The Role of Cultural Dimensions in the Acceptance of Retail Innovations

The purpose of this paper is to study factors that influence acceptance of self-service retail innovations and to propose methods to measure these factors across cultures. In particular, the research studies how cultural dimensions influence the acceptance of technology used to deliver new ways of shopping. The cultural dimensions include uncertainty avoidance and collectivistic cultural dimensions as moderating factors to predict technology acceptance. Understanding these dimensions is important in the globalized economy where international retail firms are planning to increase market share in different countries. Understanding potential adaptation of new technology based service models is crucial for successful market entry. Given a means to predict acceptance of new service models, international retail firms are better prepared to adjust technology strategies to fit specific cultural needs. Furthermore, it is important to understand if the technology is perceived as an uncertainty or if it has been incorporated into normal living. The research case shows how a collectivistic culture and high uncertainty avoidance among young Taiwanese influences their acceptance of self-scan checkouts. An ANOVA analysis is used for testing the difference between variables. With a p-value of