Why Is It Hard to Fight Herding?

Abstract

The ubiquity of information, in part a consequence of the fast growth of Internet technologies, provides individuals with previously unknown opportunities to acquire and share information about new technology products. We witness numerous situations where potential adopters observe the decisions (but not the reasoning) of others and imitate their adoption behaviors. This implies that herd behavior can lead to en mass adoption. However, individuals possessing different characteristics exhibit different degrees of herd behavior. The characteristics of a given technology must also fit with the requirements of the task(s) that a technology adopter wants to fulfill. It is important to understand these phenomena in the herding context because they can influence a technology's staying power. We examine how several different user and technology characteristics interact with the antecedents of herd behavior, observed popularity of prior adoption and perceived uncertainty, to predict one's individual propensity for imitation in technology adoption. We test our research model via an online experiment with 260 respondents. One key finding is that while prior research has not found uncertainty to have the expected effect on propensity to imitate, it does in fact have a significant effect when various individual difference and technology moderators are taken into account.