This research aims to establish the important dimension of pre-adoption factors’ influence on the consequences, or post-adoption usage behaviour, of online securities trading by the retail investors in Singapore.
While several studies have been conducted by researchers on the factors that lead people to adopt new innovations, few have actually explored the consequences of the innovations or post-adoption usage behaviour. Therefore, this research fills the gap in the diffusion and adoption studies. The researcher aimed to address the following three research issues in this study:
RI1) What pre-adoption variables in the Diffusion of Innovations model affect the post-adoption usage behaviour of retail investors using online securities trading?
RI2) Does Perceived usefulness affect the post-adoption usage behaviour of the retail investors using online securities trading?
RI3) Will Consumer loyalty affect the post-adoption usage behaviour of retail investors using online securities trading?
The parent discipline of this research is Consumer Behaviour which has been elaborated on in the literature review chapter. The immediate disciplines are Consequences of innovations from the Diffusion model; Perceived usefulness from the Technology Acceptance Model and Consumer loyalty. They have been discussed in the literature review chapter as well. Seven propositions have been derived from the literature review and have subsequently formed the hypotheses of the research study.
A positive paradigm has been selected for this research, and the data analysis undertaken used a quantitative method and an online survey questionnaire to gather research data from the retail investors using online securities trading in Singapore. There were 232 data elements collected from the online survey. The data were then further analysed by: using factor analysis by the Varimax rotation extraction method, conducting reliability testing using Cronbach Alpha testing, and testing of the theoretical model and hypotheses using multiple linear regression analysis.
The findings concluded that not all of the variables in the pre-adoption factors of Roger’s Diffusion model are influencing the post-adoption usage behaviour of the retail investors trading stock online. The pre-adoption variables tested to have significant influence on the post-adoption usage behaviour are: Compatibility, Complexity, Trailability and Observability. The Optional decision variable was found to have an influence on the post-adoption usage behaviour but not the variables Authority decision and Collective decision.
Nature of social system and Change agent’s promotion efforts are shown to have significant influence on post-adoption usage behaviour of the retail investors. Perceived usefulness and Consumer loyalty variables have also been tested and concluded to have an influence on post-adoption usage behaviour of the retail investors trading stock online.
Finally, contributions to the knowledge, research limitations and areas for further research, especially in the Consequences of Innovations discipline, were discussed.
From the findings of this research study, a framework has been set for future researchers to investigate further the pre-adoption factors’ influence on the postadoption usage behaviour or consequences of innovations in other products and services. In addition, this study provides some useful findings and implications for the retail users, researchers, practitioners and brokerage firms in the area of online securities trading usage.