A Dynamic IT Adoption Model for the SOHO Market: PC Generational Decisions with Technological Expectations

The small-office/home-office (SOHO) professionals comprise the fastest growing segment in the labor force today. Typically being a one-person business based at home, SOHO owners mostly rely on office information technology to single handedly run their entire operation. Despite the segment's ostensibly growing dependence and influence on the information technology (IT) industry, still very little is known about the dynamics between SOHO and IT products. With the purpose of addressing this void, we investigate the SOHO professionals' adoption patterns of multigenerational IT products. Accordingly, we develop and empirically estimate an individual SOHO-level initial- and repeat-purchase logit model that captures the procurement patterns for successive generations of technological products, namely the PC category. Specifically, we find that SOHO professionals' procurement choices are influenced by a number of salient dimensions (i.e., income, performance, price, interpurchase time, network externalities). Furthermore, some SOHO owners are found to have a preference for a future (expected) generation (over a currently available one), which is explained via their business dispositions (i.e., technology orientation, result orientation, search orientation) toward accepting technological incertitude.