The Role of Habit in Post-Adoption Switching of Personal Information Technologies: A Push, Pull and Mooring Model

In recent years, information technologies have broken outside the confinement of business organizations and entered the daily lives of individual users. Unlike users of workplace technologies, users of personal technologies are not bound to specific products by organization mandates, and have the freedom to switch from one product to another that offers similar functionalities and satisfies the same need. In this paper, we approach technology switching as a special form of post-adoption user behavior and propose a comprehensive model that explains postadoption technology switching. Post-adoption use is usually a highly routinized behavior, and switching to alternative products typically involves interruption of well-formed routines. Therefore, we draw from the social psychology and post-adoption user behavior literature, and argue that habit impacts switching intention and behavior independent of reasoned influences. Furthermore, we apply the push-pull-mooring paradigm from human migration and customer switching literature, and incorporate three sources of reasoned influences: push, pull, and mooring factors. The main contribution of this article is improving our understanding of post-adoption technology switching, valuable to both researchers and practitioners