Although much research has examined conscious use, which involves deliberate evaluation and decision making, we know less about automatic use, which occurs spontaneously with little conscious effort. The objective of this study is to compare two contrasting views in the literature on the nature of automatic use, namely, the habit/automaticity perspective (HAP) and the instant activation perspective (IAP). According to HAP, automatic use occurs because of the force of habit/automaticity without the formation of evaluations and intention; thus, past use--which is a proxy for habit/automaticity--is believed to weaken the evaluations-intention-usage relationship. In contrast, IAP posits that automatic use is simply an expedited form of conscious use; accordingly, as with conscious use, automatic use is still a function of evaluations/intention, so past use will not weaken the evaluations-intention-usage relationship. We tested the competing hypotheses using 2,075 cross-sectional and 990 longitudinal responses from actual users of two online news sites. Our results show that the evaluations-intention-usage relationship is generally weaker among heavier users than among lighter users. These findings suggest that with an increase in past use, user behavior becomes less evaluative and less intentional, in support of the argument that automatic use is driven more by habit/automaticity than by instant activation of cognitions. Overall, this research shows an initial piece of evidence of the moderating role of past use in postadoption phenomena, and it is expected to help the information systems community systematically investigate the important yet underexplored subject of habit/automaticity.
The lack of consumer confidence in information privacy has been identified as a major problem hampering the growth of e-commerce. Despite the importance of understanding the nature of online consumers' concerns for information privacy, this topic has received little attention in the information systems community. To fill the gap in the literature, this article focuses on three distinct, yet closely related, issues. First, drawing on social contract theory, we offer a theoretical framework on the dimensionality of Internet users' information privacy concerns (IUIPC). Second, we attempt to operationalize the multidimensional notion of IUIPC using a second-order construct, and we develop a scale for it. Third, we propose and test a causal model on the relationship between IUIPC and behavioral intention toward releasing personal information at the request of a marketer. We conducted two separate field surveys and collected data from 742 household respondents in one-on-one, face-to-face interviews. The results of this study indicate that the second-order IUIPC factor, which consists of three first-order dimensions -- namely, collection, control, and awareness -- exhibited desirable psychometric properties in the context of online privacy. In addition, we found that the causal model centering on IUIPC fits the data satisfactorily and explains a large amount of variance in behavioral intention, suggesting that the proposed model will serve as a useful tool for analyzing online consumers' reactions to various privacy threats on the Internet.