registration and transaction procedurals are designed to be as effortless as possible.
Therefore, procedural switching cost does not hinder users from adopting more
than one auction site. Financial switching cost was neither significantly negatively
associated with the intention to adopt another auction site, not supporting H7.
One possible explanation may be that the financial benefits accumulated in one auction
site will not disappear altogether due to multiple adoption, because users still stay
with the original auction site while adopting another one. Furthermore, procedural
and financial switching costs can be easily compensated if buyers can find a wider
range of products and sellers can sell more items by adopting another auction site.
Therefore, users’ intention for multiple adoption was not reduced by these switching
costs. Relational switching cost was negatively associated with the intention to adopt
another auction site, supporting H8.
Perceived network externality was not found to be positively associated with PU
in the adoption of another auction site, not supporting H9. That is, the perception that
more and more people begin to adopt another auction site does not ensure the
usefulness of adopting this auction site in addition to the present one. The reason
may be that users can evaluate usefulness by conditions that are more concrete and
pragmatic. For example, whether the system of another auction site is reliable and
user-friendly, and whether another auction site can facilitate selling/buying more items.
Nevertheless, perceived network externality was positively associated with the
intention to adopt another auction site, supporting H10.
PEOU was not found to be positively related to intention to adopt another auction
site, not supporting H11. The reason may be that buyers/sellers adopt another
auction site with a purpose, either hedonic (PE) or utilitarian (PU), but PEOU by itself
may not give users a direct reason to do so. Nevertheless, the other four hypotheses
(H12-H15) were supported. The squared multiple correlations for all endogenous
constructs (0.66 for PEOU, 0.30 for PU, 0.59 for PE, and 0.29 for behavioral intention to
adopt another auction site) were significant.