Organizational Buyers' Adoption and Use of B2B Electronic Marketplaces: Efficiency- and Legitimacy-Oriented Perspectives

Despite the large potential to transform the way that organizations conduct trading activities, there is a paucity of empirical work that investigates the impetus for organizational participation in Business-to-Business electronic marketplaces (B2B emarketplaces). With insights obtained from transaction cost theory and institutional theory, this paper identifies two groups of factors, efficiencyand legitimacy-oriented, respectively, that may influence organizational participation in B2B e-marketplaces. The effects of these factors on adoption intent and on usage of B2B e-marketplaces are empirically tested with data collected from the purchasing side of 98 potential adopter and 85 current adopter organizations, respectively. The results of a Partial Least Square analysis of the data show that all three efficiency-oriented factors— product characteristics, demand uncertainty, and market volatility—and their subconstructs have a significant influence on usage. However, only demand uncertainty is found to have significant influence on adoption intent. The results also show that two legitimacy-oriented factors—mimetic pressures, and normative pressures—and their subconstructs have a significant influence only on adoption intent, but not on usage. Finally, unlike efficiency-oriented factors, legitimacyoriented factors are found to contribute to a significant increase in variance explained for only adoption intent among potential adopters.