Location-based system: Comparative effects of personalization vs ease of use

• Few studies investigated the economic impact of an LBS-enabled mobile app in a field setting.
• Consumer search theory and theory of IS critical success are theoretical backgrounds.
• Financial gains, perceived benefits, and system usage are used as success measures of LBS.
• A field experiment and two complementary field surveys are used for this empirical study.
• We conduct a field experiment in the domain of gas purchase decision-making.

Context-driven, personalized information services have become extremely popular for numerous mobile businesses to influence consumers’ decision-making and improve subsequent benefits. In this research, we examine the effects of two explanatory variables (i.e., personalization and ease of use), arguably the two most critical factors, on the success of location-based system (LBS) in terms of economic gains, perceived benefits, and intention to continue service usage. Personalization enabled by contextualization (personalization for short) of LBS enhances the quality of information provided, and ease of use is a representative system quality variable. To examine the association, our research focuses on consumers’ decision-making regarding where to buy gasoline and the effects of LBS-assisted searching for gas price information on user perceptions and actual behavior. We utilize two research methods for this empirical study: a field experiment and two complementary field surveys. The empirical findings confirm the strong association between the explanatory and consequence variables.