Satisfaction to Stay, Regret to Switch: Understanding Post-adoption Regret in Choosing Competing Technologies When Herding

Facing hundreds of similar alternatives in any technology adoption decision, users commonly take a shortcut in the decision making: following others in the herd! Although herding is found to be an influential force for technology adoption, this research sheds light on its distal on user staying power in post-adoption evaluations. Supplementing the dominant perspective that users will stay with the chosen technology when satisfactory with the technology performance, this research proposes a new regret perspective to account for users’ concerns about the competing technologies and the decision process in the technology adoption decision. A research model is accordingly constructed and tested in two longitudinal field studies on user adoption and post-adoption evaluations across competing technologies in both forms of free software and paid hardware, with samples collected in Asia and Europe. Based on the findings and insights, this research suggests to IT vendors on how to retain users in the new era with competing technologies by understanding how post-adoption regret, the predominant factor of user switching, is formed and how it can be lessened.