A critical review of mobile payment research

• This study reviews the mobile payment research literature from around 2006 to 2015.
• The authors use a multi-perspective framework to classify and analyze the literature.
• Despite the complexity of the issues that have arisen around mobile payments during the past 10 years, the related research still lacks diversity.
• There have been far too many adoption studies that cover the same ground with respect to theory and practice, and fail to deliver anything more than incremental knowledge, if any.
• A new agenda for research is proposed, based on the analysis and results of the authors’ critical review, that is intended to enhance the quality and relevance of future mobile payment research.

This article aims at assessing the progress of mobile payment research over the last 8 years. A previous literature review (Dahlberg et al. 2008b), covering articles published between 1999 and 2006, showed that the majority of research had only focused on a few topics. In order to address this issue, a research agenda was formulated to encourage researchers to explore new topics. Almost a decade later, our review reveals that researchers have continued to focus on the same topics (especially consumer adoption and technology aspects) with a limited accumulation of new knowledge and similar findings. In addition to reviewing the literature, we discuss the possible reasons for the lack of research diversity and propose new recommendations to enhance future mobile payment research.

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