Understanding consumer online shopping behaviour from the perspective of transaction costs

2.2.2 The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) 
TAM, introduced by Davis (1989) is one of the most widely used and accepted models 
researchers use to explain information technology and information systems acceptance and 
usage. TAM, rooted in TRA (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975) suggests the belief–attitude–
intention–behaviour causal relationship for explaining and predicting
technology acceptance 
among potential users. Building on TRA, TAM proposes that two
beliefs about a new 
technology, perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived
ease of use (PEOU), determine a 
person's attitude toward using that
technology, which in turn determine their intention to use 
it.
PU is the degree to which one believes that using
the technology will enhance his/her 
performance (Davis
 et al.
1989).
PEOU is the degree to which one believes that using
the 
technology will be free of effort. TAM further suggests that
PEOU is instrumental in 
explaining the variance in
PU (Davis
 et al.
1989). 
Prior studies have validated TAM as a robust and parsimonious framework for understanding 
the user's adoption of technology in a variety of contexts including banking technology 
(Gounaris and Koritos 2008, Al-Ajam and Nor 2013), adoption of online shopping (Svendsen
 
et al.
2013), online trading (Lee 2009b), online auctions (Stern
 et al.
2008), online games 
(Zhu
 et al.
2012a), m-commerce (Bruner and Kumar 2005), mobile Internet services (Jiang 
2009), mobile financial services (Lee
 et al.
2012b), mobile advertising (Zhang and Mao 
2008), 3G mobile value-added services (Kuo and Yen 2009), online community participation 
(Wang
 et al.
2012a), adoption of e-health (Dünnebeil
 et al.
2012), e-learning (Lee
 et al.
2013), 
instant messaging services (Wang
 et al.
2004), Wi-Fi technology (Mehta 2013), and so on. 
In the study of online shopping adoption, TAM often plays a backbone in the research models 
(O'Cass and Fenech 2003, Ahn
 et al.
2004) 
and other theories are usually integrated with it. 

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For example, Chen et al. (2004) investigated online consumer behaviour by integrating the 
innovation diffusion theory (IDT) with TAM. Their findings confirmed that TAM was a 
reliable and valid research model in investigating online consumer behaviour. The findings 
also suggested that a more positive consumer attitude could be achieved by enhancing 
consumer’s value, needs and lifestyle, PU, and PEOU. Koufaris (2002) integrated TAM and 
flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) into one theoretical framework of online consumer 
behaviour, aiming to examine how these factors from two theories together influence online 
consumer behaviour. The findings indicated that both enjoyment of the shopping experience 
and PU of the website strongly predicted consumers’ intention to return to the e-commerce 
website, implying that online consumers were not only purely utilitarian (focusing on 
efficiency in shopping), but were also enjoying online shopping. The study also further 
confirmed that TAM could be successfully applied in online shopping behaviour research, 
even when the behaviour was not restricted to pure system usage, but instead included 
purchase decision behaviour, etc. Many other studies have reached the similar conclusion that 
TAM was a good model in the study of online consumer behaviour (Chiu
 et al.
2009b, Ha 
and Stoel 2009, Svendsen
 et al.
2013). 
Although TAM has been tested over a wide range of system settings (Tong 2010), including 
online shopping adoption, empirical tests of the model have rendered mixed and inconclusive 
results, leading to questions about its validity (Meuter