Understanding Bike Sharing Customers’ Acceptance of Incentive Mechanisms: An Extended Technology Acceptance Model

Abstract

Customer-based rebalancing has drawn wide attention recently in the context of bike sharing. Customers’ acceptance of incentives is critical to the success of customer-based rebalancing, which has not been well studied yet. Aiming at investigating bike sharing customers’ perceptions of incentive mechanisms and identifying the determinants of their acceptance, we extend technology acceptance model by incorporating three variables that are perceived cost, perceived risk, and altruism. The proposed model was empirically tested using survey data from 403 bike sharing customers. As hypothesized, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and altruism positively affect the intention to adopt incentive mechanisms, while perceived cost and perceived risk are negatively associated with behavioral intention. In addition, perceived ease of use and perceived cost have positive and negative influence on perceived usefulness, respectively, but perceived risk has no significant impact on perceived usefulness. Based on these results, implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.