Understanding augmented reality adoption trade-offs in production environments from the perspective of future employees: A choice-based conjoint study

The implementation of augmented reality (AR) systems in production environments is associated with a variety of advantages, such as productivity gains, lower costs and reduced operating times. Despite these potential benefits, the lack of user acceptance due to issues such as privacy concerns constitutes a barrier to diffusion in workplace environments. In order to better understand the issues surrounding AR acceptance, we employed a conjoint study to empirically examine the trade-offs that future employees perceive when being involved in adopting such systems. Using a hierarchical Bayes estimation, we discover that functional benefits such as productivity gains and safety enhancement are the main adoption drivers. In contrast, future employees indeed perceive monitoring through head-worn AR devices as negative. However, a complementary cluster analysis indicates that not all respondents share a negative view of monitoring, and one third are likely to share their performance data with employers. We identify three groups with significantly different utility patterns. Furthermore, we monetize the value of privacy to determine compensation payments. The results may help employers, decision-makers, software solution providers as well as researchers in the information systems domain to better understand the factors surrounding acceptance of AR assistance systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address this issue using conjoint analysis.