An Empirical Study On Influence Factors Of The Willingness To Use Mobile Location-Based Services

Mobile location-based service is to determine user’s geographic position through mobile terminal and communication network and based on this position to provide a range of services such as navigation and social interaction. Along with the rapid development of mobile internet industry and the growing popularity of3G network and smart phones, mobile location-based services will have broad market prospects. However, at present whether in the aspect of cognition or the market scale, mobile location-based service leaves much to be desired. The industry is always trying to solve the problem from the technical aspect, while ignoring that the key problem lies in the users’acceptability. In order to design products preferably and run marketing better targeted, exploring the factors that affecting user’s acceptance of mobile location-based services has its theoretical and practical significance.This paper uses the logic of the technology acceptance theory as a basis to study the problem, which specifies the causal linkages among external factors, internal beliefs and the intention to use. After combining the gain and loss thought in the customer perceived value theory and the risk benefit thought in the privacy calculus theory, this paper divides internal beliefs into two parts:perceived benefits and perceived sacrifices. Perceived benefits part uses the concepts of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use from technology acceptance model, adding perceived enjoyment as the measurement of intrinsic motivation, while perceived sacrifices part means perceived privacy risk. In addition, in the aspect of external variables, this paper put forward the effect of information quality and system quality on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use combined with the information system success model. In the meantime, on the basis of the characteristics of mobile location-based services, select accuracy and currency as the criteria to measure the quality of the information, ubiquity and timeliness to measure the quality of the system. Based on these, the study model of this paper is finally constructed.After questionnaire survey and empirical analysis, research results verify that users’ intention to use location-based services is the result of advantages and disadvantages trade-off. Users’ perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and perceived privacy risk influence their intention to use at the same time. And as location-based service is still at its entry-level stage of market expanding, users’ primary motivation is to obtain information, so perceived enjoyment doesn’t play a decisive role in this development phase. In the meantime, the accuracy of information has a significant impact on the users’ perception towards usefulness, while the ubiquity and timeliness of system observably influence the perception of ease of use. Therefore, in the aspect of practice guidelines, in order to strength users’ intention to use location-based services, there are at least three effective approaches we can rely on:improving the precision and applicability of location technology, simplifying the operational procedure of location-based services and adopting appropriate privacy protection measures.