Task complexity and different decision criteria for online service acceptance: A comparison of two e-government compliance service domains

Inspired by ever evolving information technologies and the myriad of successful business cases that reap the benefit of new technologies, many governments around the world have jumped on the bandwagon of electronic government (e-Gov). However, there has been little academic research regarding the types and conditions of e-Gov services that are acceptable to the public. This paper synthesizes a model of e-Gov compliance services acceptance by critically integrating prior research along with the distinctive characteristics of the online government services context. The study posits that different levels of task complexity involved in various e-Gov compliance processes can lead citizens to use different decision criteria and empirically examines the differing acceptance decision patterns of potential e-Government service users in two compliance service domains. The results reveal that citizens do adopt different decision criteria for different levels of task complexity, suggesting that functional usefulness of e-Gov services becomes a more important criterion for online services that involve difficult tasks. In contrast, the service provider’s competence in online operations becomes a more important factor for simple tasks. Several other findings and future research directions are also discussed.