Adoption of continuous and discontinuous innovations : the role of consumer expectations

This study aims to examine the effects of consumer expectations on the consumers' adoption decision for high-tech products. Based on the concepts of transaction utility and expectancy-disconfirmation, this study empirically investigates the effects of consumer expectations regarding price and technology on technology adoption of technological innovations. Two experimental studies were conducted to investigate how expectations regarding price and technology affect the customers in the adoption of two different types of innovations, namely continuous and discontinuous innovations. The findings indicate that perceived technology and expected technology significantly affect the adoption likelihood. However, price perception. and price expectation are unexpectedly found to be only significant for continuous innovations but not discontinuous innovations. The results indicate that new product managers should not only pay attention to price and technology perceived by consumers, but also type of innovations and consumer expectations regarding price and technology. Marketing research should be conducted to monitor the changing of customer expectations. Price and technology should meet, but not exceed too greatly, customer expectations. For new product development, continuous improvement of technology should be implemented so that it can lead customer expectations.