Do early adopters upgrade early? An empirical study of mobile 4G service

Since Rogers proposed innovation diffusion theory, it has been used to analyze the new technology adoption behavior and divided the customer into five segments. Some studies compared the difference between early adopters and majorities. Some studies support the early adopters upgrade earlier, however, researchers usually employ self-report adoption intention as the proxy of actual adoption behavior. We argue that factors affecting adoption intention may differ to factors affecting actual adoption behavior. Therefore, we collect our dataset from a Taiwanese telecommunication service provider; the sample set includes 8900 users who register for the 3G service between 2005 and 2014 and their voice and data usage in August 2014. Some of them have upgrade to be 4G users. According to innovation diffusion theory, we divide the consumers to be four groups: early adopter, early majority, late Majority and laggards. The results show that the 3G early adopters have significantly higher usage of basic function than others. The 3G early adopters upgrade earlier for 4G than other groups, which is only partly supported. However, the 3G early adopters with higher usage of innovative function tend to upgrade earlier for 4G than their counterpart with lower usage of innovative function.