Understanding consumer motivation to share IoT products data
Journal of Indian Business Research
ISSN: 1755-4195
Article publication date: 5 February 2020
Issue publication date: 7 April 2020
Abstract
Purpose
Almost every study undertaken by academicians or practitioners on the Internet of Things (IoT) has mainly highlighted the privacy concerns and information security issues with the IoT products. On the contrary, this paper aims to explore the motivators that could encourage customers of an IoT product to share their IoT product’s data with a third-party aggregator system to facilitate computer-generated product reviews which are defined as electronic Word of Thing (eWOT) in this paper.
Design/methodology/approach
An experiment was conducted with customized e-commerce prototypes of eWOT. Structural equation modeling analysis was conducted to test the measurement model by using confirmatory factor analysis and thereafter a structural model to test the relationships amongst the latent variables.
Findings
This paper found that five consumer motivators (personal innovativeness, enjoyment of helping, anticipated extrinsic rewards, moral obligations and venting negative feelings) contribute to eWOT intention.
Practical implications
This research advances the understanding of human interaction with computer-generated product reviews and opens up avenues for future studies in online consumer behavior in the IoT context.
Originality/value
This paper presents motivators for eWOT intention to share IoT product data. This is done through a novel concept of an experimental IoT-based prototype, namely, eWOT. These eWOT reviews can be generated from the IoT products data by applying analytics and using natural language generation. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no other study has been conducted on this subject.
Keywords
Citation
Bhatnagar, S. and Kumra, R. (2020), "Understanding consumer motivation to share IoT products data", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIBR-09-2019-0268
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited