A two-country study on the psychological antecedents to cryptocurrency investment decision-making

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to investigate the psychological antecedents toward cryptocurrency investment decision-making. Using extended planned behavior model, data were collected from 517 sample respondents in Kenya and Ghana to test the proposed model. Specifically, we find that skepticism undermines willingness to invest in cryptocurrency via attitude toward cryptocurrency across the two countries studied. We also find that subjective norm and perceived self-efficacy positively influence attitude toward cryptocurrency that, in turn, positively influences willingness to invest in cryptocurrency. The positive relationship between trust disposition and attitude toward cryptocurrency and in turn willingness to invest in cryptocurrency is statistically valid in Kenya but not in Ghana. Contrary to expectations, no negative statistical effect of risk disposition on attitude toward cryptocurrency was found in the Kenya and Ghana sample. Overall, the presented findings in this study enrich empirical understanding about the psychological factors influencing attitude and individuals’ intentions to invest in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Litecoin.

KEYWORDS:

• Africa
• cross-country research
• cryptocurrency
• extended theory of planned behavior
• FinTech
• skepticism

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the Editor-in-Chief and the Associate Editor who handled this manuscript for giving us the rare opportunity of revise and resubmit. We are also indebted to the three reviewers for their constructive comments and without which this manuscript wouldn’t have been significantly improved. Lastly, the authors acknowledge all those who assisted in the data collection process across the two countries.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare they have no known competing interests either financially or personally that could have appeared to influence the research report.

Ethics declarative statement

The authors acknowledge that even though the current research uses human participants for this study, this study, as it was based on data collected online from research participants, carries no injury whatsoever to participants and thus no institutional clearance was required for this research. More so, participation was voluntary and did not collect any personal information from the research participants. Besides, this research uses aggregated responses to analyze the dataset.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request.