, the negatively moderating effect of CFC-Immediate and the positively moderating effect of CFC-Future on the relationship between perceived security and continuance intention to use mobile commerce were confirmed. These findings are consistent with regulatory fit theory (Aaker and Lee, 2006, Higgins et al., 2003), which suggests that individual with CFC-Future will have a feeling of “fit” when thinking about security and individuals with a high level of CFC-Immediate will have a feeling of “mismatch” when thinking about security. However, we fail to prove the buffering role of CFC-Immediate on perceived risk – continuance intention to use mobile commerce relationship. This is unexpected yet is explainable. As mentioned above, mobile commerce comprises of immediate hedonic consequences such as fun, enjoyment that promote mobile commerce use. These hedonic motivations are stronger than the perceived risk in explaining mobile commerce usage intention and thus, neutralize the negative moderating effect of CFC-Immediate on risk – continuance intention association. Also, we fail to prove the weakening effect of CFC-Future on this relationship. This can be explained by the suggestion that consumers may adopt both time orientation (i.e., CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future) in order to achieve the desired results and balance (Joireman et al., 2012). Thus, CFC-Future does not show a strong conflict with risk perception, leading to termination of the moderating effect of this variable on risk – continuance intention relationship. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Conclusion This study explored the relative role of CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future in explaining continuance intention to use mobile commerce under the trade-off role of perceived risk and perceived security. Accordingly, CFC-Immediate versus CFC-Future and perceived risk versus perceived security were hypothesized to simultaneously affect continuance intention to use mobile commerce. This study further explored the interactions between those constructs as well as the asymmetric effects of CFC-Immediate versus CFC-Future on perceived risk versus perceived security. Based on a sample of 441 mobile commerce consumers in Vietnam, we adopted PLS to test the proposed hypotheses and found the results supported most of the proposed hypotheses. With those interesting findings, this study proposed some significant implications for both academics and practice. Theoretical implications Studies in the psychological area have contended that individual differences and personality traits are strongly related to personal values and thus, exert a significant effect on consumer behavior (Parks-Leduc, Feldman and Bardi, 2014). In a mobile commerce context, previous studies have demonstrated that individual difference variables have an important role in explaining consumers’ behavior (Gerpott and Thomas, 2014, Ovčjak et al., 2015, Sanakulov and Karjaluoto, 2015, Zhang et al., 2012). This generates a call for further studies to discover and explore more individual difference variables such as personality traits in predicting continuance intention to use mobile commerce (Hong et al., 2017, Mohamed et al., 2014, Zhou, 2013d, Zhou, 2014). By proposing, investigating and confirming the role of CFC in explaining continuance intention to use mobile commerce, this study responses to the above call and contributes to the literature to form a more comprehensive picture of how and why individual differences in CFC influence continuance intention to use mobile commerce. This is because the adoption of CFC to explain continuance intention to use mobile commerce is largely ignored in the literature. Also, the finding that both CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future have positive effects on continuance intention to use mobile commerce demonstrates that CFC is a promising variable in explaining consumer behavior in an online context in general and a mobile commerce context in specific. Future studies investigating factors affecting mobile commerce in Vietnam and global contexts can adapt CFC to increase the predictive power of the research model. For example, because CFC is a trait rather than a state, it can act as a moderator to moderate the relationship in question. Moreover, the finding contributes to the debate of how CFC is structured (Joireman et al., 2008, Joireman et al., 2012) by validating the two-factors construct of CFC (Dassen et al., 2015, Dassen et al., 2016, Joireman et al., 2008, Joireman et al., 2012, Olsen and Tuu, 2017). Strathman et al. (1994) developed a 12-item scale measuring the individual differences in CFC. This scale has been derived and adopted in many studies to explain a wide range of behaviors such as health behavior, financial decision-making, work behavior, ethical decision-making in organizational contexts and environmental decision-making (Joireman and King, 2016). Most of these studies have considered CFC as a uni-dimensional construct (i.e., a sum of the items of CFC-Future and reverse-coded CFC-Immediate). However, an emerging argument that the two-factor structure of CFC best explains responses has received the attention from scholars (Adams, 2012, Joireman et al., 2008, Joireman et al., 2012, Rappange et al., 2009, Toepoel, 2010) because this distinction provides both important theoretical and practical implication (Joireman et al., 2012). Following this approach, we used the two-factor structure of CFC to investigate its role in explaining continuance intention to use mobile commerce. The testing results of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity and correlation analysis indicated that mobile commerce-adapted CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future are two distinct constructs and independently predict continuance intention to use mobile commerce. This implies that time orientations vary among consumers and that consumers with different time perspectives may have different behavioral tendencies regarding mobile commerce use (Joireman et al., 2012). Furthermore, both CFC-Immediate and CFC-Future contribute equally to continuance intention to use mobile commerce, suggesting that their effective mechanisms could jointly contribute to mobile commerce use, which helps clarity CFC’s relationship with a given outcome (Joireman et al., 2012) such as continuance intention to use mobile commerce. In other words, the continuance intention to use mobile commerce is driven by both a concern with future consequences and by a concern with immediate consequences. Clearly, this implication will be overlooked when one adopts a uni-dimensional structure of CFC. As such, future studies on mobile commerce in both Vietnamese and international contexts should utilize the two-factor solution to provide a deeper and broader understanding. While there is a call for integrating both facilitator and barrier factors into a research model to shed more useful insights on consumers’ adoption intention and behavior (Hanafizadeh et al., 2014, Malaquias and Hwang, 2016, Phong et al., 2018), the simultaneous investigation of the impact of perceived risk versus perceived security on continuance intention is ignored in the mobile commerce context. Thus, the findings regarding the effects of perceived risk and security on continuance intention to use mobile commerce yield some interesting implications. Firstly, the findings demonstrated that both perceived risk and perceived security have impact on continuance intention to use mobile commerce with opposite valence. This indicated that continuance intention to use mobile commerce can be seen as a trade-off between avoiding negative outcomes (e.g., losing time and money) and achieving positive results (e.g., gaining security while saving money). Secondly, while perceived risk has a negati