From 'ancient' to 'modern': a cross-cultural investigation of electronic commerce adoption in Greece and the United States

摘要

Globalization and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet facilitate e-commerce activities across nations. An empirical study was conducted using data from Greek and US consumers in order to obtain a better understanding of cross-cultural e-commerce adoption. The results give support for the proposed hypotheses, emphasizing the moderating role of cultural differences on consumer e-commerce adoption. The unique contributions of this paper are three fold. First, we introduce Hofstede's cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance to the study of cross-cultural e-commerce adoption model. Second, we apply the theory of planned behavior perspective to capture behavioral intentions to transact online in two dissimilar countries - Greece and the US. Finally, the paper discusses several insights from this exploratory study that enrich the cross-cultural e-commerce literature. Globalization and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet facilitate e-commerce activities across nations. An empirical study was conducted using data from Greek and US consumers in order to obtain a better understanding of cross-cultural e-commerce adoption. The results give support for the proposed hypotheses, emphasizing the moderating role of cultural differences on consumer e-commerce adoption. The unique contributions of this paper are three fold. First, we introduce Hofstede's cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance to the study of cross-cultural e-commerce adoption model. Second, we apply the theory of planned behavior perspective to capture behavioral intentions to transact online in two dissimilar countries - Greece and the US. Finally, the paper discusses several insights from this exploratory study that enrich the cross-cultural e-commerce literature.