Understanding users' attitude toward mobile payment use: A comparative study between China and the USA

Purpose The authors position security measures and payment culture as key determinants of perceived security (PS) and trust. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how PS and trust affect users’ attitude toward mobile payment use and why mobile payment has developed differently in the USA and in China. Design/methodology/approach Empirical data were collected from a survey conducted both in China and in the USA. The whole sample consists of 186 Chinese and 196 Americans. Partial least squares analysis was conducted to test the proposed relationships and multigroup comparison analysis was performed to examine the differences in the coefficients of those relationships between Chinese and the US model. Findings The findings show that payment culture (measured by coverage of mobile payment context (CMPC) and uncertainty avoidance (UA)) and security measures (measured by security technology protection (STP), security rules and policies (SRP), and security responsibility commitment (SRC)) have significantly positive impacts on the PS and trust, except that the positive impact of security on trust is not supported. The impacts of CMPC and PS on trust in the USA are significantly smaller than those in China, whereas the impacts of security measures and UA on PS and trust do not show significant differences between the two countries. Research limitations/implications Respondents of this study are selected from young educated population, the major users of mobile payment in 2015. However, recently with the increasing penetration of mobile payment, major mobile payment users are not only limited to young educated population, and thus there may be new findings after extending the range of respondents’ age. Since the research subjects in this study are the mobile payment of China and the USA, the authors could also expect different findings when the research subjects are extended or changed to other countries because of different mobile payment cultures across countries. Practical implications Findings in this paper will help mobile payment service providers to know the determinants of their users’ behavior intention and to take measures to improve these determinants, and these findings can also provide mobile payment service providers with insights into the differences in mobile payment use between the two countries and suggestions of measures that they can take to increase users’ attitude toward mobile payment use. Furthermore, the findings of this paper also help these providers globalize efficiently by paying more attention to those antecedents. Social implications The findings in this paper show that there is no difference in the impacts of UA and security measures on PS and trust between China and the USA. However, the impacts of PS and CMPC on trust in China are significantly higher than those in the USA. This is because that globalization has made people from different countries hold similar UA, whereas the CMPC, a construct refers to the business environment of mobile payment, is still very different between China and the USA. Originality/value This study extends prior studies of attitude toward mobile payment use through proposing that security measures and payment culture are key determinants of PS and trust and examining the role of PS and trust on the attitude. Furthermore, the empirical findings will not only provide mobile payment service providers with important insights into the differences in mobile payment adoption between the two countries, but also help these providers globalize efficiently by paying more attention to those antecedents.