Breaking Status-Quo Inertial Use of Incumbent Payment to Adopt Mobile Payment: A Contingency Perspective

Abstract

Integrating a contingency perspective with status-quo theory, this study investigates how to break the inertial use of incumbent payments to use mobile-payment services in South Korea. We surveyed 330 Korean respondents from March 2021 to May 2021, using a non-probability purposive and web-panel sampling method. Our hierarchical regression estimation results reveal that the status-quo inertia of incumbent transactional method negatively influences user behavior regarding mobile payment adoption. Moreover, from a contingency perspective, individual factors, including gender and age, and technology environmental factors, such as technology diversity, weaken the effect of status-quo inertia. Meanwhile, regulatory environmental factors, such as institutional inertia, strengthen status-quo inertia’s effect on the intention to use mobile payment. More attention has been given to the questions of how and why leapfrogging from traditional transaction methods to mobile payment has not yet been replaced. In this context, our findings could provide answers for both academic and industry experts who have explored how to break inertia to adopt mobile payment.

Keywords:

• Mobile payment
• status-quo bias theory
• inertia
• contingency perspective
• institutional theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SNWASO.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eunmi Tatum Lee

Eunmi Tatum Lee received a BA from Peking University, an MA from the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and her PhD in Business Administration from Yonsei University. She has researched issues related to innovation performance and international business.

Xiaoyuan Li

Xiaoyuan Li obtained a BA from the Central University of Finance and Economics, an MS from the University of Bristol, and a PhD in Business Administration at Yonsei University. Her research interests lie in innovation, international business, and international HRM.