An empirical study of mobile commerce in insurance industry: Task–technology fit and individual differences

Mobile commerce, generally defined as conducting information inquiries and/or business transactions by using mobile devices via wireless communications, is considered the next big wave of investment and application of information technology. Mobile commerce is estimated to account for a sizable portion of the US$6.9 trillion e-commerce revenue by 2004. Although abundant research on the technology side of mobile commerce has been published, there exists ‘very limited research on the strategies and applications of M-commerce’. We propose and validate a modified task–technology fit model to explore the factors affecting the effective adoption of mobile commerce in the insurance industry. In particular, we study: (1) if the mobile commerce system based on personal digital assistant (PDA) technology is applicable for the insurance industry; (2) whether individual differences will impact the cognitive fit of insurance agents’ use of PDA mobile commerce system; (3) which of the three major insurance tasks is better suited for the PDA technology; and (4) which PDA technology characteristic is best for which type of insurance tasks. Our research finds that the PDA mobile commerce system is indeed suitable for the insurance industry. In terms of the impact of individual differences, we discover that position experience, cognitive style, and computer self-efficacy are major factors that can predict the fit of applying PDA technology for insurance tasks. Counter conventional wisdom, other demographic variables such as gender and age are found to be non-significant. Among three major insurance tasks, we find that the PDA mobile technology provides the highest level of assistance in post-contract customer services, followed by recruiting new insurance contracts, and tax and legal information services.