Consumer Acceptance of Personal Cloud: Integrating Trust and Risk with the Technology Acceptance Model

This paper conducts a conceptual replication of Pavlou (2003) which studied factors that impacted consumer’s behavioral intentions to make online transactions by integrating trust and perceived risk with the technology acceptance model (TAM). We test the generalizability of the model by replicating the study a decade later using a different online setting—personal cloud computing. Our results that are based on 240 observations, confirm the original study’s research model except perceived ease of use lost its direct predictive power to trust, perceived risk and perceived usefulness. Trust continues to be an important factor in perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness and should be an area of focus in online marketing strategies. Perceived usefulness continued to have a significant relationship for consumer’s intentions to use, but perceived ease of use did not affect consumer’s intention to use. Thus, more online businesses should focus on the usefulness of their service(s). Future studies are encouraged to methodologically replicate this study in different contexts and after another period in time to examine whether results hold.